doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Cylinder Choke - Your Thoughts

That is the Vena Contraca. I have one by Trulock & Harris.

It should make no difference what the bore is - the concentrating effect will be produced by the degree to which the bore differs from the choke section.

I beleive you need to go by what all the top sporting clay shooters are shooting. More and more are changing to shooting tighter chokes. I regularly shoot clays with a guy who shoots Improved Modified in his Beretta auto. Even though the targets are close he still beats most of us.
A lot of English Bests were choked cylinder and full, I suppose for driven birds. I myself prefer to stick with more open chokes for target and 1 ounce #8's. When you get old you need all the advantages you can get.

And then there are those shots at grouse under 10 yards because you don't see them before or after........


just a thot (QUIZ: What member famously ended each of his posts with that?)

What the top sporting clays shooters are shooting makes sense for sporting clays, where the top shooters do their shooting. Doesn't make sense for most upland hunting, where most shots are at skeet distances.

Re what constitutes cylinder, I think someone above spelled it out: Reach in as far as your bore and choke gauge will go. If there's no constriction from where you start to where you end, that's zero choke: cylinder. Bore could be .739, .729, .719. If that's also the measurement at the muzzle, that's cylinder. Were that not true, a cylinder bored 16, 20, or 28 would pattern differently than a cylinder bored 12. Which they don't. All should produce roughly the same pattern PERCENTAGE at 25 yards.

It is not the difference in the bore at 15" from the muzzle and the muzzle. It is the difference between the bore at 3" (or 2" or 4")from the muzzle and the muzzle. That is why I brought up the English gun Dig identified as the Vena Contracta. If you measured the constriction in the last 15" of the bore of a Vena Contracta it would be about 55/1000ths or improved full yet it shot a cylinder pattern. If you measured the constriction in the last 27" of the bore (30" barrel)it would be 99/1000ths or full full full choke. Yet the Vena Contracta gave cylinder patterns.

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AmarilloMike Offline
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Registered: July 14, 2005
Posts: 4080
Loc: Amarillo, Texas An English maker once made a bore that started out at 12 bore (.729) and tapered at a constant rate to a 20 bore (.619) It threw cylinder patterns. It is the constriction in the last few inches of the barrels that does the choking.
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Amarillo Mike
I believe you but where did you read that . That is interesting.
E me montgom@tecinfo.comXXXXXXXXXXXWWWWWWWW

All of my double guns except one are left barrel full right barrel mod. For pheasants I used to load one barrel with #4's and the other barrel with #2's. When I shot they did a nose dive to the ground and stayed there. Now days both barrels are loaded with #4's.........chokes remain the same.

Too, there is often significant difs with ammunition from the same bbl., e.g. a high quality trap or target load vs. an inexpensive 'promotional' round vs. a thumping blaster round ... for those who need to feel the recoil to have confidence vs. a reload with seemingly low velocity [<1150 fps] that throws tighter than expected patterns. In any case, only time at the pattern board and shooting multiple patterns & some form of analysis will tell you what's going on with any certainty.

For example, some so-called 'spreader' loads don't 'spread' very much.

Another example that comes to mind was finding that some of those 'rifled' choke tubes that are advertised to open patterns give typical IC results w/most loads. Another was finding that some Remington Premier 27 trap loads in #7.5 produced some well balanced 65% patterns out of a cylinder bbl. in one particular gun.

One can go back and read some of the 'card tests' that were performed in England before choke boring became the fashion to see that differences were being reported even at that time to both penetration and pattern densities with some makers using those results to hawk their 'improved' cylinder borings. Naturally, the powder and shot and ammunition makers too were all claiming superior products. Some of them probably were.

I suspect then as now, irrespective of gun or ammuntion used that the better shots experienced the best overall results.

Garwood or Burrard but I can't tell you for sure.

I love cylinder for skeet and close to medium range preserve birds, but on western covey rises of huns and chukars at range (30-45 yds), I've shot cyl/full choked guns and found that I scored most of my kills with the full choked left barrel, and many misses with the cyl barrel. As stated earlier, it all depends on the what, where,and how far. Cylinder for everything is just nonsensical imo.