Stocks

For over five centuries, features such as beauty, functionality and elegance in traditional hunting firearms were achieved through the skillful union of metal and wood. That tradition lives on today.

The traditional aesthetics in the design of hunting shotgun stocks – specifically side-by-side and over-and-under double-barrel shotguns – led to the creation of definite style rules through the Centuries; we still find those rules applied according to the type of shotgun we consider.

Even when dealing with mass-produced, industrially manufactured shotguns, it’s important for Sabatti customers to know that they can rely on wood components of unquestionable quality, with an appropriate design and the right grain to guarantee strength while being aesthetically pleasurable at the same time.

The design of wooden stocks for hunting rifles also follows traditional aesthetic canons supported by over a century of experience and by the feedback coming right from the field from hunters worldwide.

A hunting rifle will however definitely see harsh terrains and climates, in the woods and on the mountains, and will more often be used on makeshift supports such as wood stumps or rocks. Under this point of view, it’s paramount for the hunter that the stock will remain reliable and robust in a plethora of drastically different working conditions.

Whether it’s a standard walnut stock built for a bolt-action hunting rifle or a selected stock built for a high-quality double rifle, Sabatti wood rifle stocks are made to last, and endure, for a long, long time.

When a firearm is to be used in extreme environmental conditions – due to the climate, the temperature, or the way it has to be carried and fired – a polymer stock becomes the best choice.

A synthetic stock offers many advantages that a wooden stock simply can’t give. A polymer stock will better resist water and shocks in any condition; and particularly should the rifle or carbine need to be carried at the shoulder for several hours, as it’s typical of mountain hunting, the lighter weight of a polymer stock offers an objective advantage that reflects on the overall weight of the gun.

Finally, synthetic materials allow for more flexibility in terms of design and industrial scale production, allowing us to realize models that wouldn’t be possible to obtain with wood, such as Sabatti Thumbhole stocks.

The stock of a precision or long-range shooting rifle must offer very specific features, such as rigidity and resistance to the natural deformation caused by environmental temperature.

Unlike on a hunting rifle, the weight of a precision shooting rifle isn’t a problem; if anything, in many ways, it’s an advantage.

That’s why so many precision shooting rifle stocks are manufactured out of laminate, composed by multiple different layers of wood combined together according to the specific dynamic end features that we wish to obtain and high-pressure glued together into a single block that’s later modeled into its final form.

Laminate is sturdy, it offers high performance levels, and it’s often wrapped in a polymer film that makes it possible to decorate the stock with all sorts of image: all perfect features for a sporting rifle.

For a precision shooting rifle – particularly a long-range precision shooting rifle or a tactical long-range rifle – the choice of a synthetic stock brings along several distinct advantage.

The use of fiberglass-reinforced Nylon composites allows us to manufacture very rigid stocks, with performance levels close to those of a laminate wood stock, but remarkably lighter.

Synthetic stocks are better for large-scale manufacturing, leave the door open for choices on which polymer formula to adopt depending on the intended type of firearm and relevant use, and they can be used in several colors and with a wide variety of surface finishes.

Sporting shotguns are important firearms. They’re always over-and-under shotguns, and they’re important because their intended use demands that their manufacturing is cured down to the smallest detail, from the design to the technical layout and the quality of every single component.

Sabatti is famous worldwide for its rifled barrels, but not many know about the staggering quality of the barrels we use on our shotguns. And yet, Sabatti competition over-and-under shotguns offer technical features that put them head-to-head with the best competitors on the market: that’s why the wood that we use for their stocks is likewise selected with the utmost attention.

As the years went by, the design of bolt-action rifles has progressively evolved with the siphoning of technical solutions originally conceived for tactical and professional uses – particularly military – into the sport shooting world.

Now, besides laminated wood and polymer stocks, both on the commercial and professional markets, modern precision shooting rifles sport chassis systems completely manufactured out of metal – either steel or aircraft-grade aluminum alloy, depending on the task at hand.

Metal chassis systems offer several advantages: imagination is the only limit to the design; industrially speaking, they can be manufactured easily even in small quantity; and when it comes to an end user, a modular layout allows shooters to configure and customize their firearms more easily and freely than a standard stock would.

With an attentive eye always trained towards market evolution, Sabatti engineers and manufactures all its rifle chassis systems entirely in-house, following extremely high-quality standards.