Gun

BERETTA DT10 Trident

PERAZZI BASHER?

Beretta's new DT10 Trident has its Italian rival firmly in its sights. Richard Rawlingson gets his hands on a trap version and puts it through its paces.

You don't have to be a marketing guru to work out where Beretta are coming from with the new DT10 Trident (the DT stands for 'detachable trigger' incidentally). Looking at the overall market for competition shotguns the company's product planners will have perceived a gap opening up in recent years with no Beretta product making an effective challenge. They will have been happy with the performance of the Silver Pigeon and the 682 ranges in their respective sectors of the market and ecstatic with the grip they have on semi-automatic sales, but less so with their share of 'higher ticket' items, the growing demand for guns in the £3,000 and upwards price bracket, the segment inhabited by the likes of Kemen, Krieghoff, Gamba and of course Perazzi.

With the sidelock SO's prices heading through the five-figure barrier, it now inhabits in a rather more rarefied plane altogether, leaving the ASE Gold as the Beretta contender for the 'serious' competition shooters' favour. And that has been the problem. The ASE has its devotees but it has never really caught the imagination of the market in the way its rivals have. Fundamentally it is a very sound gun, beautifully built and distinctly different, but it has remained as a niche model, seen mostly on the Olympic Trap and Skeet fields for which it was originally intended.

Enter the DT10. It was conceived and developed in the same think tank as the new 682E and shares many of that gun's features. They were launched to the world's press at the same time nearly a year ago. It has however taken rather longer to reach these shores, with demand from America taking up most of the early production. That tells you much about the current economic balance of power in the world gun trade. Both the DT10 and 682E were developed with massive input from Beretta USA and have that huge market as their first priority.

Technical Overview

The new gun has been launched as a complete family, with models for both international and American trap, sporting and skeet, each with different weight and balance characteristics built in. We have chosen the trap model for this first test.

The DT10 is an evolution of the ASE design, sharing the existing gun's cross-bolt locking system, also used on the SO range. The locking bolt emerges from the fence on the left hand side of the action to release the barrels and locks them by engaging on two lugs set either side of the top barrel. Those of you who know your history of gun design will recognise this as a long-established means of locking barrels to action, much favoured by Greener in England and the German trade based around the traditional gunmaking centre of Suhl. The concept also has a long history of use in the Italian trade.

The primary benefit is strength, allied to automatic take-up of wear through the bolt's slightly tapered design. The negatives are the presence of those lugs and also the characteristic flared breech end of the barrels to accommodate them. Aesthetically it perhaps lacks the elegance of the Boss system used so widely by other makers.

The receiver has not been lifted unchanged from the ASE. The walls have been thickened and raised slightly, while the bottom of the barrels' monobloc has been squared off, resulting in the barrels sitting lower in the receiver. Beretta say this reduces muzzle flip, on the principle that the lower the barrels sit the greater the tendency for a gun to recoil backwards in a straight line.

The detachable trigger group can be released only when the gun is open, revealing a neat and compact unit using V-springs contained within a frame. Inspection ports in the frame allow a quick check for a broken spring. Replacement does not however seem to be something that could be done on the spot. The trigger blade itself is continuously adjustable along a rail after undoing a small lock screw. The gun comes complete with right and left canted blades. All the trigger parts except the gold blade are given the same black finish as the receiver. The trigger on the trap model is non-selective, firing the bottom barrel first in the normal manner.

I said that the DT10 comes from the same gene pool as the latest 682 and this is most apparent in the sporting and skeet models. These guns share the new 'Optima Bore' barrel profile, which virtually eliminates the conventional forcing cones in favour of a continuous taper into the main bore dimension. The sporters will also get the longer 'Optima Choke' system. These are much thinner than previous Beretta chokes and eliminate that distinctive bulge at the muzzles found on most guns with factory chokes fitted. There is the option of even longer extended choke tubes and these are also colour coded for easy identification.

The trap barrels retain more conventional boring - measuring .725 and .727" on my gauge, with fixed chokes, three-quarter and full. Both mid and top ribs are raised, the top rib plain, tapering from 10 to 7mm.

The other main feature shared with the 682 is the option of choosing an adjustable comb for an extra £175 or so. Adjustable stocks are a bit like cup holders in cars - very much this season's 'must have' accessories. On  a trap gun like this however I would rate the feature as very useful and worth the extra. The mechanism used is exclusive to Beretta and is made form a lightweight, carbon-reinforced, synthetic material with a built-in shock absorber seal and a 'memory system' that retains the comb height settings if the unit is disassembled or the cast is altered. The unit allows quite extensive changes to be made to the set up, cast can be altered by up to plus or minus 5cm and comb height by about 13mm. Quite a large amount of differential adjustment is also possible (ie rear raised higher than the front) and the operation is very straightforward

Cosmetics

The DT10 is classified by Beretta as a 'premium grade' gun which means that it is produced at the state-of-the art Beretta Due facility and involves considerably more hand work and final testing than would be the case on one of the cheaper models. This is evident in the fir and finish, which is of a very good standard throughout. The receiver and all the furniture is finished in semi-gloss black with no superfluous engraving or detailing other than the P. Beretta signature logo on the sides and the crest and inscription 'DT10 Trident' on the underside. The action fences are given a stippled anti-glare finish.

The test gun had handsome wood with strong dark figuring and the same gloss synthetic finish that is used on the 682E. The American influence is perhaps at work here, they like high gloss finishes whereas we tend to prefer the more subtle effects of traditional oil. Fine (36 lines per inch) chequering is employed and the shape of the chequered panels is designed say the company to improve the ergonomics of the grip as well as complement the lines of the gun. This includes a small chequered diamond just behind the top strap which appears at first purely decorative, but does in fact sit neatly below the base of the thumb and help secure the grip.

Overall the gun looks purposeful and every bit a serious tool. It also looks unremarkable when lined up against its primary competitors and I suspect this may not be entirely unintentional.

On Test

The ergonomics of the gun have obviously been given considerable thought. The locking bolt for example is treated with an anti-friction material that is claimed to reduce the break-open weight by 30% and the top lever itself is a new design that presents the maximum bearing area to the thumb. Small points, but they do add to the pleasure of using the gun.

Buyers in this price bracket are likely to be fussy about trigger pulls and will expect much from the specification of this gun. They are certainly light - my gauge measured them at 3lbs top and 3½ lbs bottom, about as light, I would say, as it would be prudent to go on a competition gun. There is just the merest hint of slack, followed by a good, crisp break that is well up to the mark.

In this configuration the gun is set up to have just a touch of weight-forward bias and I do mean just a hint. This makes the gun feel lively despite its substantial weight. The catalogue weight is 8¼ lbs, but our test gun (with the shorter 30 not 32 inch barrels) tipped my postal scales at over 8¾, not all of which can be attributed to the adjustable comb. However balance not weight is what counts and the gun feels very poised and responsive. If that balance is present then some extra ounces can actually make the gun more pleasant to shoot by helping soak up recoil.