James Marchington looks into the latest gizmo from Ben Husthwaite, the Method Gateway
Some strange looking photos have been appearing on clay shooting social media groups lately, with clay guns sporting a big U-shaped attachment clipped to the muzzles. A closer look reveals it’s called the Method Gateway, and comes from shooting coach and former world champion Ben Husthwaite. At first glance it looks like some sort of aiming device, perhaps a way of measuring the lead in front of a crossing clay – but the description on Ben’s website talks not about lead but teaching shooting methods.
So what is the Method Gateway, what does it do and how does it work? With Ben Husthwaite’s name behind it, and shooters declaring it had solved their problems, it certainly merited further investigation. So I headed off to Kibworth Shooting Ground to find out more.
I found Ben with a group of his regular pupils, working on some targets on the Sportrap layout in what was frankly some pretty awful weather. Sure enough, they were using his device – and as it turned out one of those present was Stamati Lagoudis, the chap who had inspired Ben to come up with the idea in the first place.
Ben explains that Stamati was trying to shoot the pull-away method, but without realising it was actually shooting something more like maintained lead. “I’d say to him ‘Look, you’re starting in front of the clay’ and he’d swear blind he wasn’t,” says Ben. “So I went into the coaching room at Kibworth and made a big U shape out of cardboard and taped it to his gun. We went back outside and I said ‘Right. If you want to shoot pull-away, before you move off you’ve got to see that clay inside the U.’ All of a sudden he understood.”
Basically, for pull-away, you let the clay appear in the gap between the horns, travel with it and then pull ahead. The device can be used for the other shooting methods too, of course. “If I want to shoot maintained lead then I never let the clay get to the horn,” explains Ben. “For swing-through I’ll let it appear in front of the horn before I make my move. So it covers all three methods.”
After his success with his Eye Dominance Rail, Ben quickly spotted an opportunity and turned to his engineer partner Steve May. The design and manufacture of the Method Gateway proved to be quite a challenge. The dimensions have to be correct so the device does its job; it must be strong enough to withstand multiple shots without becoming too bulky or heavy; it needs to cli
