In December 2007, a new Ithaca Gun Company bought out the remaining assets of the Ithaca Gun Company LLC and moved production to Upper Sandusky, Ohio, where production of the Model 37 resumed under its birth name.
But this company was also forced from business in 2005. Following litigation, assets were sold to the Ithaca Acquisition Company in Kings Ferry, N.Y., and it began production of the Model 37, renamed the Model 87, in Kings Ferry. Somewhere in all of this, sales sagged, and in 1986 Ithaca went bankrupt. It also began cataloging semi-automatic shotguns-some imported, others made in it’s factory-among which was the excellent Model 51 and the then-audacious Mag 10, 10-gauge autoloading shotgun. Then it bought the Mitchell Optical Company, 10X sportswear and several other outdoor-related companies. In the 1970s Ithaca decided to branch out, and it imported Perazzi competition guns from Italy. They are made the same way today, only it’s a day’s drive from Ithaca, N.Y. A 15-inch, bored steel tube is placed on a mandrel and then subjected to hundreds of powerful hammer strokes around the circumference that thins and stretches the tube into a barrel. Manufacture of the Model 37 begins with a 7-pound billet of steel that is machined into the receiver, and the barrels are made by cold-hammer forging. In production, it became evident that the Model 37 could be made very light in weight, and in 1938 the 37 was given the name “Featherlight.” When the patents lapsed in 1937, Ithaca took up the torch.īottom ejection has several benefits: Empties are ejected at the shooter’s feet (and not at a buddy), the action is better protected from debris and bottom-ejecting guns work well for left-handed shooters. However, before any were released, Ithaca discovered that their new shotgun infringed on existing Remington patents, and so the project was shelved, but not forgotten. In 1932, based on Howland’s patent and the Remington 17, Ithaca built 100 bottom-ejecting, pump shotguns. In 1931, he filed for a patent that improved the firing pin and ejector mechanism of the Remington 17. John Moses Browning designed several bottom-ejecting shotguns that were produced by Remington, and it was the Model 17 that caught the eye of Ithaca gun designer Harry Howland. Ithaca began making double guns in 1883, and by the late 1920s company officials surmised that repeaters were perhaps the wave of the future. It’s the lone survivor of the pre-World War II pump-action shotguns-the Winchester Model 12 and Model 97, and the Remington 31. The Ithaca Model 37 is a true American classic.
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