The author in the field with his Benelli Super Black Eagle 3.
Game Changer
The Benelli Super Black Eagle has set a high bar for inertia semi-auto shotguns.
By Phil Bourjaily
In the early 1990s I started hearing about an Italian shotgun from a little-known maker. It was a semi-automatic, the only autoloader made for the brand-new 3½-inch 12-guage cartridge. It sold for $1,000, an exorbitant price for a semi-auto in the days when you could buy a Remington 11-87 for under $600. It had an odd name, and it worked neither by harnessing recoil, nor by bleeding off expanding gases to drive the action. Instead, somehow it worked on its own inertia.
The gun was the Benelli Super Black Eagle, and I finally saw one five years after it was introduced, in the hands of a man who had won it at the World Duck Calling Championships in Stuttgart, Arkansas. In the 1990s, the Super Black Eagle built a cult following among hunters willing to pay top dollar for all-weather reliability, earning the gun the nickname “the Arkansas Purdey.” Now in its third iteration as the SBE3, it is the shotgun that changed the waterfowl market forever.
Thanks to the SBE, duck and goose hunters will pay $1,500 to $2,000-plus for a hunting gun. The reliability of inertia systems—along with improvements in gas guns, to be fair—has made the semi-auto more popular than pumps in the blind. And, once Benelli’s patent expired, and other makers were able to copy them, inertia guns have become even more popular, rivaling gas guns.
Springing to Life
In the 1960s, Italian inventor Bruno Civolani designed a semi-automatic shotgun with a two-piece bolt featuring a rotary head and a stout spring inside. When the gun is fired and moves back under recoil, the heavy bolt remains in place due to its own inertia, locking tightly into the barrel and compressing the spring. As the gun’s rearward movement slows, the spring drives the bolt back, opening the action and ejecting the shell. Inertia actions stay cleaner, longer, than do gas-operated guns. They work better in cold, wet weather, and they’re slimmer and lighter. They’re simpler, too, with many fewer parts than other semi-auto designs.
Civolani met the Benelli family when they moved their motorcycle manufacturing business to the mediaeval walled city of Urbino, far from northern Italy’s gunmaking center of Brescia. There the Benellis, keen hunters and shooters, bought Civolani’s patent and went into the gun business. Heckler & Koch imported Benellis to the U.S. in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the switch to steel shot for waterfowl at the end of the decade that Benelli captured the public’s attention.
The non-toxic mandate drove the development of the 3½-inch 12-gauge cartridge. Although making a gas gun that operated with 2¾-, 3-, and 3½-inch shells presented a serious challenge, the inertia action adapted easily. By beefing up some parts and switching to stouter springs, Benelli turned its existing Black Eagle into the Super Black Eagle in 1991, long before any other 3½-inch semi-autos hit the market.
Something Better
Hunters in the know prized the SBE’s light weight and the reliability of its inertia action. Shooting showman Tom Knapp raised the brand’s profile further as well. Even so, says George Thompson, Benelli’s director of product management, the name “Benelli” was far from a household word. “I worked at a gun shop in Maryland in the ‘90s,” he says, “and I don’t think I even saw a Benelli until I started working for them a few years later.”
Beretta acquired Benelli in 2000, forming Benelli USA shortly thereafter. Under the new ownership and increased marketing effort, Benelli and the Super Black Eagle took off.
“I’d like to say we were marketing geniuses,” says Thompson, “but all we did was expand our dealerships and take what we were hearing from Benelli owners and amplifying it. What they were saying was that the gun worked, and that became our message. We saw massive increases in sales from 2002 to 2005.”
The second edition of the Super Black Eagle, the SBE2, came just at the right time when it appeared in 2004, says Thompson. “For 15 years Benelli could get away with saying ‘inertia is great’ to sell our guns, but we needed something better. The SBE2 was a night-and-day difference over the original. With the SBE2 we were able to get the weight down to that of a 20 gauge. We made the gun slimmer and made it kick less with the [vibration-reducing] ComforTech stock. The Crio-treated barrel improves patterns. We made it better in every way.”
Sales grew following the successful introduction of the SBE2 in 2004. But even then Benelli engineers were already at work on the SBE3, which would replace the SBE2 in 2016.
Continuous Improvement
I got to shoot one of the first SBE3s in Saskatchewan in the fall of 2016. The gun had a number of improvements over the SBE2. It was even lighter and trimmer. It had a bigger bolt handle and bolt-release button, which everyone wants on a duck gun these days. Despite weighing less than previous SBEs, it didn’t kick any more, thanks to the improved ComforTech stock. A redesigned loading latch made it easier to slide shells into the magazine. The improvement that sold me on the gun, though, was the Easy Locking Bolt.
Anyone who has hunted with inertia guns has experienced an out-of-battery misfire. If you ease the bolt shut, or it gets bumped just so, the gun won’t fire. Instead of boom, you hear a click. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens at the worst times. A simple, and patented, detent pin in the bolt eliminates the problem and also sets the SBE3 apart from all but one of its inertia competitors.
Having established the Super Black Eagle as the premier waterfowl gun, Benelli expanded the line last year and this year. Although 31/2-inch, 12-gauge capability made the gun famous, it stands for reliability in the minds of so many that Benelli added a 3-inch 12-gauge and 3-inch 20-gauge last year. And this year it came out with a 3-inch, 28-gauge version. And, building upon the SBE’s reputation as a bad-weather gun, Benelli now offers it with the Benelli Surface Treatment (BE.S.T.) with all metal parts bonded to a rust-and-abrasion resistant, proprietary graphite coating.
Benelli engineers already are gathering ideas for the SBE4. “It’s a hard job improving on the SBE3,” says Thompson. “We joke about it: ‘how do you make a Ferrari go faster?’ We’re going to work on improving ballistics and collecting enough other tweaks and improvements until we have enough to justify a new model.”
In the meantime, Benelli remains at the top, but when the original inertia patents expired ten or so years ago, competitors wasted no time in making inertia guns of their own. Now the brand has plenty of competition. Thompson says Benelli is confident that they can keep their inertia gun crown.
“We have patents on features like the Easy Locking Bolt and the ComforTech that set us apart,” he says. Benelli’s modern, ultra-precise manufacturing methods offer another advantage. “We’ve got great quality control, and we can maintain incredibly tight tolerances. At the factory the Italians like to say ‘we don’t make Benellis, we clone them,’ and that makes a difference.”
“What we’re more concerned about is some of these other companies giving inertia a bad name,” he says. “We don’t want someone to have a bad experience with a competitor’s gun and decide that inertia is no good.”
Okay, so that might sound a bit arrogant to some, but when you’ve gone from unknown in the 1990s to conquering the waterfowl gun world in the 2000s as Benelli has, you’ve earned the right not to act humble all the time. Pricing for the Super Black Eagle3 in 3½-inch 12 gauge starts at $1,999. (benelliusa.com)
