Trick the Fausti DEA … a new, more elegant butt plate

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Trick the Fausti DEA … a new, more elegant butt plate

June 10, 2011 by Scott

Fausti family foto

I LOVE my new Fausti DEA SL shotgun! Sisters Giovanna, Barbara and Elena Fausti pulled out the stops at the factory to produce a beautiful gun that I’ll use this season, then give away as a prize in our upcoming “TruckVault Cares” initiative (more on that later).

Out of curiosity, I finally got around to measuring the length of pull and it is a good 1/2″ longer than my second-favorite gun. I shoot “instinctive style,” and a short LOP is helpful. Now I could just leave it longer and have a built-in excuse for my bad shooting this season but that would be the easy way, not the Upland Nation way.

Bringing the LOP back to what I’m used to should give me a couple more birds per day (so I hope). So, time to take off the rubber butt pad. I consulted gunsmith Tom Nitcher of Sun Mountain Gunsmithing, who pulled out a ton of examples:

We actually settled on a simple, elegant and smooth plastic option until Tom called back after digging through his wood inventory:

From ebony to walnut, rare South American varieties and even bison horn … we had a myriad of choices. Tom suggested we fabricate a butt plate worthy of the incredibly figured wood of the Fausti’s stock and fore-end and I agreed – wood it will be.

The ebony we settled on actually has a bit of visible grain (pardon my ignorance re: terminology) but is dark enough to make a nice contrast with the stock’s wood, to my eye more so than the rubber pad shown here: