This Savage Renegauge is fresh off a week-long Argentine dove hunt, where I got to see exactly how it would perform firing around 6000 rounds in dusty field conditions. Only necessitating one cleaning the entire trip at around 3500 rounds (I purposely ran the gun to failure to determine where and when its failure point would occur), the Renegauge performed exceptionally well, particularly considering it's a gas gun, which runs dirtier than its recoil-operated brethren by nature of its very design.
While gas-operated actions may necessitate more cleaning, however, Id consider the Renegauge the quintessential 12-gauge for high-volume shooting. While that may seem contradictory on its face, I assure you it is not. The gun's Dual Regulating Inline Valve (D.R.I.V.) system redirects much of the gas forward, resulting in massively reduced recoil. This combines with a patented, exceptionally absorbent butt pad and (even more importantly) a rubberized cheek piece to knock down felt recoil to almost nothing. I got a real-word taste of how important this is for shooting at volume when my Renegauge needed a cleaning. I switched to an older-style, wood-stocked 20-gauge to finish out the session, and had a visibly bruised cheekbone and a sore shoulder within the hour. The larger gauge Renegauge, on the other hand, caused me zero discomfort over the entire ~6000 round count. That's a crazy statistic I almost wouldn't believe had I not experienced it, and let's be honest, having to clean the gun at some point every several THOUSAND rounds is a pretty small price to pay for that sort of performance. If you're not already cleaning your firearms more frequently than that, you may want to reconsider your maintenance schedule.
When cleaning, the Renegauge scores itself another point by coming apart exceptionally easily, really just requiring a punch set and some needle-nose pliers—no special tools necessary. Of course, while the video above focuses mostly on this aspect of the gun, there are many other things to love about it, including its fully adjustable LOP and cheekpiece, as well as a loading port so smooth I watched one of my fellow hunters (who is also a 3 Gun competitor) repeatedly quad load it. You can read more about those features in our full review on the gun, which can be found here.
To see still more about the Renegauge, and all the other firearms the company has to offer, visit savagearms.com.
