Tristar Cypher 20-Gauge: Full Review

Firearms importing is not a game for the weak of heart or thin of wallet. Currency fluctuations can make a finely calibrated sales plan no more than a pipe dream. Foreign policy gyrations, whether on the U.S. end or in the country of manufacture, can make goods that were perfectly fine one day verboten the next. Customs regulations mean that nameless bureaucrats can make interpretations that keep vital merchandise locked in some bonded warehouse for months.

Ghassan “Gus” Bader has been navigating that life for more than four decades, and is really quite good at it. I first got to know him in the 1980s while he operated American Arms, an importer primarily focused on Spanish shotguns.

Bader was one of the first to discern the potential of Turkey as an arms manufacturer. (Sorry President Erdoğan, good luck getting Americans to spell it “Türkiye.”) Now, of course, the NATO member dominates the low and moderately priced civilian gun market, putting the smaller Italian and Spanish makers in the shade.

We’ve all heard of Turkish drones, due to the Ukraine War, and Turkish manufacturer Repkon is providing the machinery for the U.S. Army’s new plant for 155mm artillery shells in Mesquite, Texas. The largest Turkish manufacturers, including Hatsan and Sarsilmaz, are 100-percent competitive when it comes to up-­to-­date manufacturing facilities.

TriStar imports a range of 1911-­style pistols in 9mm, .38 Super and .45 ACP, but is primarily notable for a very complete line of sporting and defensive shotguns. These include over-­under and side-­by-­side doubles, autoloaders, pumps, single-­barrel trap guns and even a .410 based on the Winchester Model 94 lever gun.

These are available in finishes ranging from camouflage to quite shiny, and there’s a compact line for younger or smaller shooters.

The over-­under ranges start with the Setter, which economizes on wood quality and has extractors rather than ejectors, but still provides a full five-­piece choke tube set, fiber-optic sight and ventilated side ribs. Retail is $655 for 12-­ and 20-­gauges, and $685 for 28-­gauge and .410.

Next in line is the Trinity II, which gives you a higher grade of Turkish walnut and gold-­colored decoration for $855 for the 12 and 20, and $870 for the smallbores. You can specify the Trinity II LT, which gives you an aluminum frame for no extra charge. This gets the weight of the 20-­gauge below 6 pounds.

Next is the subject of this month’s examination, the Cypher. This takes the walnut up another notch and incorporates decorative panels that endlessly repeat the name Cypher in tiny letters. These are both attractive and useful, as you can press them into service as an emergency nail file.

Prices for the Cypher line are $960 for the larger gauges and $975 for the smallbores. You can specify the Cypher X if you want the lightweight aluminum treatment. There’s a Cypher SP, which is a dedicated sporting clay gun that adds an adjustable cheekpiece for $1,025.

A Superposed shotgun for less than $1,000 is a pretty impressive achievement. My first over-­under was a Browning Citori, which was thought of as an economical shotgun when I paid $666 for one in 1978. That’s more than $2,500 in today’s money, and while I’d hardly equate the two guns, it demonstrates that these are the good old days for gun values.

The Cypher frame is finished in matte silver with the TriStar logo on three sides. There’s an etched line on the underside that echoes the trigger plate of a Browning shotgun, but it’s strictly decorative; the frame bottom is solid. The top lever, trigger, triggerguard and safety button are finished in a semi-­gloss black that contrasts nicely with the frame color.

Looking inside the frame with barrels removed shows an action familiar from many, many moderately priced Italian and Turkish over-­unders. A bolt at the bottom of the standing breech engages a bite in the bottom of the monobloc. At the left of the bolt is the catch that holds the top lever open.

When the gun is closed, the engine-­turned monobloc presses down on this part, unlatching the top lever. As you can imagine, you insert a finger and press down on it while holding the top lever to the right to let the lever close for casing the shotgun.

The cocking levers pass down the bottom center of the frame. After firing, they are returned by a cam in the forend iron and recock the hammers.

Since shotguns in this class are intended as much for sporting clays shooting as for hunting, the safety is manual. This is appropriate in a competition where the safety is never used. In the hunting field, you’ll need to remember to reset it after firing.

Barrels are selected Beretta style, with a sliding tab in the safety button moved left or right to select the barrel to fire first. Sliding it to the right selects the bottom barrel, and most shooters will leave it there 99.9-percent of the time.

The single trigger is mechanical, meaning it can be fired twice whether the first shell goes off or not. This once was the province of competition guns, but has become so universal that it’s hard to remember a time when inertia triggers were the rule.

Ejection is selected by a cocking rod moving forward and pushing up on a lock piece in the monobloc that holds the ejector in place until the barrels are fully lowered. At that point, it is pulled out of engagement with the ejector, allowing the latter to spring rearward, ejecting the empty.

The Cypher is fitted with 28-­inch barrels, and that’s the only length available. If you insist on something longer for sporting competition, you’ll have to step up to the SP version, which comes with 30-­inch barrels.

The upper barrel is 3-­inch chambered and topped with a 7mm straight-­sided ventilated rib. Some might find this a bit skinny on a 12-­gauge, but it’s perfect for a 20 or 28. At the muzzle is a 2mm red fiber-­optic front bead. This I found easily visible without the shouty aspect of large green fiber-­optics, which are more appropriate for a defensive shotgun. Side ribs are ventilated; some like that and some abhor it.

The chrome-­lined barrels measured .624 ­inch inside diameter. The Cypher comes with a full set of five choke tubes: Cylinder bore (.629 ­inch), Improved Cylinder (.622 ­inch), Modified (.612 ­inch), Improved Modified (.604 ­inch) and Full (.598 ­inch).

The tubes are 3 inches long, have a conical-­parallel interior profile and are threaded to the Beretta Mobilchoke standard, where the threads are at the muzzle. The availability of tubes in this style is almost infinite, should the five supplied not get it done for you.

Tubes have a knurled section that extends three-quarters of an inch from the muzzle to allow easy removal. If they’re too hot or too tight, a supplied key helps apply the required torque. The notches for this are covered, helping to keep the tubes from cutting up the inside of your case.

As you’d expect on a Turkish gun, the stock is of Turkish walnut, here with a semi-­gloss finish. The buttstock has a 1-­inch black rubber recoil pad, and both buttstock and forend have 16 lines-per-inch checkering in a bordered point pattern. This is a measure that should provide enough grip in all but the sweatiest conditions.

It used to be that when you wrote up a modestly ­priced double gun, you could count on widely disparate trigger pulls, barrels that shot to different impact points or comically erratic ejection.

That made for more reporting fun, but the fun seems generally to be over these days. Double guns like the Cypher most often come out of the box with no interesting defects to report at all. Bad news for us, good news for the consumer.

I’ve shot plenty of Blasers, Krieghoffs and Perazzis, and the triggers were more rifle-­like than the Cypher’s, but it provided pulls that were smooth, consistent and more than adequate for anything short of your state trap championship. You certainly will be at no disadvantage when topping off a morning of preserve birds with a round of five-­stand.

We patterned the Cypher with Federal’s Top Gun steel load in No. 7. As you’d expect, recoil was a little stiffer given the fact that the wad is effectively a plastic bucket with no cushion section. That said, it was not unpleasant. It will get the job done at the increasing number of preserves and sporting layouts that are adjacent to wetlands and require non-­toxic shot. If you suspected that patterns might be tighter with steel, that was not the case here.

I passed the Cypher around to bystanders, and all were able to connect with clays immediately. Earlier Turkish shotguns often had an odd, uncomfortable grip angle, but the Cypher’s is perfectly conventional, which is a pleasure.

If you’re looking for your first over-­under, the Cypher definitely rates a look. If you already have one or several, it’s still worth examining as a backup gun. The value proposition for this stackbarrel is ironclad. 

Tristar Cypher

• Type: Over-­under shotgun
• Gauge: 20, 3-­inch (tested); 12, 28, .410
• Barrel: 28 in., carbon steel
• Overall Length: 46 in.
• Weight: 6 lbs., 5 oz. (tested)
• Stock: Turkish walnut, deluxe, oil finished
• Length of Pull: 14¼ in.
• Drop at Heel: 2¼ in.
• Drop at Comb: 1½ in.
• Finish: Blued (steel)
• Trigger: 4 lbs., 8 oz. (tested)
• Sights: Fiber optic
• Safety: Selector switch, tang
• Accessories: Cylinder bore (.629-­in.), Improved Cylinder (.622-­in.), Modified (.612-­in.), Improved Modified (.604-­in.) and Full (.598-­in.), tube case and key
• MSRP: $960
• Manufactuerer: Khan Arms, Istanbul, Turkey
• Importer: TriStar Arms, tristararms.com

---