Field Notes · Sportsman

Best Shotgun Cases: How To Choose The Right One

A shotgun spends most of its life out of your hands. In a truck, across a gator, leaned in a corner at the club, riding in a boat blind before light. The case is what stands between a gun you are proud of and a gun that looks like it has been in a fight.

Most guidance on this subject is written to fill a page. Here is what actually decides it.

Slip, sleeve, or case? A note on the words

You will see all three, and the difference is worth knowing before you shop.

A slip or sleeve is the traditional term, used mostly by clay, upland and driven shooters, for a soft case that the gun slides into, usually with an open or flapped mouth. A gun case, in the older English sense, meant the fitted, hard, baize-lined box a gun travelled in broken down.

In American usage the words have collapsed together, and a soft full-length zip case like ours gets called all three. If you are searching for a slip and finding nothing, search for a shotgun case, and the other way around.

What kind of shooting are you doing?

This decides more than the material does.

Will your shotgun fit?

Fit is the thing people get wrong, and with shotguns it is barrel length that catches them.

Measure from the muzzle to the rearmost point of the butt pad, with the gun assembled as you will carry it. Add two inches. That is your minimum case length. The two inches keep the muzzles off the end of the case and give the zipper room to close without straining.

Case length

52″

Fits shotgun to

50″ OAL

Height

8″

Weight, empty

4.5 lb

As a rough guide for an assembled gun with a standard length of pull:

• 26 inch barrels: roughly 43 to 45 inches overall. Comfortable.
• 28 inch barrels: roughly 45 to 47 inches. Comfortable.
• 30 inch barrels: roughly 47 to 49 inches. Fits, with little to spare.
• 32 inch barrels: roughly 49 to 51 inches. Measure yours before ordering.
• 34 inch trap barrels: you need a longer case.

Those are guides, not promises. Length of pull varies by an inch or more between guns, and an adjustable comb or a recoil pad can add to it. Measure the gun you own.

Over-and-under, side-by-side, semi-auto and pump

A full-length soft case carries a break-action gun assembled, which is how most people want to carry one between the truck and the stand. The receiver of an over-and-under is the deepest part of the gun, and that is what the case height has to clear. Our 8 inch height takes standard sporting and field receivers without forcing.

Semi-autos and pumps are shallower through the receiver but often longer overall for the same barrel, because of the receiver length ahead of the stock. If you shoot a 30 inch semi-auto, measure it rather than assuming it matches an over-and-under with the same barrels.

If you prefer to carry a gun broken down, you want a takedown case, which is a different object entirely and shorter by half.

What should you look for in the build?

Six things, in the order they will fail if they are done badly.

• The zipper. Full length, and branded. If a listing will not name the zipper, it is not a zipper worth naming. YKK is the standard you want.
• The lining. Sherpa or shearling. It cushions the stock finish, and more importantly it lifts moisture off the barrels rather than pressing it against them.
• The muzzle end. This is where a case wears through, because it drags. Look for a doubled or reinforced tip.
• The strap anchors. Sewn webbing tabs are the common failure. Riveted leather billets are not.
• The handles. Wrapped handles spread the load across the palm. A single strip does not, and on a 9 pound gun you notice.
• Whether the sling comes off. A fixed strap is a strap that snags on everything in the back of a truck.

Nylon, canvas, or leather: what you are actually choosing between

Most shotgun cases sold in this country are the same object with different labels on it. Six hundred denier polyester with a polyurethane backing, closed-cell foam inside, an unbranded coil zipper, and a webbing strap stitched to the shell. Forty-five dollars, and it will protect a gun.

For about three seasons. Then it fails, and it fails in one of four predictable ways: the zipper loses teeth, the polyurethane backing breaks down and goes tacky against the stock, the foam turns brittle and powders into the action, or the sewn strap tab pulls through the shell with the gun in it.

That is not a criticism. It is a forty-five dollar case doing precisely what a forty-five dollar case does, and being honest about it. The question is what you want to own.

The arithmetic, honestly

Forty more years of shooting, a synthetic case at forty-five dollars replaced every third season, is fourteen cases and roughly six hundred and thirty dollars. A full grain leather case at six hundred and fifty, conditioned once a year, is one case.

The money comes out level. What differs is what you are holding at the end. One of those is a case you bought last spring. The other has forty years of colour in it and a grandson who has already worked out that it is going to be his.

The gun sets the standard

There is a reason the English gun trade has always cased guns in leather, and it is not decoration. A gun built by hand over hundreds of hours is not well served by something stamped out by the thousand. The case is the part of the arrangement you actually get to choose, and it is the cheapest part of it.

If you shoot a plain pump gun that lives behind the seat of a truck, none of this matters much and a synthetic case is a sensible purchase. If you shoot a good over-and-under or a side-by-side that somebody put their name on, a forty-five dollar sleeve is a mismatch, and everybody at the club can see it.

And between canvas and leather?

Full grain leather is the traditional answer and the handsome one. Heavier, holds its shape, and scuffs turn into patina rather than damage. It is the one that will still be worth handing over in forty years.

Waxed canvas with leather trim is lighter and sheds rain better from new. The wax wears thin at the rub points and you renew it rather than replace the case. The honest working choice for a gun that lives in a truck.

Neither is waterproof. Water resistant means a walk in the rain, not a morning in flooded timber. Anyone who tells you their leather is waterproof is selling you something.

Dakota Leather Shotgun Case

Full grain leather, sherpa lined, antique brass YKK zipper and copper rivets. Detachable all-leather sling. $649.95

See the leather case

Dakota Waxed Canvas Shotgun Case

18 oz waxed cotton canvas with full grain leather trim, sherpa lined, same 52 inch shell. Lighter, and it sheds rain. $479.95

See the waxed canvas case

Where the case is actually seen

A shotgun case does very little of its work in the field. You are carrying the gun there, not the case.

Where the case lives is everywhere else. The rack at the club. The boot of the car with four other guns beside it. Leaned against a wall at a shoot lunch. Across the back seat on the drive home, and on the peg beside men who know exactly what everything costs and are far too polite to say so.

Shooting has always been a sport where kit is read, quietly and instantly. That is not snobbery, or not only snobbery. It is the same instinct that has a man wipe a gun down before he lends it. What a gun arrives in says something about how it is regarded.

Leather is the only one of these materials that gets better under that kind of attention. Synthetic wears out and looks it. Waxed canvas fades handsomely and is renewed. Full grain leather darkens, softens, takes the mark of the buckle and the rub of the car seat, and ends up looking as though it could not have belonged to anybody else.

Twenty years in, it has stopped being equipment. It is part of the gun.

How do you look after it?

Wipe it down dry when it comes in dirty. If it is soaked, let it dry slowly and away from heat. A radiator or a truck heater will cook leather stiff and it does not come back.

Condition leather once or twice a year, worked in with your hands rather than a cloth, and let it sit overnight before you use it again.

Waxed canvas does not get washed. Brush it with a stiff brush and cold water, and re-wax the panels when they go pale at the rub points and stop beading.

And take the gun out between outings. The case is for the journey.

Common questions

Xan Hood founded Buffalo Jackson Trading Co. in 2009 and has spent the years since working with leather makers in Mexico and India on bags, outerwear and sporting goods. He writes about how the things we carry are actually made.