What’s in the box?
The shotgun and a cheap nylon sling. The shotgun is fitted with neato looking ramp sights that look like cool low light pieces. The stock has a pad-like thing for your shoulder. Sling mounts are integral to the stock and magazine nut, as with other guns of this type.
The breakdown
The world of knock off pieces from China is diverse and profound. You can buy a knock off of everything from Coach bags to Tag watches, and from Ka-Bar knives to kevlar helmets. In every case, without exception, the knock off is something that looks, and maybe acts, like the real thing. It’s close enough, but the lesser cost comes in materials and construction that make premium items, or even regular selling pedestrian items, what they are as a branded product.
So it is with this Ultra 87 shotgun from Century.
The 870 Remington that it carelessly copies is a wonderful and ubiquitous tool used by many for target shooting, clays, hunting, and home defense. Its quality is generally good and its place in the lower priced pump shotgun world is cemented at or near the top for most everyone who understand the market.
People regularly run an 870 with boring reliability and dependability to the point that the only thing they can do with it is farkle it with searchlights, pistol grips, xenomorph motion trackers and pez dispensers when they become bored with it. The parts inside are good quality and the design is robust enough to handle just about anything you ask it to do, short of crazy handloads that exceed the pressure limits of the design.
So, why are all my pictures of this Century arms knock off depicting it as disassembled? Because it is a knock off of a great item, which implies it is not so great. Unlike the Remington 870, it is not a quality firearm. It is a cheap imitation of a quality firearm.
When testing the Century Ultra 87 with a few light rounds of universal target shot, meant for clays and birds you don’t want to eat, it did fine. When I switched to a load of 00 buckshot, it lasted all of 7 rounds before it bent the bolt inside the receiver and I had to persuade it to disassemble by using a rubber mallet.
The good and bad news is that you can fix it with Remington parts. Good, because you can upgrade the internals and get it working again to the quality (ish) of a Remington. Brownell’s and other suppliers of gun bits have these parts in stock every day, so a fix is only a day or so away. Bad, because after you spend $150 or so on parts, you have the same or more money in a Century arms shotgun that you would have spent if you had purchased the Remington from the start.
Save your pennies and get a real product from a manufacturer with a good reputation. Sure, there are other shotguns from Mossberg and other makers besides Remington that are quality. They are all priced competitively too.
Conclusion:
I would hate to have saved some money on a firearm that wound up either failing in the field on a hunt, at the range on a 3 gun round, or most importantly during a home defense scenario.
7 rounds is all it took to lock this thing up solid. There is no clearing that kind of jam. There’s no tap and rack drill for that. You are totally screwed if it happens in a defense situation.
Verdict: Do not buy these. Buy the thing they’re knocking off, or a competitive model from a reputable dealer.
Function Review
But, BentWrenches, I want to know what they shoot like, how they cycle, stuff like that, too. I might get a good one.
My assessment:
Before they blow up they have the action cycling of a Remington that got through QA testing when the tooling was getting old and tolerances were loosening. Their manufacturing variances are much looser than Remington, so you can get one that stacks all these variances and feels like a soup sandwich when you rack the slide back and then forward to load a shell from a full mag.
New, they are fairly clean, but still need to be disassembled and purged of manufacturing leavings (metal shavings, dusts, and polymer particles or whatever else is floating in the air at the factory).
The action is somewhat smoooth, the magazine spring is pretty heavy, and loading it can be a chore. I found considerable dust and detritus in the mag tube as well.
Once I cleaned it, it did pretty well and smoothed a little. But it still felt sloppy due to the large tolerances. The tang safety felt somewhat incidental, without giving a good click for a haptic feedback when you either push it on or off. The trigger group feels somewhat wooden, which is on par with a lot of the other big name models it apes in design.
Overall, it’s a fair field gun you don’t mind getting dirty or beating up in your truck if you’re doing farm chores or fenceline work. If you take the time to make one run, it’s the world’s okayest pump shotgun.
It registers a solid “meh” even when it works.