Well, it's been far too long since my last blog post, in fact I've been neglecting my website too much lately. It's partially due to getting an offer on the house in late October and I was pretty busy trying to get things straight for that.
So as of late I've been diversifying my interests. One of them has been playing guitar almost non-stop lately. Another is watching "The Office" on TBS which seems to constantly be on (I've never got into that show until recently). Finally my other new interest is hunting and of course guns. And it only took me 153 words to get to the point of this blog.
For well over a year now, I've been wanting to "mod" my Mossberg 500 ASG shotgun. To do it, it wouldn't cost me a great deal of money, but over the past year it was enough that I decided I would hold off from doing it until the house got sold. I looked at it sort of like a present for finally getting it sold. After realizing that I exhibited great patience over that time period and rather then waiting 2-3 years for the house to sell, I decided to jump the gun so to speak.
Before:
Here's my gun before: a regular old hunting shotgun. My Dad and I (mostly my Dad) took this apart and turned it into a sweet home defense gun. We added what is called a top-folding stock to it. This essentially makes the gun smaller so that it can be shot from the hip. The stock is the part of the gun that is typically made of wood and is pressed against the shooter's shoulder. It also comes with a pistol grip which makes it easier to hold.
The next thing we added was a barrel shroud which wraps around the barrel of the gun. It has small holes in it that allows the barrel to breath while preventing the shooter from touching the hot barrel.
After that we swapped out the wooden forend to a black composite one. The forend is the part of the pump shotgun that you move back and forth to load a new shell. This was pretty much just a cosmetic change as it would look sort of silly with a wooden grip while the rest of the gun is black.
Finally the last change we made was to add a shell shot holder to the folding stock. This adds another 5 shells to the gun bringing it's capacity to 11 when fully loaded.
After:
Here it is after all the modifications. This photo doesn't really do it justice so I took some really sweet artistic photos with my digital camera. I added these to my Wallpapers section and also on Flickr. Pretty sweet photos, eh? Also, I added some photos to my Photo Gallery showing it being taken apart and also after I shot at some pumpkins leftover at my parents place from Halloween.
Why?
Well first of all it looks totally cool and is much more fun to shoot. Second of all I was tired of waiting. I made myself wait a year and it's true that the longer you wait for something, the more you'll enjoy it. Overally I'm very happy with the gun and look forward to shooting it some more.