5 or 6 Shell Plug: Mossberg 500, 590, 590A1, 835

These plugs will work in a multitude of guns: Mossberg/Maverick, and many other shot guns with extended magazine tubes.

The vast majority of Mossberg 500 (Maverick 88), 590 and 835 guns have 5 round magazine tubes: if you need a 3 round plug for one of those click here.   

However, there are “security” style or “tactical” guns out there with longer magazine tubes (7 or 8 round).   These plugs are made to work in them, so that they can comply with 3 round magazine limits imposed on hunters.  To do this: a dowel is placed in the magazine tube to prevent it from holding more than 2 rounds.    You can choose a dowel for sale here that will take up the space of 5 or 6 rounds.  You need to know which round count your magazine holds… then subtract 2 from that number to know what round plug you need.

For instance, if you have a 9 round total gun, that is called an 8 plus 1 (or 8 +1),  that gun holds 8 rounds in the magazine tube… thus take 2 rounds away from 8 rounds (8 -2) = 6 rounds… an 8 +1 gun needs a 6 round plug to comply with federal migratory bird rules (8-6 = 2 rounds in the magazine)  Sorry for the story problem, but life is a story problem… oh and we are talking standard 2 3/4″ or 3″ rounds… not the “shorties”.

Some unsolicited advice:   If your happen to have a barrel with removable chokes in your security/tactical gun, you probably want to shoot a tighter choke than you’d use in a defensive situation (when trying to hit flying birds shooters usually install modified, or improved cylinder chokes).    With turkey, shooters usually install full/extra full chokes.

The trouble is: Most of these security style guns are fixed cylinder bore (CYL ie no choke).   With cylinder bore, your pattern probably won’t have enough pellets close enough to not have holes in the pattern that birds can fit in.   Ie the pellets spread too far too fast with cylinder bore to be useful on most birds.

Its hard to hit birds at any common distance with cylinder bore… unless you use ammo with special wads, like Federal’s “Flight Control” wad.   With these sorts of wads, the barrel’s choke is much less important, the wad holds the shot together and sort of trickles it out, making a nice tight pattern out of no choke barrels.

Also,   If your gun has a fixed Improved Cylinder (IC… ie very little choke), you might be ok to a reasonable distance (30 yards) when using steel shot, but lead will probably spread very fast and not be useful much past 20 yards.  Steel won’t compress when it goes through the choke, so steel tends to choke tighter than lead.

​Good LUCK!