GForce AR12 Shotgun - Best Budget Semi Auto Mag Fed Shotgun?
Updated
25 months ago
Good morning everyone, I hope you're all having a wonderful day today. This is John with Gun Deals, and today we are going to be taking a look at the GForce, GF12, or AR12 kind of style - semi-automatic shotgun, a very, very cool gun.
GForce AR12 Shotguns Features
The first thing when talking about semi-automatic shotgun - this is, of course, GForce or GForce arms. They're basically more of an importer than anything else because all of these shotguns - there's a ton of different versions of basically the exact same semi-automatic shotgun. They're all made in Turkey, so they have slight variations - you'll get some with a little bit lighter of a barrel shroud, different handguards, maybe a different stock, but they are all basically identical.
There are going to be slight variances between them and again, most of that is going to be cosmetic. The internals of most of these styles of shotguns is the same piston operated recoil system, so with that being said, these generally retail for anywhere from $400 to $500 on the low end if you are buying them online, or if you are buying them in-store, they're like maybe $600 or somewhere around that price point. They do come with two very heavy five-round magazines, because this is a magazine-fed shotgun, though it does have a bolt hold open and bolt release very similar to an AR. I do want to say that the magazines do not drop free, but that's just kind of part of their design.
They also make eight and ten round magazines, however, I don't have any experience with those whatsoever. They're like 30 to 40 bucks if you can find them online. The five-round magazines have been basically perfect, but, again, no experience with the higher capacity magazines, so I won't really speak to their reliability, only that they are in fact available if you wanted to look them up and buy a couple.
Talking about design, kind of built features, and stuff like this, we have a 20-inch barrel, which is internally threaded for whatever sort of choke you want to put on it, so it does have some variability there.
The lower receiver
The lower is a one-piece semi-AR style lower. The recoil assembly is completely contained, and it's actually fairly difficult to take apart, but this entire lower is basically one piece, and it is a complete polymer lower.You have a hollow stock that is not adjustable for the length of pull, so it just does have a fairly long length of pull. It does have a cheek comb riser, but I'm not sure why you would need that on a shotgun like this unless you're putting on some crazy tall optic.
How it's set up for me with shorter arms (I'm about 5'9) - the length of pull is just a little long, it's still totally workable, and if you're a bigger guy, it's going to be probably optimal for you. For me, it's just a little bit too long, and again, it's not adjustable, so what it is is what it is, and the lower is a solid piece of plastic.
The trigger
Now - the trigger. It looks like an AR-15 trigger, but it is not, so it's not going to be compatible with aftermarket triggers and that sort of thing unless it's specifically designed for this shotgun. So, as you guys can see from this very scientific accuracy test, it is very accurate at close range. Alrighty, so we're gonna go ahead and do a patterning at about 10 yards, we are just gonna shoot this thug target, center mast puts one solid hole in it.
Already, now for about 20 yards. All right, let's go check it out. So our second glass - you can see still same center area right about here, but it does start to open a little bit more like 20 yards, but that is an incredibly tight pattern on here.
The safety selector
You do also have an AR-style safety on the right-hand side. It is a 90-degree selector lever. It is very small and very tactile, so it actually does have very positive clicks. And right now, the hammer is back, so if we go ahead and just pull the trigger (we'll talk about the trigger in a minute), let's go ahead and pull the trigger, put it on safe because even when the hammer is down, you can still put this gun on safe, and now the bolt is now locked forward, and it is stopped. So now, when the hammer is forward, and the gun is on safe, you can't even open up the bolt, so that does lock up the firearm.
Whether or not, that's a good feature for you. I'll let you decide for me, I don't mind it, although I do prefer the completely AR-style of how it does not lock the bolt up, but again, it does do that on this gun.
Moving from the lower receiver which, again, solid polymer one piece, basically air style controls for the most part with a few differences again, not really interchangeable with an AR 15. The upper receiver is a piston upper receiver. It is a solid block of aluminum. It's not a heavy shotgun. It's about seven pounds or so, not a heavy shotgun, especially for a long 20 inch barrel semi auto shotgun, but there is quite a lot of aluminum in the upper receiver. So, upper receiver pins on and off like an AR 15. With one slight difference - the front pivot pin is captured while the rear one is an 8K style push pin. Not sure why they didn't use captured pins on both, but that is just the way it is designed.
The Picatinny rail
We do have a standard Picatinny rail on top as well as on our handguard in the 3, 6, 9, and of course, the bottom position as well, or the top position as well. It's kind of a smooth upper receiver on top of these that looks like there are M-LOK slots cut out on top, but they are not M-LOK. You will not be able to fit anything in there. And overall the handguard is fairly slim, though again, the only place to mount anything is on the Picatinny because even though it looks like they have like the lightning cut started for M-LOK. This is not M-LOK, more for just looks and ventilation than anything else. That being said, the handguard, which is about 15 inches long or so, is very comfy. It's actually very slim in the center, so you can reach your full fingers all the way around and get a really good grip on it, which is super nice. It looks fairly nice. Although I'm not a huge fan of Picatinny just at the end, I'd rather have M-LOK and then just Picatinny all the way down on top. But again, there are a lot of different variations of this shotgun that you can find online.
The barrel shroud
Moving forward, there we have this, which looks like the barrel, but it does not - this is just a barrel shroud. So this just rotates off and is held in place by a detent, which was actually a fairly cool design. And since we've started, we might as well show you the takedown process, which is actually fairly nifty. I was expecting it to be fairly chintzy, made very cheap, very small components. But overall, I actually like the design of it quite a bit. So go ahead and just lift our handguard off. And if we look at the back here, the handguard has two locking tabs that lock into the upper receiver. So when you put it on, let me go and slide this guy back down, so when you slide this guy back down, there is no left or right movement whatsoever, especially when you tighten down the barrel shroud which again tightens down via detent on to the handguard which locks everything in place and works really well. So here we have our actual barrel and everything else again, you have the choke and the top internally threaded. So if you want to switch that out for something else, you totally can.
The short stroke piston system
And here we have our piston and operating rod assembly. It is, technically speaking, I want to say a short-stroke piston system. Although it is quite a bit different than that if somebody has the technical term for it, you can go ahead and scroll me down in the comments. But everything is contained within the upper receiver so the lower receiver does not deal with any of the reciprocating force whatsoever. That's all housed in the aluminum components, not on the plastic bits. If we go ahead and pull back on our charge again when we take it off safe, pull back on our charging handle, you can kind of see how everything works. Right here we have our light piston installed, which is fairly oily because I did just clean this and lubricate it. So, right here we have our light piston which does come with two pistons. It is not an adjustable system, but it does come with two different styles of the piston. You have a light piston which is light for lighter loads and you have a heavy piston that is very heavy. So basically the heavy piston takes a lot more force to move, therefore slowing down the recoil assembly, slowing down that recoil impulse if you're using much more powerful rounds like three-inch slugs or something like that, so it's not really adjustable on the fly.
However,the pistons can be swapped out fairly easily. All you need to do for this is unscrew your piston sleeve retaining collar or whatever it is. And once this gets screwed off, which is fairly easy, you can then push down on the recoil assembly. Pull out your locking rings right here. There are two of them that come right out. And then you can expose your gas block or not your gas block, but your gas ports and everything else. Pull everything off, take your piston off. If you unscrew the barrel nut from the upper receiver, the entire recoil assembly comes out as one piece, which is fairly nice. So, overall, the design is actually very substantial and very strong. It's fairly simple to put together. As soon as I watched like a five-minute video on how to do it, it was very, very easy to take apart and clean. And because this is a shotgun, the fire is really dirty ammunition if you're firing like lead slugs, or something like that, a lot of fouling which means you need to clean it quite a bit. Now, right here is our recoil, operating rod, or whatever you want to call it, very substantial welds on it, you have two large pieces of stainless steel moving up and down that work the entire system.
The recoil assembly
In terms of build quality and durability, it is very, very robust, I should say. I would be confident that this would last thousands and thousands of rounds, depending on, of course, if you actually maintain it, so I might as well just take off the barrel assembly for you so you guys can see it. It's a fairly easy process. Once you get it loose enough to be removed via hand, you can just unscrew it, and then pull the whole thing out. We have our barrel nut fully loosened off, it's fairly easy to do, then all you need to do is put a little bit of downward pressure, pull out your site charging, your little knob report, and then you should just be able to pull the whole thing straight out. There we go. So you do actually need to remove the lower receiver from your upper receiver so that you can actually just pull out your bolt assembly or your entire recoil assembly. So this is everything. This is your entire operating system, your bolt, everything. So basically to remove your bolt from the actual chamber, pull up on here a little bit, tip it out. And then right here is your bolt with a massive locking lug there on the bottom, your extractor or firing pin which is a captured firing pin spring loaded so it doesn't move back and forth during recoil on its own, which is very nice.
And again, you have a very, very robust recoil assembly, big substantial welds on everything, lots of stainless steel, which I really liked to see. Big recoil spring. Honestly not a lot to complain about here. And I'm actually very surprised for the money because you gotta remember this is only a few hundred dollars, You know, four to five hundred, depending if you can get a good deal online, you can look up gun deals for a good deal on it. So the recoil system, the entire operating assembly is very, very coolly designed, easy to switch out, easy to clean, again only requires one tool to take the whole thing apart. Easier even than an AR-15, because with an AR-15, it can be a little bit more tedious to remove the handguard and remove the barrel nut. The barrel nut on this is designed to be easy to remove versus not really on an AR-15. So overall, the build quality - I'm actually very, very impressed by. And here is the upper receiver by itself. As you can tell, it is just a large hunk of aluminum and your recoil assembly just slides right inside and sits in there like that. And then so it can slide back and forth fairly easily. I have only used the light piston and not because I have anything against the heavy piston, but there is a substantial break-in period and that's one of the big drawbacks with a shotgun like this is. Generally speaking, there is a fairly aggressive, fairly long break-in period that can be very expensive to reach, even though the shotgun itself is not that expensive.
Let's go ahead and do the reassembly part which is very easy again, you just want to push down a little bit on your recoil assembly to line up the holes on there. And now you have your charging handle reinstalled. It's also of course important to tighten back down the barrel. So once we tighten back down on the barrel, we should be able to reinstall everything just fine again, you just basically hand-tightened down the barrel until it gets a little tight. Then take your handy dandy included tool and make sure it is very nice and snug. And we should be good to go ahead and reinstall the handguard to make sure that it is indexed properly. That slides right over top and then our barrel shroud which then will index on the detent, and you just go until it's pretty tight. There we go. And now you have your rock-solid gun that is set up and ready to go.
Downsides of GForce AR12 shotgun
Some of the downsides of this gun I mentioned it a little bit are - it is a piston-operated shotgun. Shotguns are not the cleanest running guns, so there's a lot of fouling that gets thrown into them. So basically, every time you shoot it every 50 or 100 rounds or however much you shoot in a day, you're going to need to take it apart, clean it make sure that it's oiled and ready to go again, just to make sure that the shotgun lasts as long as possible and runs as well as possible.
To this point, we've put about 300 rounds through it so far. It has run almost everything fairly well though again, that is just barely passed the shotguns break-in period. They recommend anywhere from like 100 to 200 round break-in period with the light piston and using like heavy-loaded ammunition. Most of the stuff that we were shooting was either slugs, buckshot - both double out and number four, and also three-inch Turkey loads - very very hot ammunition. At the beginning, we could not really get any two and three-quarter-inch birdshot to run whatsoever, we did get a couple of boxes, or I shouldn't say boxes, we got a few magazines 1250 FPS Estate, their competition load to run. That's a two and three quarter like seven and a half shot or whatever, 1250 FPS shot anything lower than that, like 1200 FPS, we were not going to be able to get to run whatsoever.
At the very end, we got some cheap Walmart stuff to start running fairly well, though, again, a lot of that lighter loads, a lot of non-super high powerful name brand stuff was not running in it whatsoever, even with the light piston. I do imagine that if you keep it well lubricated, and you continue to fire more and more rounds through it, maybe if you got it up to five or 600 rounds and more heavy loads through it, you're gonna break in the whole operating system more and more, and it will start to allow you to run those lighter loads, though again, at this point, it is still not running lighter loads very consistently, which is one of the downsides of a lot of semi-automatic shotguns as well. Of course, they cycle the hotter, bigger and more powerful, more expensive ammunition very well. A lot of the cheaper stuff is just not powerful enough to get them to run, which can be a big problem, especially if you're spending or trying to buy an inexpensive semi-automatic shotgun. And then you have to go through a several 100 Round break-in period of very expensive ammunition. In some cases, depending on what you're buying right now the break-in period can be more expensive than the shotgun itself. And again, even after that point, if it doesn't lighten up and start to allow you to use cheaper ammunition, it's going to be very expensive to run and to get it to run reliably. There are other problems that come with semi-automatic mag-fed shotguns - they're not really good for home defense. Just because the magazines tend to squish the rounds, especially plastic rounds, plastic does not do well with compression force, especially these ones. So the first round will of course cycle for you. And then the second one will probably have a failure to feed. So in some sort of home defense situation where you need 2,3,4 rounds with your shotgun, it can be an issue if you leave the magazines loaded for long periods of time.
There are ways around that you can buy like aluminum shelled ammo, which is very expensive, but again, for home defense situations, which probably don't show up all that often it's not a bad investment if you wanted to use something like this for home defense. Now, it is a very long shotgun, it uses a 20-inch barrel. It uses a fixed very long stock on this. So it's not crazy maneuverable though, if you ever needed to, you could always do something off of your shoulder, I do have it set up right now. In sort of a home defense way, we have a Holosun 503C red dot on top with an Olight Odin on the side, which is a 2000 lumen light. It is very, very powerful. Overall, the build quality, the design, the ease of takedown, and the setup is very, very nice on the shotguns, very high quality in a lot of ways a lot better than the price tag would allow you to believe so even though it does have some of those issues like I mentioned -issues with some magazine reliability if you're going to leave them stored for long periods of time, not really being able to cycle everything yet. Hopefully, later on, when it gets even more broken in, it will be able to cycle everything from light to heavy loads.
Summary
But, as of right now, even with all those drawbacks being said, very big, very long shotgun, it's still a ton of fun to shoot. So if you enjoy shooting, target practice, or even competition because if you're running a competition and you're running ammo that it really likes and you're really comfortable with, you know, when you're cleaning it before your matches and everything like that, this would be a very awesome auto shotty. I'm not sure about the longer magazines - the eight and ten round magazines. I haven't really used them but I will hopefully be picking some up and testing those guys out as well. And so I kind of give you guys some feedback on that. But, for right now, for targets, for just fun at the range, and competition, I think that this is an excellent shotgun for those things especially considering the money again - four to five hundred bucks for a magazine-fed semi-automatic shotgun that works as long as of course you take those other things into consideration. You do need hotter ammunition especially during the break-in period and hopefully, later on, it will allow you to run just about anything through it although, right now, that still has not been the case.
