doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com History of Choke Boring

Being 'The' site of encyclopeadic knowledge on all things about guns I need your help.
I have a very beautifully made W.R.Pape boxlock that I am restoring.
Now I know from my readings that there was no love lost between Pape & Greener.Any history or anecdotes about the fued between these two will be gratefully received.
Here is a few gems for starters.
Pape is credited with inventing choke boring ( although I believe that both Pape and Greener had travelled to the U.S. and stolen Fred Kimball's idea?)
Greener subsequently crowed that he had invented choke, but it is believed Greeners success actually was down to the skill of a barrel borer he employed by the name of William Ford.
The countrysport magazine called 'The Field' organised trials to check the claims and quality of the various gun manufacturers, and indeed Pape won these trials initially.Greener as so incensed at this result he demanded a retrial which he subsequently won.
Now, we dish the dirt.Greener had obtained barreels bored by Pape prior to the events and found that they were not as good as is own.Imagine his surprise when he lost!
Upon investigation (Greener was a wealthy powerful man)he found that the pattern board officials had found numerous odd looking wads littering the floor.Upon inspection it was found that these hollowed out wads (cup like) obviously would contribute to a cartridge holding more shot pellets.
At the subsequent trials which Greener won the cartridges were supplied by 'The Field'
Any information about choke & choke boring will be useful also references to books, and Kimball or perhaps you know more about choke boring Thanks in anticipation of a flood of information.Salopian.

Salopian,
In an 1888 L.C. Smith Gun Catalog Syracuse, N.Y.,they state "All of our Guns are Choke-Bored to shoot extremely Close unless Otherwise Ordered. No extra Charge." Also states "Our System of Multiplied Choke Boring Gives Better Pattern and Penetration Than Any Other System of Boring". Also "No Extra Charge for our Multiplied Choke Boring. It Produces better results than any other method, No othr manufacturer can use our system of Choke Boring."

This is again from an 1888 catalog, I don't know what time frame you were referring to and they also stated that European guns didn't have some of their (L.C. Smith's) features.

I'm stil trying to figure out what they meant by Multiplied Choke boring.

Pape patented choke boring in 1866 but it is believed Joe Manton was 'freeing the bore' behind the muzzle, mentioned in Hawkers 'Instructions to Young Sportsmen' published in 1816
Kimble is credited in the U.S. with being the inventor but not until 1869.The Field trials were in 1875 at Wimbledon Common.Interestingly there were previous trials held in New York in September 1873 in which the first two places in four categories were won by W&C Scott guns possibly rebored in the US by W.H.Van Gieson.

salopain: The story of choke boring is well traveled. Fred Kimble did not invent choke boring (1) nor did Greener make a similiar claim (2). Choke boring evolved as a logical result of breech-loading.

(1) Fred Kimble was the last surviving old-time knight of the trigger and got to telling stories to credulous writers in his seniality; William Hazelton and Charles Askins and others made Kimble a folk hero starting in about 1920. But going back to the orgins of choke boring in the early 1870s, Kimble was a bystander. But the latter-day exaggerations of Kimble were promoted by Askins and Hazelton and "written over" by the next generation of gun writers until the ATA Museum created a Hall of Fame, to which ol' Fred was inducted as a charter member...and the story well-told just won't go away. Fred's bio. on the ATA-HOF site is pure hogwash.

I debunked the Kimble story in my Parker Guns: The "Old Reliable" (Safari Press 1997, 2004) in a chapter entitled "Choke Boring-Pure Accident." Another author took my research to the next level in his article "Doubting Fred Kimble." And John Davis has written two Trade Paperbacks debunking the choke boring story while telling of Fred's impressive other accomplishments in the pigeon ring and as a maker of the Peoria Blackbird" clay target.

(2) By simply reading Greneer's copious writings one can know what he really said about choke boring. He disclaimed "inventing" choike boring, giving credit to Americans, but he had a plausable claim to having prefected it in England, in the early years. After all, Greener was a shotgun maker on an industrial scale. Who better to improve on the basic concept that was in the public domain since at least 1827 in America, and written about by Hawker in England since 1814 in his Instructions to young Sportsmen. Hawker used the choke boring words "cylinder" and "relief," and Greener pictured barrel cross-sections in his tome, The Gun, starting in 1881.

(3) Choke boring as we understand it today, rather than manupilating the back-bore, became an accomplished fact in America with Roprer's ca.1868 screw-in choke, which wasn't effective according to contemporary tests. Meanwhile, once cartridges could be loaded at the breech rather than pushed in from the muzzle (like paper cartridges and Eley's wire cartridge), the barrel borers could constrict the muzzle, and experimentation with true choke boring began.

(4) Joseph Tonks of Boston supplied Joe Long of Boston with the first documented (meaning written about contemporaniously in the first person) choke bored "close shooter;" he wrote a letter to his duck-shooting buddy Fred Kimble in Peoria IL about it, and Fred asked for the gun--"Send it sure." This is covered in Joe Long's 1879 revised edition of his 1874 book, American Wild-Fowl Shooting. If Askins and Hazelton had read Long's book they would not have bought Kimble's "crazy-old-man" stories of grandure, and the true story of the advent of choke boring would have been written quite differently. But once a bogus story gains curency, it ain't gonna go away no matter how often debunked. EDM

Sylvester Roper is reported to have been issued a patent on April 10, 1866 for his screw in choke device. I've not been able to find a copy of the patent to confirm however. Most of the links on this site do not work unfortunately
http://www.roperld.com/RoperSylvester.htm

Fred may have been a crazy old man who exaggerated his accomplishments, but he did experiment with choke and he did use it to his advantage. He ordered at least two Parker shotguns with "muzzles 1/14 inch thick" or "muzzles 1/10 inch thick" or some such, obviously with the intention to fool with the chokes. I seem to remember some documented proof that Fred sent one of his choked guns, maybe the Tonks, to England, possibly to Greener, for testing. It seems that neither Long, Kimble, Greener, or Pape is the first person to try his hand at muzzle constriction to improve shotgun patterns. If Manton was "freeing the muzzle" before 1816, I'm willing to give him the honor.

Roper's choke was actually a screw-ON device. It was a short ring that screwed on the outside of the muzzle.(single barrel only) I remember seeing it in a reproduction of an old Sears catalog. It is also shown on page 256 of W. W. Greener's "Gun and its Development". Greener also gives Roper credit for the first patent on a choke device, saying it precedes Pape's patent by about 6 weeks.

No, 79,861, S. H. ROPER. Detachable Muzzle for Shot Guns Patented July 14, 1868

http://www.google.com/patents?id=C7kAAAA...roxburry#PPR2,M




Pete

I don't agree that the Kimble bio on the ATA HOF site is "pure hogwash" as EDM describes it. The information consisting of contributions by trapshooter Charles Newcomb, trap historian Jimmy Robinson, and ATA historian Dick Baldwin includes at least one exaggeration about Kimble being the inventor of choke boring, but largely it is quite informative. Kimble's exploits at the traps and in the pigeon ring are well documented, and he was quite a good shot and had some wins in his shooting career.