Early on in my gun-owning journey, I bought a Saiga 12 and converted it to a 13″ barrel SBS. It’s a slick gun, albeit I think it’s been since eclipsed by some other contenders (especially the VEPR 12 and RIA VR80). I still enjoy shooting it as the opportunity presents.

Ever since I got into the night vision game, I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of a night vision-oriented shotgun. I don’t think the Saiga 12 the BEST choice (rock-and-lock in the dark is rough with shotgun magazines), but I think it’s respectable, and it’s what I’ve got. However, in order to get my Saiga 12 SBS into a night vision ready mode, some upgrades were in order.

First, it had an old-style Chaos tri-rail. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I felt that moving to MLOK would give me a lighter gun to compensate for the stuff I was about to bolt on to it. I went with the KS-12 TRSS handguard, which wasn’t overly expensive and fit my SBS tightly (always a good thing when you’re about to mount a laser).

Next, the optic needed an upgrade for passive aiming use, with better light transmission characteristics and night vision brightness modes. I had an AEMS Core (green) optic on a PCC I wasn’t using much, so I bought a low mount for it and put the AEMS on the Midwest Industries side rail sight mount. This gets it nice and high, but not so high as to be obnoxious when not using night vision. The AEMS is widely regarded to be the next best thing to an Eotech E/XPS3 for night vision use.

Then… lights and lasers. I wanted to retain the shotgun’s white light ability, thus the solutions needed to be able to go in the visible and IR spectrums.

For the laser, I decided to go with the Holosun LS221G I had previously bought for my .300BLK SBR (and replaced with a Somogear PEQ-15). While it’s not optimal, I decided to mount it on the right side of the handguard. I didn’t have a top rail, and for reasons you’ll read about later, I didn’t want to put it on the bottom rail. One funny note about the LS221G is that the turrets are all labeled for side mounting.

For the light, I decided to go with a classic: the Surefire KM2-C “Vampire” head on a Surefire body with a Surefire UE tailcap, mounted offset from the bottom of the handguard. This would give me good IR and white light flood, which is all I really need out of a shotgun.

Finally, for the switch, I used a leftover Unity TAPS Sync V4 switch, which gave me the choice of light+laser or just laser. Since both the laser unit and the light could be individually configured as white light or IR, this gave me a lot of flexibility in how I could configure the whole system – and would eliminate the possibility of negligent white light discharges. Very handy!

This setup worked really well. However, when I put my Salvo 12 on the gun, the suppressor blocked the KM2-C. The Salvo-12 is a rather oblong suppressor and has a lot of mass below the barrel – fine on a tube-fed shotgun, inconvenient on a mag-fed shotgun. This got me thinking: how could I build this gun so that I could further offset the light?

The solution I wound up with was to utilize a knockoff fusion hub with an offset rail mounted to the top of it, on the right hand side of the handguard. I then mounted the LS221G to the rail on the hub, and the light straight to the offset portion of the hub (up and towards the centerline).

This pushes the light out of the way of the laser unit and the suppressor, while not blocking the field of view for the optic. It looks weird, but it works great. The suppressor does cause some shadow in the light beam, but it seems pretty usable in general. Unfortunately, since I don’t always run a suppressor on this gun, I was reluctant to mount the light further forward using a wing.

I ran the shotgun at action shooting practice, and there was no discernable zero shift. That’s a testament to the LS221G, but it’s worth noting that I was also shooting slightly-spicy birdshot, not hard-kicking 3″ 000 buckshot. The recoil is pretty anemic with the suppressor on; you can run this gun pretty fast if you want to.

I’ve also run it at night. And it’s a ton of fun. Reloads suck in the dark, but just shooting it until it runs dry and transitioning to pistol is great. The IR setup works really well for what I need (which is shotgun distances).

Obviously, this is a for-funsies gun for the most part. Yes, I could press it into home defense use, and I’m sure it would excel, but it’s mostly there as an oddball gun to run at night shoots to see how a shotgun can break stage setups. I may send it out to Dissident Arms at some point for a VEPR magazine conversion to aid in reloads.