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Choke Choice, New Shotshells and Shotgun Performance
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8/23/2010
It takes a lot more than a state-of-the-art shotgun to maximize field performance. New loads with their high-tech wads must be properly choked to realize the finest your shotgun has to offer.
by Ralph Lermayer
Choking or “constricting” the muzzle end of a shotgun barrel to tighten patterns and extend range might be the most significant improvement in shotgun performance since scatterguns were created. Before choking, all barrels were straight tubes, cylinder-bored, and about 25 yards was all you could be confident in as a kill zone.
Around the late 1800s, a lot of people were playing around with ways to tighten patterns and extend range, but most credit an Illinois duck hunter named Fred Kemble with the technique, although he did kind of figure it out by accident. Seems he was trying to constrict the barrel of his big 10-bore by squeezing down the area at the muzzle. Resulting patterns were worse than ever, so he wanted to give up on the idea. He tried to bore out or drill the constricted area back to the straight cylinder-bore. When he was done, the gun shot tighter patterns and held them farther than it ever had. He measured the bore to see what was up and discovered he hadn’t quite reamed it all out. He had left just a wee bit of constriction in, and choke-boring was discovered.
The surprise, it seems, was in just how little internal taper or constriction is needed to affect the shape of the charge exiting the bore. For example, a 12-gauge cylinder bore, with no constriction, measures on average .730 inch. Improved-choked bores measure .721, modified .712 and full .694. A reduction of only .036 inch brings the pattern from wide-open, cylinder-bore for close shooting of quail to full-choke for reaching way out for passing ducks. Not much, but, as Fred Kemble discovered, it doesn’t take much.
