Gun Review

It's so incongruous. In my gun safe the massive Kolar sporting clays gun stands between a petite Winchester Model 42 .410 pump and a lightweight 1920s Webley & Scott side-by-side. It's like parking a D9 Caterpillar tractor between a Ducati and an MG TC. If ever the phrase "horses for courses" were apt, this is an example.
Since sporting clays started in the US in 1986, the game has followed skeet and evolved from a test of field shooting with field guns to one of specialized presentations and even more specialized guns. Today's usual over/under sporter has at least 30" barrels and weighs in around 8 pounds. But if some is good, more is better. Right? Kolar thinks so, and the company may be correct.
It all started in the early 1970s in Larry Kolar's machine shop in Ithaca, New York. At the urging of a skeet-shooting friend, Kolar developed a set of... Read More »



skeet tube inserts with integral extractors. Don Mainland, who owns a large machine shop in Racine, Wisconsin, bought the rights to the tubes and began making them in the late '70s. The Kolar skeet tubes continue to be popular to this day. In 1988 Mainland started making the 90T single-barrel trap gun for Remington. There were 3,500 guns made before production ceased in 1994. Toward the end of that run, Mainland's key personnel decided to design and build competition over/unders under the Kolar Arms name. Our review gun is the AAA Competition Sporting Standard model. In addition to our sporting clays version, trap and skeet variants are also available.
Most clay-target guns are converted field guns, which makes sense when you consider the general demands of the gun market and where the volume sales are. Not the Kolar. This over/under was designed from the ground up as a no-compromise competition gun.
One look at the receiver will convince. It looks like a Perazzi on steroids. Machined from a billet of 4140 chrome-moly steel, its Boss locking system allows a shallow but very wide action. It's one of the widest I've seen. The huge, squared, twin locking lugs protrude from high on the receiver face. This allows a more direct and less flexible connection between the opening lever and the locking plate.
The action pivots on two easily replaceable side hinge stubs. The bottom of the receiver is solid, with no Browning-style lower lumps piercing it. In fact, the entire receiver is cut from one chunk of steel. Unlike on many other guns, the top and bottom tangs plus the rear vertical support are hewn from the same single chunk of steel as the main body of the receiver. It simply can't flex. CNC machinery sure has come a long way. The opening lever is the only cast piece on the entire gun.
Like guns by Perazzi, Zoli and some others, the Kolar has a removable trigger group. It's held in with one Allen screw to forestall inadvertent detachment. Hammers are driven by coil springs centered on guide rods. The trigger is selective via a toggle behind the trigger blade. The trigger is mechanical, not inertial, so it will work with sub-gauge tubes. The trigger group and action have been awarded a number of US patents. Kolar paid a lot of attention to the little details too. Most of the cross pins in the trigger are tacked in place with a tiny center punch just to make sure. Sears are heat treated and titanium-nitrited for long life.
The trigger blade is adjustable for length of pull for about 1/2" along a track. It has notch detents and is secured with an Allen bolt. Adjustable triggers are fine until they come loose. These shouldn't. Like any proper competition gun, the top-tang-mounted safety is manual. As an interesting plus, it also can be locked out entirely should a competitive shooter wish to do so.
Barrel structure follows the usual tube-and-monoblock method. After the tubes are fixed in the monoblock, the joint is magnafluxed to make sure it is perfect. The monoblock carries easily removable ejectors almost identical to Perazzi's. High on each side of the rear of the monoblock are the large squarish receptor cavities for the dual locking lugs. They are like Beretta's, only larger.
The side of the Kolar monoblock has an interesting patented feature. Like Perazzi, Kolar uses the Boss-style bifurcated lumps on each side of the action to engage recesses in the sides of the monoblock. Kolar has added replaceable inserts at the rear of each monoblock recess. Different-size inserts can be used as barrels wear in, to maintain full contact and take pressure off of the hinges. This feature also is very helpful in fitting a second barrel to the same receiver. Boss used the same arrangement, but the replaceable inserts were on the receiver walls, not the barrels. The sporter is available with an additional lightweight tubed carrier barrel for NSCA sub-gauge competition.
Kolar buys its barrels as raw hammer-forged tubes, which are then machined to specification. Our sporter barrels were the "Semi-Lite" .750" bores. This is a good bit more of a 12-gauge overbore than Krieghoff, Browning or Beretta. Twelve- gauge nominal is .729", so you get the picture. Kolar's bores are big. And heavy too. The emphasis is on the "Semi," not the "Lite," as these Kolar barrels weigh about 4 oz more than the typical Perazzi sporter's. If, for some reason, you want even heavier barrels, Kolar will ream the bores to only .735" to add a few more ounces. As would be expected in a state-of-the-art target gun, the chamber forcing cones are a long 2". The bore interior is not chromed; it is nicely polished with a computer-controlled Sunnen hone.
The Kolar sporter is available with fixed chokes of your choosing or with screw chokes. Our test gun came with five screw chokes from .000" Cylinder Bore to .020" Modified, but you can get whatever constrictions you want. The chokes were polished stainless, .6" extended, and the constriction was clearly marked on the extension for easy reference. Choke tapers are the popular conical/parallel design, with .010" bore relief at the rear and 5/8" parallel at the front. The chokes are just shy of 3" long-long enough to permit effective gradual tapers. Currently, Kolar is experimenting with total-taper, no-parallel, Teague-style chokes as well.
Although most of the action comparisons are to Perazzi, Kolar looked to Krieghoff for barrel inspiration. Krieg-hoff made split, ribless barrels a hallmark in competition guns. The huge advantage to this approach is the adjustability of barrel convergence. Kolar uses replaceable hangers to attach the barrels at the muzzle and replaceable spacers to separate them in the middle. The barrels end up being joined at the monoblock, middle and muzzle, not along their entire length by side ribs. Because the spacers and hangers can be replaced by those of different sizes to force the barrels apart or bring them together, barrel convergence (the ability of each barrel to shoot to the same point of impact) is easily adjusted. You would be amazed at how many guns with soldered side ribs do not print both barrels to the same place. Barrel convergence is the first thing I test on a new gun. Kolar's convergence adjustments can be made by the owner, which is very interesting and very useful. This is indeed a high-tech machine.
Barrel options abound. Sporter lengths can be 28", 30", 32" or 34". Barrel weights can vary depending on the bore size selected. Our 32" test sporter came with a "ramp taper" top rib that was silver soldered in place. It was raised .4" at the rear and sloped down to .15" at the muzzle. (A flat-taper rib also is available if you prefer no built-in vertical lead.) The width of the rib tapered from .44" at the breech to .33" just beneath the usual Bradley white-bead-on-a-block front bead. There was also a small steel center bead. Mercifully, the barrels were not ported, but porting is available if you must.
Our barrels were high-gloss blued, but the rib was machined on top with a channel down the middle to cut glare. Although the action is available in "black-iron bluing," ours was the matte silver color of electroless nickel plating. The contrast was quite attractive. The trigger group was done in the same electroless nickel with a gold trigger blade. The nickel will neither wear through nor rust.
There was little engraving on the receiver of our standard-grade gun. It was just enough to break up the flat areas. The Kolar lion rampant crest was on the bottom. Heavily hand-engraved French grey receivers are available on the higher grades.
Off-the-shelf Kolar stocks emphasize heavy vertical Italianate competition pistol grips and Krieghoff-style Monte Carlo combs. The Kolar catalog shows three different sporting stocks, four skeet and three trap. Not to your taste? No problem. Kolar will make a stock to your dimensions on its state-of-the-art CNC stock machine. If you don't have your dimensions, Kolar will do the fitting at its 45-yard indoor test range. The stocks also are carefully shaped for width to govern weight for proper gun balance. The stock-bolt assembly even has a set of conical washers to permit contraction and expansion of the stock without cracking.
The single-border checkering on our gun was hand cut to a purposeful 22 lines-per-inch that provided a good grip. Slick, ultra-fine checkering has no place on a competition gun. A practical black Pachmayr Decelerator sporting clays pad with the plastic non-stick horseshoe insert at the top adorns the butt.
The Kolar sporter's standard forend is a sleek, attractive "Euro-style" forend reminiscent of the English-spec Perazzi sporters. A fuller beavertail is also available.
The stock finish used on our gun was a high-gloss polyurethane. On the plus side, it is durable, waterproof and immune to my universal solvent sunscreen. On the negative side, it is harder to fix the inevitable dings. Both the stock and forend were properly finished inside to prevent oil seepage. Wood-to-metal fit was excellent, with no gaps of any kind. The wood was left just proud enough to permit a refinishing or two.
The walnut was really nice on our sample. It had good figure, color and contrast. Of course you can get even fancier wood as you move up the scale of the eight engraving upgrades. It all depends on how much glitz your station in life requires. Our basic test model, the Nickel Standard, sells for $8,320 with fixed chokes and $8,995 with screw chokes. This is right in with the basic Perazzi or Krieghoff. At the top of the Kolar ladder, the Gold Select engraved model runs $24,990, whereas the Custom Grade is priced on request. The basic Nickel Standard sporting clays model comes with a sturdy aluminum Americase that is quite suitable for airline abuse. The case contains the five chokes, a proper notched choke wrench, a tube of grease, a surprisingly informative instruction manual, a wrench for the stock and also one to remove the trigger, and a three-year guarantee.
Shooting the Kolar sporter was a real eye-opener. When I first put it together, I kept looking for an axle and set of wheels. At 9 pounds, it was a load. At first I struggled with it. My sporting clays shooting style is a combination of field and clays. I swing through a lot of birds. I generally prefer lighter and more facile clays guns. My favorite personal over/ under sporters are FN Superposed target guns weighing just less than 8 pounds with 30" barrels. They move quickly and are easy to make corrections with, but I have to remember to drive them through the birds. The Kolar was balanced right at the hinge pin, but the greater weight gave it a higher moment of inertia than those of my FNs.
With the heavy Kolar, my timing was all wrong. The inertia put me in front of quartering-away targets and behind fast crossers. At the suggestion of a Master Class shooter who shoots a Kolar, I changed my lead method. Instead of coming from behind the birds and firing as I swung through, I started the muzzles well out along the flight paths ahead of the birds for a sustained lead. This way I was able to match muzzle speed to the speed of the birds while always staying in front. This requires very little muzzle movement if you start the gun in exactly the right place. That's just what the Kolar wanted. I was able to hit many of the targets with virtually no effort. The weight of the gun made it very steady during the short swing. Because the gun was moving slower than it would have been if coming from behind, there was less chance of overswing and overleading. Yet the gun's weight made it easier to follow through and not stop the swing. This horse had indeed found his course.
Clearly, changing my shooting style to adapt to a gun like this would take several thousand rounds. But it might be worth it. Many of the very best competition shooters use sustained lead on clays, and a heavy, precise gun like this Kolar makes this method easier. Concerning the heft of the gun, one very knowledgeable shooter remarked, "It shoots better than it feels." How very right he was.
On the functioning side, the gun was flawless. Everything worked. The trigger was a little lighter than I'm used to, at 3-1/4 pounds lower and 3-1/2 pounds upper, but it was very consistent. There was more creep than I like but no overtravel and, most important, no variation at all in pull weight. The chokes stayed in tight but were easy to remove. The gas seal between the choke skirt and barrel effectively eliminated carbon deposits. The trigger and stock detached easily but were never loose. Ditto the forend. Everything fit properly.
Between the overbore barrels, long forcing cones and well-designed chokes, the patterns were more efficient and hotter in the center than I am used to for a given constriction. Fewer pellets were being deformed. With the Kolar, you can open up your chokes a bit to gain the widest effective pattern possible. The manual mandates that the gun be used only with "lead factory target loads." That seems restrictive when so many clays shooters reload. Steel shot is not recommended.
A number of people who shot the gun commented on its low recoil. Obviously, heavy guns kick less than light ones. Adding a pound (12 percent) to an 8-pound gun reduces calculated free recoil by about the same percentage. Some feel that overboring and long cones reduce perceived recoil, but you can't calculate that.
The Kolar sporter is a no-compromise gun. It is built to do one thing very, very well and for a very, very long time. I doubt that the gun could be worn out, but if it needs attention, Kolar's service department has the highest reputation. This gun certainly isn't for everyone. If you shoot sporting clays to practice for your days afield, this is probably too much gun. But if you are an analytical competitive shooter and are willing to adapt your style to the gun, the Kolar sporter may allow you to achieve scores you thought impossible.

Author's Note: For more information on Kolar shotguns, contact Kolar Arms, 262-554-0800; www.kolararms.com.