A follow up to my post yesterday about testing your gear in firearms training classes.

One piece of kit I was seriously looking at was the MatchSaverz shell holder. I had mounted one after taking Tom Givens Shotgun Instructor class last summer. One of the things that quickly becomes apparent when putting a lot of rounds through a shotgun is that keeping it fed can be a difficult task. There are not a ton of great answers (besides the reliable “do more work”) to this issue, so you have to take what you can get.

I had seen the MatchSaverZ device and it was certainly intriguing. A single shell holder that could be mounted right in front of the chamber for potentially a lighting fast single round reload is an awesome idea. The problems are twofold – 1) the holder itself is plastic and small, giving the impression it is not particularly rugged, which is compounded by issue 2) that the attachment of the holder to gun is not great. It is one screw going the shell holder channel into the forearm of the gun, which is then backed up with a velcro attachment. This is made worse by using the factory forend of the 1301. There are a lot of dips and curls in it, and finding a spot where I could drill through and drive the screw without compromising the action, and keeping it close enough to the chamber to be handy severely limited my options. I tried a number of different spots and used extra adhesive to give it some added support, but it still felt flimsy.

Understand me, this is understandable in it’s construction. I am not saying the company did a poor job of making or designing the item. There are just inherent limits to what can be done at a price point that works. Now, running this in dry fire and the little bit of range work I have done in the past year, I did not have any problems with the holder. It stayed on well, and did it’s job well. It is a perfect thing for the emergency load. But as I mentioned previously, going through an extended class and putting a lot of rounds through a gun under time constraints can reveal weaknesses, so I was interested in seeing if the MatchSaverZ could handle it. I was not optimistic.

Well, I was wrong. The seemingly flimsy thing held up. Frankly, I was a bit astonished. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it never did. Now, a longer class may give a different result, but I think that it has been shown that for MY OWN PROJECTED NEED, the MatchSaverZ most likely will work in the home defense role. I have doubts that it would hold up in the field in a military context, or as a patrol gun (getting banged up from being taken in and out of a locked carrier), but for a citizen in the home, I think it is durable enough. At least for this user.