Cabelas Kodiak Double rifle...?

[j23]

I am considering picking one of these up. ...because deer hunting with the Lyman Great Plains isnt good enough I guess...???

Anyone have any experiences or hear anything good or bad? I believe they are made by Pedersoli?

I was thinking of the .72 caliber, just for 'kicks.' Lyman makes a round ball mold

THoughts?

[docone31]

I so coveted one of those. However, they are for right handeds. I am a lefty.
Aside from that, I did not like the way they pointed. Just did not feel right.
The one I handled, looked very well built. Just very barrel heavy. Also, you have to run a tight ball if you want both barrels loaded in the field. Supposedly, the recoil can move the unfired ball outward. Not a good thing.
If it were me, I would go with the .54. From what the reviews on it from various sources, it is picky on shooting well.
Mind you, I do not have one. I still want one, but I know it would not be my favourite rifle.

[missionary5155]

Good morning
I was rescently at Cabelas in Minnesota ( Otawana) and there was a 54 double in the bargain den.
It was heavy ! the barrels were bored 54 into what looked like enough metal to bore at least 72 caliber. Granted they are built stout but me personally I would not drag a 15 pound rifle about the woods.
Mike... unpacking in Illinois

[pietro]

Yup - but they get slightly lighter, as the caliber gets bigger - down to a dainty 12 pounds or so.

You better start working out, if considering one.

Although YMMV, I wouldn't do it, either - just to have a quick second shot available.

.

[northmn]

I had a CVA double that I sold. The second shot is available with an advantage that is debatable. The Kodiaks I picked up were heavy as stated. A double rifle does not give the accuracy of a single barrel. First you may have trouble regulating the sights to both barrels. Usually you get a comprimise that is usable for hunting. Often one sights in for one barrel and uses the other for close up. The CVA I had would not regulate as the barrels shot further apart at longer ranges. At one time the Kodiak came with 2 rear sights, which could cause obvious confusion in the field. I gather the newer ones do regulate better. Another issue is the locks are not neccesarily condusive to accurate shooting. I do not know how fine they can be tuned or if they have a fly in the tumbler so that they can be lightened for finer shooting. Mostly a double is designed for close range stuff. Some have them and like them, I have seen more than one for sale in Cabela's bargain ben.

Northmn

[Doc Highwall]

I had one in 58cal and it shot great. I used Lyman's 575213 that dropped at 568grs with 136grs of Elephant black powder. I made a false muzzle for it and installed a Lyman tang sight on it. With this load I was able to keep shots from both barrels on a clay pigeon at 200 yds. Yes it is heavy and the reason I got rid of it is because I got hurt at work and have had three spine surgeries and a shoulder surgery.

[Odinbreaker]

Some state's do not allow double muzzle loaders in muzzy seasons I know Wis does not but we have lots of redundant regulations like 1 x scopes.

[451whitworth]

I am considering picking one of these up. ...because deer hunting with the Lyman Great Plains isnt good enough I guess...???

Anyone have any experiences or hear anything good or bad? I believe they are made by Pedersoli?

I was thinking of the .72 caliber, just for 'kicks.' Lyman makes a round ball mold

THoughts?

i have a .72 and a .58 Cabela's Kodiak (these are ambidextrous docone31, no cheek piece on stock). i had a .50 for many years but i sold it. the .50, .54, .58 cal. guns have the same barrel contour just with a bigger hole as the caliber increases. thus the weight comes down quite a bit when comparing the .50 to the .58. the Cabela's model has the pistol grip stock while the Pedersoli that Dixie Gun Works sells has a straight grip with cheek piece for RH shooter. both of mine shoot to the same point of aim although not all of them do so they have two rear sights for each barrel. the .50 that i sold didn't shoot to the same POA and i was forced to use a sight for each barrel which i didn't like. the individual barrel groups for that .50 were very tight though. the .72 uses beefed up 12 ga. shot gun barrels and also has shorter (25.5") barrels compared to the 28" barrels on the 50-58 cals. the .72 is much handier and better ballanced than the other cals. my 50 had 1-48" twist barrels but i understand the new ones (50 and 54) are 1-24" while the 58 is 1-48". my 72 has a 1-86" twist (measure by me) although Cabela's lists it at 1-75". the .72 is my hands down favorite. i use a Rapine .715" round ball mould and 140grs. of 3FG and it regulates perfectly. i have read many times on the internet people who claim the ball or bullet in the unfired barrel can move off the powder charge when the first barrel is fired. i have NEVER had that happen in any of my three rifles. i guess it could if you used a loose combination of patch/ball or undersized bullet. lastly the .72 pummels deer/bear like nothing you've ever seen. they go right down.

[docone31]

Wow, not being side specific would make a great deal of difference.
The one I tried in .50 was heavy, I could not hit anything with it, probably not the rifle's fault, and it just did not seem right, being right handed and me left handed.
I would love to get one someday, perhaps I just might if they make them ambi.
Way cool.
The rifle I tried was a beauty. It was the right handed stuff that made me back off.

[JW6108]

I had one in 58cal and it shot great. I used Lyman's 575213 that dropped at 568grs with 136grs of Elephant black powder. I made a false muzzle for it and installed a Lyman tang sight on it. With this load I was able to keep shots from both barrels on a clay pigeon at 200 yds. Yes it is heavy and the reason I got rid of it is because I got hurt at work and have had three spine surgeries and a shoulder surgery.

That is a beauty, doc. That the barrels were regulated so well on a double in that price range must be nearly a miracle. Sorry to hear about the surgeries causing you to have to part with it.

[Doc Highwall]

JW6108, that will probably be a story of the guns that I should not have let go. There is a thread on this in the hand gun section running now.

[725]

FWIW. My buddy had one in the .72 and the barrels were not regulated very well at all. Shot to two wildly different POI's. One trigger was super light and the other felt like a pound of sand was in there. He is in the trade and got to meet with the CEO and detailed his complaints. Had no functioning phone number here in the US. They had a number, but over the course of many days & weeks, nobody picked up. That's probably been addressed by now, but be forewarned. There were other less than stellar points about the rifle which I now forget. As much as he wanted one for a return trip to Africa, he got rid of it. I'd love to have "A" double in .54 but I'm not looking and would avoid the Pedersoli if other options presented. Just my observation and thoughts. Your milage may differ.

[KCSO]

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here but I have had 3 and worked on a couple more and have never been impressed. #1 Regardless of what they tell you the barrels are NOT regulated. The sights are set so you flip up the second sight for the second barrel. #2 The stocks are poorly done and are at best modified shotgun stocks with a huge lump of lead in the butt to attempt to balance overly large barrels. #3 The locks are rough and the trigger pulls por for the cost of the gun, when you spend over $600 for a gun a 3# trigger isn't too much to ask, rough and creepy at 5# just doesn't cut it. #4 The sights are at best ugly and cheap to boot see comment above, for the money you deserve better.

All in all to anyone who has handled a quality double gun these are sad imitations of the real thing. Heavy poorly stocked unregulated guns with a 25 cent ramrod under the tubes.

The worst thing will be that after you have got one and you end up dissatisfied you will get about 1/2 what you paid for the gun at trade in time.

[jmforge]

I too covet a Kodiak, but a caveat is in order. I talked with a couple of custom ML'er builders about the cost of tuning the locks and replacing the double leaf sights with a tradtional 3 leaf English express sight and they told me that the biggest problem with the Kodiak is at the price point they sell them, it isn't possible to truly regulate the barrels. One guy told me that, in his experience, around one out of five is regulated well just by luck, but the others will not come close to shooting the same point of aim out of the box and you get the occasional stinker. As for getting the gun regulated, I was told that it could take 2 hours of labor and $5 worth of powder or 12 hours and $100 worth of powder and there is no way to tell going in. One guy was able to regulate a double rifle he built himself with only like 8 shots from each barrel, but he said that experiences like that are about as rare as hen's teeth. He also said that for the cost of buying one new and "fixing it" you were getting into the range what you would pay to have someone build you a plain jane double using better parts that worked as advertised.
As best as I can tell, the .50, 54, and .58 are all built using the same barrel blanks, so as the caliber goes up, the weight goes down,which means the recoil goes up even more The .72 is apparently built using shorter, fatter barrel blanks.

[nvbirdman]

I have a CVA side by side 12ga muzzleloader, and it is a REAL fun gun, but after rabbit hunting for about thirty minutes I will return to the truck and exchange it for my 20ga breechloader because that ML is HEAVY.

[jmforge]

i have a .72 and a .58 Cabela's Kodiak (these are ambidextrous docone31, no cheek piece on stock). i had a .50 for many years but i sold it. the .50, .54, .58 cal. guns have the same barrel contour just with a bigger hole as the caliber increases. thus the weight comes down quite a bit when comparing the .50 to the .58. the Cabela's model has the pistol grip stock while the Pedersoli that Dixie Gun Works sells has a straight grip with cheek piece for RH shooter. both of mine shoot to the same point of aim although not all of them do so they have two rear sights for each barrel. the .50 that i sold didn't shoot to the same POA and i was forced to use a sight for each barrel which i didn't like. the individual barrel groups for that .50 were very tight though. the .72 uses beefed up 12 ga. shot gun barrels and also has shorter (25.5") barrels compared to the 28" barrels on the 50-58 cals. the .72 is much handier and better ballanced than the other cals. my 50 had 1-48" twist barrels but i understand the new ones (50 and 54) are 1-24" while the 58 is 1-48". my 72 has a 1-86" twist (measure by me) although Cabela's lists it at 1-75". the .72 is my hands down favorite. i use a Rapine .715" round ball mould and 140grs. of 3FG and it regulates perfectly. i have read many times on the internet people who claim the ball or bullet in the unfired barrel can move off the powder charge when the first barrel is fired. i have NEVER had that happen in any of my three rifles. i guess it could if you used a loose combination of patch/ball or undersized bullet. lastly the .72 pummels deer/bear like nothing you've ever seen. they go right down.

There is a guy on the ML'ing forums who has a .72 caliber and he had a custom mold built to cast very short, fat blunt nose slugs for his gun. IIRC correctly, they were somewhere north of 650 grains as opposed to the 500 grns MOL for the round ball, but he said that they were still short enough for the slow twist rifling to stablize them. I have heard that the .72 will indeed pummel game, but it also tends to pummel the shooter as well. The one quote that I saw attributed to a former .72 owner was that the gun does as much damage behind the muzzle as it does in front.

[missionary5155]

Good morning
Having shot 12 Guage RB for some years out of a mossy with up to 135 grains #2 Black I will attest a light weight .73 caliber is not real high on my list for a target gun. Sitting off cross sticks is tolerable.... standing or kneeling is not as bad. BUT there is the accumutive factor of recoil....
10 pounds + of steel soften that impulse... but that is why the profesionals have a gun bearer. Do you wonder why the Buff hunters travelled about in wagons hauling the 14 pound + shooters until a heard was found ?
Double rifles are intended as close in powerhouses. They are heavy and with good reason. BUT sadly mass produced items today are not refined... Cost/profit is more important to investors who will never carry the product. So a mass purchased 60 caliber barrel blank will be rifled for 50 to whatever caliber and a few more $K gained.
Presonally if I bought one I would go to the 58 and use sabots/ thick patches to shoot smaller diameter RB or cast boolits. That would be the simple solution to reduce the weight and still have the smaller caliber.

[2shot]

I have had one of these for the last 20 years. Mine is one of the first ones that Cabela's offered and is a .58 cal. I had found that when I shoot the Lee R.E.A.L. bullet with a load of Goex FFG in the 90 to 120 gr. range that both barrels hit within an inch at 75 yards. I have set both rear sights the same but leave one folded down as a back-up in case I need it. Other than the weight of this rifle it's great! I have a Lyman .58 cal. Old Style mold that doesn't shoot too well out of this gun but I bet that one of the larger diameter Skirmish moulds from RCBS would work well. I also would like to try more experimenting with the RB but to date just haven't gotten around to it.

2shot

[jmforge]

A little update on the .72. i was checking out YouTube and saw a video from a South African guy who apparently has his .72 dialed in really well. He was shooting at steel plates 100 yards away and hit both times. Now the fun part. One barrel was loaded with the standard 500 gr round ball and the other was loaded with his preferred 800 grain (!!!!) conical. I think he said that he gets 1350-1375fps with the 800 and 135 grains of powder.

[FL-Flinter]

They are made by Pedersoli and a one-word answer would be: "Avoid!"

Several years ago I ordered a 10ga/.72 combo, over $1400 later I got a total ********* Fit & finish were bad, the "smoothbores" were anything but "smooth" and the rifled bores weren't much better. Zero customer service from the dealer (not Cabela's) and not even a response from the mfg to my multiple letters sent both email and snail mail. Left lock was unsafe, the full-cock notch was little more than a scribed line, trip the right lock and left one went too. Right lock was as sloppy as a ... well, I won't go there in this forum... Left lock spring was okay, right lock spring was barely enough to fire the cap. Folded piece of paper was used to shim the trigger plate. Buttplate screws were stripped as were three of the four wedge escutcheon screws. RR would not fit, it jammed between the stock & barrel lug. After a few months, it became clear that I was stuck with this ***, I decided to try repairing it. I lapped the rifle barrels, and lapped, and lapped until they were reasonably smoothed out yet at 50yds there was still better than 20" POI difference and "grouping" from either barrel was actually "patterning", my smoothbore 12ga would qualify as "match-grade" compared to this alleged rifle. The smoothbores were so rough you couldn't get a patch down them, I went in with a carbide hydraulic cylinder tube hone and took more than 0.020" out and they were still rough, it got to the point where I just got disgusted with the whole thing! I welded the nipple holes shut and it's wall hanger at someone else's house.

The thing is, I ordered this gun simply because I didn't have time to build my own and for the price I didn't expect any more than what I paid for but had no idea it was going to be totally useless. I planned on it not being regulated and there are methods of tuning the regulation that do not require un-brazing the barrels provided the POI is reasonably close and the bores are good enough to print half-decent groups - normally the worst case is installing separate sights on each barrel and/or running slightly different load combinations but I received a brand new understanding of "worst case" with this one. On the smoothbores, it's not a big deal to remove up to 0.005" with a good lap & polish but when you take 0.0075" out and they're still crap, it's time to cull them. The weight I could deal with, the total lack of balance - eh, it's a production gun, it's to be expected... the unsafe & unusable locks and lack of even checking to see if the RR fit - absolutely uncalled for!

As for lessons learned, there were a few on this one. 1- In the amount of time I wasted on a *** that ended up being culled anyway, I could have just built my own. 2- If you want a decent SxS rifle, anything costing less than $5k and is not built by a reputable SxS builder isn't worth wasting your time or money on. 3- If you're buying a cheap mass-production gun mail order, always pay with AmEx so you can at least reverse the payment for bargaining leverage if necessary because Visa/MC is useless. If you're not dead-set on a SxS, consider a swivel breech. If you're looking for an accurate hard-hitter to 125yds, go for a custom .66 or .62 cal because either one is very effective and if it's built right, it won't beat the crap out of you. The .72 & .78 are not good choices for long-range applications anyway and inside of 65yds, a well built smoothbore will be plenty accurate if you feed it right.