One of the best improvements to the new gun is the Easy Locking bolt. Also, the enlarged controls made it an easy gun to handle. The ComforTech 3 recoil reduction system includes a soft cheek pad that goes a long way toward making this lightweight inertia gun comfortable to shoot.
It cycled 1 1/8-ounce target loads perfectly and had no trouble digesting hunting loads, either. With that said, we had absolutely no problem hitting ducks or clay birds with the gun. While Benelli has since corrected for point of impact somewhat, the guns do shoot high. Many of the early SBE3s shot extremely high, and Robinson’s gun is one of the older ones. Testing for point of impact did reveal a very high-shooting gun. Our gun patterned well when we tested it with Federal Speed Shok steel 2s with the factory Modified choke.
The trigger pull measured 6.2 pounds, which is about normal for a hunting gun. And, as expected, the gun tipped the scales at 7 pounds even-a lightweight gun for a 12-gauge semiauto.
The slender forearm helps the gun point very naturally. There was a huge difference in feel between the SBE3 and guns like the Browning Maxus II and the very bulky Beretta A400 Xtreme Plus. One of the advantages of inertia guns over gas-operated designs is that they have no bulky gas system parts around the magazine tube, so the forearm can be very trim. All of us loved shooting it in the field and at clays. Outdoor Life Editor-in-Chief Alex Robinson brought his Benelli SBE3 for us to review during our teal hunt at Pintail Hunt Club. How We Tested the Benelli Super Black Eagle 3 It features a number of other improvements, too, which were on display when we put the gun through its paces. The latest Super Black Eagle, the SBE3, cures the maddening out-of-battery misfire that plagues intertia guns, not often, but always at the worst time. Besides updating the gun’s lines, the SBE2 featured Benelli’s ComforTech stock that helps reduce the recoil that lightweight inertia guns are known for. Since the original Super Black Eagle debuted, Benelli has overhauled the gun twice. The new Benelli Super Black Eagle 3 is one of the best shotguns you can buy if you are in the market for a top-of-the-line hunting shotgun. Read Next: The Best Duck Hunting Shotguns of 2021Īlthough Heckler and Koch began importing Benellis to the United States in the 1980s, it was the introduction of the Super Black Eagle in 1991 that made Benelli famous. And because it made no use of expanding gases like other semiauto designs, it stayed cleaner longer. The inertia action of Civolani’s shotgun proved to be extremely reliable in any conditions.
While the Benelli family made shotguns for themselves, they didn’t start producing them until they met an engineer named Bruno Civolani who had an idea for a different kind of semiauto shotgun. Based in Urbino, Italy, far from the Italian gun-making center of Brescia, Benelli made motorcycles until the 1960s. Benelli guns, such as the Benelli Super Black Eagle 3 shotgun, are celebrated and known as some of the best semiautomatic shotgun models in the world. Legendary reliability has made “Benelli” is a household name among waterfowl hunters. It’s no wonder that waterfowlers count reliability as one of the most important qualities in a hunting shotgun, since they routinely hunt in conditions that can turn repeaters into single shots.