Constriction prescription

Paul Quagliana runs through choke options for your guns and talks to Graham Brown of the Purbeck Shooting School about the factors that may influence their use

- Paul Quagliana

The issue of shotgun chokes and which combinations are winners raises its head regularly in the shooting world. For some, it is a subject worthy of hours of deliberation and debate. For others, it is far less concerning. As a youth I recall a farmer who had a Mossberg pumpaction shotgun with a twist choke. Turning it anticlockwise opened the choke. If the farmer thought there was the chance of a fox, he simply gave it a few twists to the right to tighten it. He would not have a clue what level of choke he was using but it worked for him.

Chokes do require a bit more thought for certain applications as they are an integral part of shooting, but be aware that there is not a definitive answer. All shooters and guns are different and, depending on the disciplines or quarry you shoot, may require different solutions.

For the benefit of anybody reading this who is new to shooting, or comes from a background in rifle shooting, chokes are essentially a thickening, or constriction, of the nominal bore dimension of a shotgun barrel a given distance from the muzzles. This can be a means of controlling the spread of shot a given distance from the muzzles. True cylinder in a 12-bore, that is without constriction, is 0.729 of an inch. Every increment of choke thereafter is measured in increments of a ten-thousandth of an inch. Fixed-choked shotguns can be threaded to take multichokes but require a reasonable amount of wall thickness in the first place for this conversion to be carried out. It is vital that the multichokes fit tightly, as due to the thread being cut the wall thickness is reduced and should gas from the cartridge get between the choke and the barrel wall it can, potentially, cause bulging. Work such as this should be carried out by a specialist.