Benelli M4 Burndown Ep. 1: What Happened?

Yeah, the gunsmith and so on... Still a bad rep for the producer, since its product somewhat forces the customer to let himself taken hostage by third party affiliates!

I’m pretty certain your buddy broke the [aftermarket] bolt-release tab — not by pounding down on top of it, repeatedly, but by snagging the tip with a somewhat horizontal motion and shearing it off where it clips into the ferrule for the handguards.

I’ve seen this happen when a sling gets caught between the bolt-release tab and the receiver and the user tries to yank the sling free (perpendicular to the receiver) instead of sliding it out from under the tab. Getting a sling caught under there takes some serious mismanagement of the sling, btw.

The tab you are using is from Rx Arms. It is made from extremely high tensile strength, spring steel that is heat treated. You pretty much have to abuse it, by trying to pry it off the shotgun to cause it to break. Almost always, it will actually pop loose from the handguard ferrule before breaking — so you really have to be trying to break it off to cause the damage you experienced.

As for the SI handguard failure. Just skip trying to hang stuff off the handguards. Handguards are to shield your hands and keep debris out of the gas mech, and not serve as a frame for hanging MLOK accessories, which essentially serve as lever arms to better rip them out with. The better systems for mounting lights and laser on M4 clamp around the barrel hanger for the mag tube — and do not interfere with the disassembly of the barrel from the shotgun. AVA Tactical produced perhaps the best of these, but they have been out of production for a decade now. Virtually every aftermarket rail system replacing the Benelli M4 handguards — including the now discontinued ones by SureFire — has caused some kind of interference with or ended up getting some kind of damage from the ARGO gas mechanism.

By the way, the gas mechanism was designed by Benelli as the inertia recoil systems of the M1, M3, Super Black Eagle, etc.would fail with partial bolt / bolt-carrier strokes on the breech opening cycle. The military, at the time, wanted the capability to mount bulky, large, heavy-weight night vision optics to the top of combat shotgun receivers. The ARGO gas system will cycle reliably no matter how much junk you pile on to the receiver above it. Something interesting to explore in your future video-recorded testing.

The shell extraction on the Benelli is robust, ergo the ripped heads on the bio-safe shells. The Benelli M4 shell extraction is second in crazy stiffness only to the shell latch that retains the shot shells in the mag tube. One of the things not outwardly apparent to people who watch videos of the Benelli M4 and who do not own or use them, is how difficult it is to load shells into the tube mag. Your video slightly evidenced this when your hand became fatigued on loading the shells, and you had to switch hands. In the stock configuration with the stock, shell latch, there’s no way you would have gotten 500 rounds loaded — your thumbs would have gotten extremely sore long before 500.

This is where the aftermarket industry has come up with very real improvements, mostly for competition shooters using the Benelli M2 which has high interchangeability of parts with the Benelli M4. In competition, speed is everything — especially when loading, repeatedly. There are three makers of coil spring-loaded shell-latches that replace the stock, spring steel latch. Only one of these has a drop-in solution that requires no mods or special gunsmithing.

The coil spring latches completely change the shell loading experience on the Benelli M4, from high-resistance thumb wrestling like trying to stuff an angry squirrel into a 1-inch dia. tube to: two to four shells sliding in via a single stroke, with butter smoothness. These don’t affect the secure retention of the shells in the mag tube in any way, and pulling out on bolt release releases the shell latch for lightning quick, single-stroke unloading of the mag tube.