Jug Choking

[Mortblanc]

Sorry Charles but I an going to have a difficult time scratching up a model 12 for comparison on this project mostly due to them being out of production for 50 years!

And the ones that are still available of a type that if I attempted to jug choke one of them every Winchester collector within 1000 miles would be after me with heat seeking predator drones.

My goal is to get some working choke back into a barrel after it has been hacksawed or to improve an insufficient choke in a factory barrel, and do it with common hand tools and as cheaply as possible.

[CharlesHarris]

My point was only to point out that long tapers seem to perform better than abrupt ones, and that after some orientation, you can learn to discern the older drilled and reamed barrels by visual inspection. It may also be the case that some makes of hammer forged barrels might have longer forcing cones. If you have access to a lathe, Brownells sells "long forcing cone" reamers, which are popular in producing speciallized turkey and predator shooting barrels. There are also "back boring" hones which do as precisely controlled job of jug choking, which can be used to enlarge the entire bore ahead of the forcing cone, stopping a few inches behind the muzzle.

The custom turkey shoot barrels around here are reamed to provide a 6" long forcing cone, with the rest of the bore opened to .740" behind the muzzle.

[Mortblanc]

Not looking for a competition level turkey shoot gun. That is the realm of a special cult of shooters that are barely known even in the US.

And those custom turkey shoot barrels are the result of great expense and a long waiting period if the work is done properly. They are not something the average shooter can or will do at home.

Nor will most of them spend $130 for a forcing cone reamer and another $100 for an expandable choke reamer to improve a single shot shotgun that cost $100.

I know I am not going too.

I just want to get a couple of buckshot pellets to land in the big empty space in the middle of the aiming point.

The plan is to accomplish that with as little time and expense as possible.

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This is one of the test targets. The result of laying a charge of #3 buckshot on top of a load of #7 1/2 bird shot.

It does show that the small shot is still a small game killer at 40 yards but also reveals my real concern, that big empty spot where no buckshot landed right at the point of aim. I need to put a couple of pellets in the middle of that donut hole.

At 40 yards both of the patterns covered a total of 4 feet but outside the 30-36 inch center the shot was scattered and erratic with several empty spots a foot in diameter and the buckshot scattered widely.

[Lightspeed]

..and what the hell is the cannon ball shaped hole at 3 o'Clock Morty??? !

[Mortblanc]

If you look closely at the extreme 3 o'clock position you will see a dark line.

That dark line is the top of the + shaped aiming point that was supposed to be the destination of that nomadic cannon ball. The other two shots are outside the frame, about 12" from that shot and two inches separated.

The picture shown is actually rotated 90 degrees and the cannon ball is at the bottom of the frame, if you can imagine such. I had the dot as an aiming point for the shot and the cross as the aiming point for the slugs.

This barrel did not do well with the slugs at all, but the next barrel gave 2" group with slugs at 40 yards even though the shot patterns were the same.

I fired a total of 5 straight cylinder bore barrels and the shot pattern results were the same with each, big holes in both small shot and buckshot patterns. Small shot patterns ran between 25% and 30% which is very pitiful, barely of any use as a small game gun and leaves the buckshot pattern useless for taking big game.

The key term for all of them as a whole is ERATTIC ! The only consistency I find in cutting the choke out of these barrels is that the performance is consistently BAD !

They do not perform better with small shot
They do not perform better with buckshot
They do not perform better with slugs

I have been working on the jug choke for several hours and the effort is slow going! One of those boring operations that wears you out and reminds you that one is better off with a 26" choked barrel than trying to get some proper choke into a sawed off tube.

That is especially true for you guys in UK where the limit is 24". That 2"-4" off the length does not really gain you anything and takes away 50% of your performance capabilities.

[Talon]

Very disappointing results Mort.I have a 24 1/2 "" cylinder bore as my primary tool.As of yet I haven't taken it to the pattern plate with a .690 ball.Your results don't give me much hope that I did the right thing cutting off the choke.
All of the research I've done indicates a cylinder bore is best for slugs /ball(Legally I can't pattern a slug and I wouldn't want to risk being banned from my primary clay ground for testing,not to mention any legal infractions ).
very disappointing results,and another indicator that I shouldn't rely on internet data,though trying to stay legal means that it's still my primary resource.
I have shot it with 7.5 shot with good results at sporting clays though, so hunting small game is still perfectly viable.Still your results give me some concern.

[Midnitemo]

I have a 24 inch cyl bore pump action , I've used it on fox with 50 gram no3 and AAA to good effect and broken clays with it but never been after small game with it(got other more suitable guns for that)so I'm thinking I need to go have a session on the pattern plate and see what its capable of.

[Mortblanc]

More than any other thing I have noted in this effort is the need to pattern every barrel for every shotgun you own.

Every one of them preforms slightly different and in almost every case I have found that each of these cylinder bore barrels performs differently with different sizes of shot and charges of powder.

Slug performance has been different with each barrel also. The target shown had a 12" 3 shot group. The next barrel held its shots into a much better cluster, 2"-4".

You might also note that although the #7 1/2 shot was a 32% pattern the #3 buck was better than 70% pattern, but the 70% pattern was nearly useless with that big hole in the center, while the #7 1/2 pattern was good enough to down game on a lucky day.

The real point being that one should not sacrifice good game getting performance that is present in a choked barrel for some projected imaginary gain in performance with slugs.

That is especially true for the people that are not allowed to have slugs on a SGC and are restricted to buckshot.

You need choke for that buckshot! The last thing you want is scattered buckshot. You want your buckshot in a nice uniform cluster so it can SLAM the target with multiple hits.

And if your choked shotgun patterns buckshot well you have just about the same range with large buckshot that you would have with a slug, especially if your barrel happens to not like slugs after you have cut it off. While a 15" cluster of 9 #000 at 40 yards is excellent performance for buckshot it is far from ideal for slugs!

Another thing I am noting while testing both slugs and shot is that everything from #8 shot to #000 buckshot has about the same point of impact, and even on the cheapest of my shotguns it is very close to the aiming point provided by the bead.

The slugs have a will of their own and print on target at a different spot from the center of the shot pattern.

Using just the bead it is a by-guess-and-by-gosh "was I really aiming there?" type thing, but when I mounted optics on the barrels it was apparent that POI was different.

Like many here, I have several shotguns and many of them stay set up for specific uses. Since they are geared to that use I have often not tested them for performance in other areas. In the past couple of weeks I have learned a great deal about several of the shotguns/barrels I have owned for years, and took their performance for granted.

I have also come to appreciate the consistency of several brands of cheap single shot production guns. I have 3 barrels for my Rossi single shot and find that what is marked on the barrel is exactly the performance they give.

[Midnitemo]

so glad I never chopped my side by side down to 24 inches(27 1/2) I thought I'd make it a bit more wieldy and compact but as its already the most svelte off my shotguns by a decent margin and so handy with twin triggers giving the option of two very different payloads on hand ready to go......3/4 and 1/2.... I think it would be a tad tight for slugs but I already have a dedicated cyl bore in my arsenal.

[Mortblanc]

One of the other things folks overlook is that "compact" is a relative term. A nice double with 28" tubes is shorter than a pump with 24" barrel.

My little 20 bore OU with 26" barrels is the same over all length as my 18" barreled riot guns. The OU handles better and has screw in choke tubes, which alleviates all these crappy problems I am dealing with in the cylinder choked guns.