Jug Choking

[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.