Firearms | New | Shotgun | Sporting

Description

There is a point at which you break away from a budget gun as you seek better quality, though what causes you to make that decision can be difficult to quantify. If you have reached that point, the Elegante 
Field, is a step up in 
quality at a moderate price.

• The steel action is a two-
piece boxlock affair, comprising main body and trigger-plate.
• The sears and hammers are simple machined components in design and construction, with the trigger- block taking on any level of complexity and that is produced from a casting.
• Straight away we can see that there is no desire to overthink this action; it has a function to perform and achieves that via the simplest route. The cocking bars run in the floor of the action and set the ejectors once firing has occurred; tripping of the ejectors is then taken care of by lugs 
in the action body once the correct angle of opening has been achieved.
• The single selective trigger has a smooth break and resets 
to the second barrel without the 
use of recoil — not a bad trigger 
for a game gun at all.
• The fore-end iron is devoid of any active mechanism, it merely has an extension to engage the cocking bars and a catch to hold it to the barrels 
— very simple and fuss free.

Engraving

Aside from a little band of scrollwork around where the barrel tubes meet the monobloc and engine turning on the sides of the monobloc, all of the decoration on this gun is on the action body.

On some lower-priced guns, manufacturers try to raise their perceived standard by adding a lot of low-grade engraving or poorly executed game scenes, but not so with the Elegante Field. Franchi has backed right off on the engraving, offering just a hint of floral scrolls and a neat rope border on the action sides, stippling up over the top of the breech and a little floral scroll along each side of the top strap.

Delicate balance