doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com CHOKE ?

P.S. to the above:

Our village postmaster, Maurice (Monnie) Slauenwhite, has the record for ducks with one shot, set before I was born but witnessed by fishermen I gunned with.

Monnie, lame and large with a gunning reputation, dropped 21 whistlers from a stone blind at tiny Bard's Island in our village.

All we know is that he had "some hard-hitting gun." The choke I leave to you!

king: notice you are from nova scotia, one of my favorite places. i particularly like the area around wolfville over on the bay side. where are you?

There's good gunning around Wolfville in the Annapolis Valley, particularly for pheasants. I went to school there for a year after completing Grade 10 in our one-room school. I'm on the North Shore near Antigonish on the Northumberland Strait facing the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

If you want to read about choke, go to Choke in Birdguns thread. It was discussed thoroughly with lots of opinions. King, interesting you have noticed waterfowl guns that shoot harder than others. I believe some guns shoot 'harder' than others. But why???? Barrel dynamics are complicated. In the live bird ring I saw guns which seemed to shoot hard. Others were feather blowers. I think it has to do with the forcing cones. Guns with relieved forcing cones don't seem to shoot as hard as others with tighter cones IMO. I have no scientific data to support my claim but this is what I have observed.....the last barrel alteration I would make to a live bird gun would be to lengthen the forcing cone.

Swampus,

Welcome to the bbs.

Jamart was around for a very long time. They produced some very nice guns.

The Belgian markings changed over time. After 1924 they used a single mark that denoted the bore only. Before that, they included the bore and choke in millimeters.

Here are the Belgian proof marks:
http://damascus-barrels.com/Belgian_All_Proofmarks.html

So, a barrel marked 18.4 18.3 would mean the bore was 18.4mm (0.7244) inches and the choked portion was 18.3mm (0.7205 inches). Or 0.0039 inches of constriction. Essentially a cylinder choked tube.

Pete

More heresy, buzz: I believe choke and skill influences "hard-hitting." I don't put much stock in back-boring or forcing cones. My early years were with men who hunted for food, all poachers who made a little extra at $2 a pair. Poachers because they hunted before and after seasons were closed but went to extraordinary lengths to get a crippled bird, rowing for an hour to end it, stripping off to retrieve from ice-rimmed ponds and lakes. They made good blinds because "a black can see through a sheet of plywood" and waited until heads came together to sluice on the water, then cooly shoot those in the air, a third shell between their fingers on fore-ends. I regret now that as a boy I had no interest in what chokes those great Eastern Shore double-gunners were using. I suspect the notion of "hard-hitting" came from observing close concentrations burying birds on the water and shot-out barrels performing at optimal distances in the air. Decoys were always within 15-20 yards. My great uncle used a Sealer's Special Tobin, my neighbours Belgian clunkers, Stevens and the odd Parker. One thing etched on my memories was the way they rose so smoothly to shoot, raising guns to their lines of sight, conditioned by the serious consequences of missing when shells were bought five or at most 10 at a time at the country store.

I remember buying shells by the each when I was a kid. No wing shooting where I lived, but I'll always remember the kindness of the grocer who broke up a box of shells for me. And a box wasn't much over $2.

Oddly the choke restriction seems to decrease with bore diameter in most charts. The published chart above shows an increase in restriction between 10 & 12 bores. Can someone explain ?

Here is the Ithaca Gun Co. chart --

I too have become a convert to way loose chokes after many years of too tight chokes. The turning point was, when I had shot a pretty good score at Whittington with my Lefever "H",which chokes I assumed to be M%F. Mr Wood measured em, aint got any...Cyl-Cyl...That did it...