Browning Maxus II Rifled Deer Slug Gun

Paired with high-tech sabot slugs, Browning's new Maxus II Rifled Deer slug gun will definitely bring home the venison.

February 28, 2024 By Steve Gash

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Whitetails are the most popular big-game animal in the United States, and hunters pursue them in many ways. One way is with a slug gun, and one of the more elaborate and impressive new slug guns is from Browning. It’s called the Maxus II Rifled Deer.

The Maxus II evolved from the original (and discontinued) Maxus and is available in many different versions for hunting the uplands or waterfowl as well as sporting and target models. For the slug deer hunter, Browning has loaded the Maxus II Rifled Deer with features that should delight. Here’s a good look at it.

Built Browning Tough

Browning says the Maxus II builds on the success of the original, plus it adds new looks and features that further enhance its utility. That’s a pretty spot-on overview. The Maxus II is a gas-operated, semiautomatic gun with a capacity of four 2¾-inch shells, and of course, a magazine plug is supplied.

Most prominent is the Mossy Oak Bottomland camo finish on the receiver, barrel, and stock. This camo pattern not only is very attractive but also blends in well in the deer woods.

The receiver has new styling, with an oversize bolt release and bolt handle. The trigger guard has a ramp that makes loading the magazine easier. The magazine cap has been updated to make it easier to remove, and it has a sling-swivel stud. There is a Nickel Teflon coating on the bolt, bolt slide, shell carrier, bolt release, and bolt handle for durability and lubricity for reliable functioning.

The Maxus II also has Browning’s new Power Drive Gas System. It has a new piston with a 20 percent longer stroke and bigger gas exhaust ports that release gases faster from heavy loads. This reduces recoil and provides faster and smoother functioning with 2¾- and 3-inch loads. Importantly, the new system has an enclosed seal design that keeps powder residue out of the action.

Browning Maxus II Rifled Deer Slug gun gold-plated trigger. — The gun’s trigger is gold plated, and its locktime is about 24 percent faster than other shotgun triggers.

The overall weight of the gun has been slightly reduced by the use of a lightweight magazine tube. The magazine also has a “shell cutoff” on the lower left side of the receiver that is reminiscent of that found on the original Browning A-5. This handy feature makes it super-easy to essentially disengage the magazine and remove the shell in the chamber to safely cross a fence, for example.

The forearm and buttstock have gripping surfaces molded in, and the buttstock has an Inflex Technology recoil pad with a hard heel insert. Not to be overlooked is the cheekpiece, which also has a SoftFlex cheek pad built in.

Here’s a switch: The muzzle of the Maxus II Rifled Deer barrel is not threaded and does not come with choke tubes. It’s a deer gun, pure and simple. Instead, the 22-inch barrel is rifled with a 1-in-28-inch twist, optimal for the sabot slugs it’s designed to shoot. The chamber and bore are chrome-plated for corrosion resistance and durability, and the barrel has what Browning calls “thick-walled” construction.

The Maxus II Rifled Deer has no front sight, but the barrel has a six-inch cantilever attached that extends back over the top of the receiver. It has five Picatinny or Weaver-style cross-slots for the easy installation of a scope or red-dot optic.

Shotgun loads have undergone considerable evolution. For decades, buckshot of various sizes and single projectile loads (slugs) have been used on deer. The “rifled slug,” as we know it, was invented by Karl M. Foster in 1931. It is intended for smoothbore barrels, but the accuracy can be lacking, especially at longer distances.

The development of specialized shotguns with rifled bores led to the development of equally specialized ammo because Foster slugs don’t work well in rifled bores. These loads carry a projectile inside a tough plastic sabot. The sabot fills the space between the bore and the smaller projectile inside it.

Shotgun and small arms use what is called an “expanding cup” sabot that surrounds the base and sides of the projectile. Upon firing, the expanding powder gases expand the cup-base of the sabot, and the spin imparted by the rifling and air resistance causes the petals of the sabot to open and release the projectile.

Browning Maxus II Rifled Deer Slug Gun shot group — Steve tested the new slug gun with these five sabot slugs, and as this target shows, it is capable of excellent accuracy.

This serves two important functions. First, the tough plastic takes the rifling like a bullet jacket, and second, the sabot can be contoured to hold all sorts of bullets. Plus, there is no bore leading. All this produces a considerable improvement in accuracy over a smoothbore gun.

Another advantage is that the bullet inside the sabot could be a specially designed jacketed or monolithic bullet. This also enhances downrange effectiveness, with better expansion and penetration.

As for my Maxus II Rifled Deer’s accuracy, I tested it in two phases. Last year, I tested an in-line muzzleloader with sabot loads over my Oehler Model 35P chronograph, which has lighted skyscreens. This measured velocities just fine, but the sabots broke apart in front of the screens and broke the incandescent lamp bulbs over the screens. Not wanting to repeat that fiasco for this endeavor, I shot the Maxus II cautiously for velocities through my “muzzle blast baffle” over my back-up Model 35P with the skyscreen spacing set at two feet, and it worked just fine, with no damage to the equipment. That was phase one.

Phase two was shooting for accuracy, which I did from my shooting building off of a Lead Sled Dual Frame Technology rest, with two bags of shot on it for ballast. Note: Most of the sabots from these slug loads pretty much stayed in one piece, but parts of them were scattered from just in front of the muzzle to about 40 yards downrange, so I think this precaution was well founded.

Browning Maxus II Rifled Deer Accuracy & Velocity, and Ballistics Results Chart

The Maxus II Rifled Deer is designed from the ground up for use with an optical sight, so I went full bore and mounted a Leupold VX-3HD 2.5-8X 36mm scope with the CDS-ZL reticle in Leupold PRW Weaver-style rings. This setup placed the scope about 2 inches above the bore and seemed to be a perfect fit for this specialized gun.

The average accuracy of all five sabot loads was an impressive 1.98 inches at 50 yards. All loads tested delivered good accuracy, and the loads were quite consistent, running from 1.75 inches to 2.22 inches. The smallest group average was with the Remington Premier with the 385-grain AccuTip Bonded slug, at an average velocity of 1,551 fps.

The fastest ammo was the Hornady load with the 300-grain SST slug at 2,082 fps. Close behind was the 3-inch Winchester XP3 loaded with the 300-grain slug at 1,890 fps. These loads are powerful “deer medicine.”

Slug weights were nominal 300, 385, and 437.5 grains (i.e., one ounce), and muzzle energies varied slightly from 2,057 to 2,895 ft-lbs for the full-power loads. The Hornady Custom Lite load registered 1,418 fps and produced a muzzle energy of 1,340 ft-lbs.

An interesting observation regards the recoil impulses and velocities of these loads. To calculate recoil, we need the total weight of all “ejecta,” i.e., the weights of the slug, sabot and wads, and the powder charge. I used a neat tool called the Unload-It Shotshell Dismantler from Ballistic Products to dissect one round of each load and weigh each component.

These loads hit hard at both ends. The recoil data are listed in the chart as indicated. (Recoil values are for the gun with scope and mount attached.) The recoil of the full-power loads ranged from 26.6 ft-lbs for the Remington Premier AccuTip to 41.2 ft-lbs for the Hornady SST. More significantly, the recoil velocity of the gun with three loads was above the established maximum of “flinch-inducing” 16 fps.

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Hornady labels its “Custom Lite” slug load as “ideal for anyone looking to tame the recoil of their rifled-barrel slug gun.” The company says these loads offer a recoil reduction of 25 to 40 percent, but it was even more in my tests. As mentioned, in the Maxus II Rifled Deer, the recoil of the full-power Hornady SST load was 41.2 ft-lbs. The Custom Lite load had a recoil of 16.0 ft-lbs, and that translates to a recoil reduction of a whopping 62 percent. I could really tell the difference shooting both loads side by side. Muzzle energy of the Lite load is 1,340 ft-lbs, so its 300-grain SST slug should be very effective on deer.

As the separate chart shows, the downrange ballistics of these high-tech slug loads are also impressive. I calculated the ballistic coefficient (BC) of the slugs with the Oehler Ballistic Explorer program or ferreted it out of company literature. The slugs of all loads have BCs from about .14 to .20, pretty low by rifle standards, but these aren’t rifles, per se.

When zeroed at a range of 125 yards, these slugs are 1.0 to 2.5 inches high at 100 yards, and the trajectories look good out to about 150 yards. Energy levels are substantial, too, but vary by load. The 300-grain Hornady SST and the Winchester one-ounce Deer Season load had energies of 2,888 and 2,253 ft-lbs respectively, and the Deer Season slug was still delivering 1,077 ft-lbs at 200 yards. That is probably a stretch for a slug gun, but with the same 125-yard zero, this slug is only nine inches below the line of sight at 200 yards. Just sayin’.

Demonstrated use of the shotshell dismantler from Ballistic Products. — To determine the levels of recoil produced by the sabot slug loads, Steve dissected samples using the shotshell dismantler from Ballistic Products.

When we look at the role of the rifled shotgun for hunting deer and other big game, it’s obvious these highly specialized guns and their ammo are designed to serve the hunter well and to fit various area-specific regulatory frameworks. Overall, the new Maxus II Rifled Deer gun really zeros in on the deer hunter who must hunt in a “shotgun only” area because Browning has tweaked the gun for maximum performance. It’ll definitely bring home the venison.