Is Benelli’s BE.S.T. Finish All It’s Cracked Up To Be?

A decade ago I was working at CZ-USA and the topic of hardy metal finishes came up in product development meetings. A company that was steeped in old-school ‘walnut and blue’ guns, the modern era was seeing more and more development with composite stocks and modern finishes and I wanted to be on the forefront.

Cerakote was becoming a standard for upgraded finishes, while hydro-dipped camouflage also served to seal away metalwork from rust and grime.

Myself an avid motorcyclist, I'd seen the gold and black finishes that were being utilized for fork tube legs on GSXRs and other sportbikes. With the trade name, “Diamond-Like Finish,” or DLC, it was hardy and slick and seemed to do pretty well in deflecting bugs, sand and gravel as they attempted to leave chips and pock-marks in fork tubes. I'd never seen a set rust, so in my mind it was the perfect candidate for a firearm finish. At least, in theory.

The black or gold fork tubes of modern motorcycles was one of the first major uses of Diamond Like Coatings as a surface finish.

With the custom-built CZ Western Series rifles I found the opportunity to try to make it a reality. Down the rabbit hole I went, trying to source a vendor and see if they could accommodate our small-scale custom shop production while at the same time deal with federally-regulated, serialized barreled actions.

Two years in I finally gave up. It was 2015 and we couldn't make any CZs fast enough, so the difficulties just weren't worth chasing it anymore.

Fast forward half a dozen years and I took over the marketing department at a big-name American rifle company trying to innovate in the backcountry rifle space and the thought of DLC comes to the forefront once more. Excited for the possibilities, the product development team sourced a vendor and sent a trio of barreled actions off for finishing.

They came back gorgeous. Our gunsmiths had polished all the metalwork prior to the finish, and the result was a deep, lustrous bronze color with a near impervious surface. Then we started verification testing.

The first struggle was the result of coating a complete barreled action. Assembly oils seeped out around the barrel tenon threads and discolored an irregular band just forward of the action.

Worse was the bore. We hadn't plugged the bore, hoping that the finish might also prevent corrosion there and possibly extend throat life for our company's signature overbore magnum chamberings.

Instead it just flaked off under the heat and pressure and caused more issues than it solved.

When weighing the amount of finishing required for the metalwork, the care in packing needed to protect that on the way to the finisher and the need to assemble the barrel and action after coating without damaging the finish, they decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

Jump forward again and I found myself in the Maryland offices of Benelli, playing with their new products in a conference room lined wall-to-wall with guns.

“Have you seen the BE.S.T. finish?” product manager Bret Maffett asked. “We figured out how to do a Diamond-Like Coating using some proprietary methods, it's the literal best finish out there for a firearm…”

“Finally!” I sighed. “I chased that for years and didn't get anywhere – what was the secret?”

In Benelli’s SHOT Show booth is a display with constant salt spray, showing their finish compared to the competition – the others turning rather crusty!

“The Crio process. We're able to apply it a cold temps and stick it fast with patented methods and it works incredibly well.”

The next year I found myself planning for my first trip to New Zealand, hoping to chase stag and fowl and anything else that I couldn't find back in the ‘States.

Talking with Richard Burdon of Glen Dene Hunting & Fishing, he advised that the weather in May was highly variable (their late autumn on the bottom side of the world), so planning for snow, rain and cold would be a good idea.

No better opportunity to put the BE.S.T. finish to the test, and I soon found myself plucking a Benelli Lupo and its complementing Super Black Eagle III off the gun wall at my local Rock Mountain Discount Sports – both with the proprietary DLC finish.

Before I knew it my wife and I were dropping down through the clouds into the splendor of New Zealand's South Island. With fall foliage on full display, the mountains around Queenstown had a fresh coating of white powder and I found myself happy to have packed all the layers I had.

First up and most important to me was the chase for a Red Stag. Introduced by British settlers to the previously mammal-free island colony in the 1870s, they were intended to proliferate to provide both sport and food.

Hunting the verdant mountainsides above and beyond the lowland ranching operations, I found that with the roar freshly ended the stag were on a non-stop feeding binge, trying to regain all the mass and fat they'd expended during their rut. To that end, they stuck to the edges near the ranch land, since the aerial fertilization used to amend the vertical volcanic slopes extended up and into the wild lands above and beyond any fence.

Two days of glassing in the fog and mist and I finally found my stag – an old bull with antler crowns collapsing in on themselves as testament to his age and 31 points in total. The 300 Win. Mag. Lupo sent him rolling and sliding down the slope until he finally came to rest in a manuka-choked creek in a fold of the mountain.

Already wet from the weather, the Lupo was soon slathered in mud as well, since even getting to the old bull put us knee-deep in muck.

Back in the case the rifle went, grime and all, as the SBE III came out in its place. 

Knowing I'm a bird-hunting addict, Richard had arranged two days on the east coast where I could chase ducks (mallards, shovelers and paradise shelducks), pukeko (a swamp hen with long wading legs and a beak perfect for breaking mollusks and duck eggs/hatchlings) as well as walk-up pheasants and even spot-and-stalk wallabies up where they are an invasive species in the vital native tussocks.

Weather was wetter by far on the coast, and even with rain gear I was soon soaked to the bone. Fog, mist, rain were compounded as we waded through waist-deep grass that was sodden with moisture. 

Jump shooting on mallards put my Migra tungsten/steel stacked loads to work, dropping five birds with only one unlucky hen in the mix. Flushing wallabies from the tussock bunch grasslands fell to a stouter 7/9 tungsten loading that Migra would tell you is ideal for turkeys. Well, it'll knock over an invasive macropod just as deftly. A pair of pheasants kicked up by our host Ciaran’s springer spaniel folded in stereo – one right and one left.

The final chase was a sneak for pukeko that turned into a drive when the wary birds wouldn't let us get inside a hundred yards no matter how tricky we tried to be. With Ciaran and his assistant Oliver getting their dogs out and me setting up on the opposite side of the field, the name of the game became pass-shooting the driven birds.

The first to fly by was at Mach 11, and I was behind him with the first shot, still behind him after doubling my lead and then took him with the third shot holding a full truck-length off his nose. Pacing it off, he fell at 75 yards – a big poke made deadly by those 7/9 tungsten shells.

After two days dripping wet, the Benelli slid right back into my gun case for trip up to the North Island for a day shooting driven pheasants at Poronui (the semi-auto a bit out of place for such a traditional hunt) then decoying ducks from a maimai (the Kiwi name for a sunken grass blind).

No matter how poorly I treated the two guns, they simply didn't care. Back home in Wyoming, the SBE III came along as I hunted the North Platte with buddies, never getting so much as a cursory wipe-down. The only thing I didn't expose them to was saltwater, though Benelli claims BE.S.T. will take submersion indefinitely without fail.

Nine months of use and abuse has left me with little doubt about the effectiveness of DLC as a gun finish, and Benelli figured it out where others could not – to include yours truly.

With this bird season right around the corner, the new camo/grey BE.S.T. finished SBEIII is calling my name – especially now that there’s a 20 gauge option…