Home Forums Birds & Dogs Turkey Hunting Support thread for Choke Tube addiction, and the search for the perfect high

I'm nearly 60 years old and I'm an addict. I keep looking for the perfect choke-tube and it's just gotten worse. It's led me to tighter and tigher constrictions looking for that perfect high. But I never get there. My addiction drives me on. I stand on the sidewalk in a dishelved stupor, bent over at the waste, holding my latest disappointing choke tube mumbling to myself "this isn't it." Passerbys ignore me. I clearly need help. If only I had stopped at XFULL. It's all I needed. But XFULL turned out to just be a gateway drug choke. I've moved on to harder and harder tighter and tighter chokes. But the perfect high never comes. Oh GOD! Help me!

And I KNOW some of you have it way worse than me.

Come on brothers. Stand up and tell your story. Let's support one another. We're all we have.




And this /\ is after I sold more than a half dozen a couple of months ago, nor ones that have come and gone in the more distant past.

It's a shame someone cannot make a modern adjustable choke , like the old poly choke. It would be one stop shopping and lessen the madness that we suffer from.

They make screw in poly chokes. Search "screw in poly choke" in eBay, there's a bunch...

Making an adjustable choke that actually patterned well would cause an uproar in the community. It just couldn't be tolerated by the choke tube industry and YouTube experts.

About a year ago or so I took my New Haven 600 (Mossberg 500) with a C-Lect choke out and patterned it with loads I used (equivalent loads) in the 80s to hunt turkeys. And some Longbeard XR. Choke set to FULL. It left a little to be desired.

I thought I was crazy when I made a spreadsheet of my chokes so I knew what I had...

Im a sucker for cheap chokes at stores....

Maybe if I tried these indian creeks and stop messing with it.

Maybe.

then there's this whole past the point of diminishing returns topic where we so easily get lost in the weeds and miss the 40,000' perspectives on all these topics we love to get lost in the weeds in

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https://www.youtube.com/w...ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmoBsozuzHo

not sure why this link isn't posting well, hopefully this time it went?

the short story in that video is one obsessive turkey guy who at one point chasing the furthest end of the spectrum past the point of diminishing returns was running 10 gauge 32" barrel hand loads etc. has come full circle to the 40,000' perspective and running simple 2 3/4" win AA 7.5 clay shot from a MODIFIED choke and has gone 43 for 43 on turkey's to 30 yards....we could learn from those lessons in that video, including how marketing has ways to get us chasing things past point of diminishing returns in order to separate us from the cash in our wallets lol....it's not hard to manipulate us psychologically and the marketing wizards know that, heck look what we learned about that from 2020-2023 and the flu lol

hope this helps, I love living at the 40,000' view, but I still go down a zillion cash from wallet separating rabbit holes anyway....but I do it for the fun of it, eyes are wide open on the 40,000' view

and to really take things further on that concept, coming from the centerfires world of modern ballistics and the 21st century understanding of terminal ballistics, this whole tss is fascinating, it's never really discussed in terms of sectional density but that it's 'denser' than lead by 60% etc....well, that actually his the same thing as sectional density which is tied directly to penetration...so 60% more penetration, that's why that little shot is an overachiever but it can be mathed out to understand which shot sizes in tss match the penetrations of shot sizes in other materials....I digress

so it seems to me as I study this whole shotgun game from a fresh perspective and starting to think about these turkeys, along with coyotes/wolves/deer etc. with various shotgun loads...that if you were to follow the link above, grab some of that 3" 9 shot tss which adds I dunno how many more pellets per shot and run a wider pattern for the 90+% distances they are actually killed then you still have a superior long distance pattern with the added volume of shot but also ability to penetrate at the longer distances should you end up with a 5-10% of where they are killed type shot....blend the above formula of 7.5 lead shot in a modified choke great pattern for 30 yard work with a 9 tss shot from a modified choke to have that same great pattern for 30 yard work but way more shot and penetration while still patterning well for 50 yard work with 9 shot tss....anyway, that math works for me and I will go that route when the time comes to chase a turkey but I'll be calling wolves and coyotes and taking the odd deer with buck first and I can see I won't be needing anything special to go get a turkey and could run one choke that does it all, grab a decent 9 shot tss for turkeys and good to go...modified, maybe even improved cylinder

seems to me that when you improve the ammo like tss does, then you don't have to choke inferior ammo to death anymore and you can open them chokes up and increase the versatility

Edit added: as I work this out in my head and to record it... I see that diameter difference from 9 shot tss to 60% more is 4 lead shot so should be same penetration at same impact velocity, found a corroborating link quick that they list 5 shot as the equivalent min gel penetration at 60 yards for turkey heads so sniff test on math checks out and I would have to guess that means 60% more pellets in the 9 shot load. So what a stunning increase in versatility. It would suggest you could open up your pattern size 60% also...

it’s a bit to chew on because terminal ballistics is largely a subjective subject but we do have some metrics to keep it as objective as possible. That tss shot changes the game completely and lets you have a short range and long range pattern and penetration from one set up and one load. Not sure what guys would consider the min pellets in the head or 10” circle at their max distance but I’d be opening up my choke to get there knowing the short and mid range forgiveness and hit probability keeps going up and up where most birds are killed with that type of logic based tuning

Is that a fresh view or have guys already gone down this road?

You'd have better luck getting a trap/skeet/clays devotee to not fiddle with the stock on his gun, or the rib, or the front sight, etc, etc.....
It becomes an obsession to shoot nothing but perfect scores.
Bobby, with some encouragement, hit the trap shooting circuit. Though not perfect, Bobby did VERY well!
He came by the store one day on his way to a big shoot out in Las Vegas!
A week later, Bobby came in the store! How'd he do?
"I shot 499 straight and might as well not even have showed up!"
It took several rounds of "100 Straight" shooters to finally weed out the "top waters" and decide a winner.

Mitch used to tell me of a gunsmith he apprenticed under.
They went to a pretty big local shoot. Here came an old man wearing well worn overalls, dusty brogans and a silver worn Win M12.
"Watch him!" Bryan told Mitch.
By the time all the side bets and matches had been settled, the old man had money sticking out of every pocket on his overalls!

I hear sumtoy will work with you to build a choke that shoots the way you want it to. Within the realm of physics I'm sure. Personally, I'm still gunning the factory tubes that came with my shotgun. It does everything I want it to. I've often thought about another tube that would be "better". But mine is tight enough without being too tight....no innuendo intended.

Glad I stopped at X full.

When I first started hunting with guns with interchangable chokes, mostly Remingtons, all I knew was that I needed an extra full. And they worked perfectly well.

OK, to tell my story won't take long. When I first started turkey hunting Winchester XX with 2oz of #5s was the thing. It did fine. Then Win. High Velocity, achieving that by backing off to 1.75 oz. That was twice as good a pattern with same choke. Next, and now, is Win. Longbeard. All of these for me are 3" #5s. I got lucky with buying only one choke tube, at that time one of the more expensive ones: Briley Super Turkey, ported, .665. All shot out of Ithaca 37s, 12 gauge. Have had no reason to try anything else in 12 gauge, although I do shoot sub-gauges sometimes.

I’ve got a benelli SBEII, that I currently possess enough turkey chokes for, that they out value the gun itself. That’s not counting the waterfowl, sporting clays, and coyote chokes for that gun as well, lol. I have just as much fun loading and testing/patterning ammo, as I do hunting. It’s all part of the process for me. I guess you can call it an addiction, or a disease 🤷‍♂️

I have a couple 12 ga guns I don’t shoot anymore since the advent of TSS. Have a couple chokes for each of them. My go to gun is now an 870 20ga that I have 6 or 7 chokes for. What has cured me of any more experimentation is the expense of patterning each with TSS. Things start to get spendy when taking multiple shots with multiple loads for each choke.

I settled on an Avian X Crusher .565 and Apex Ninja 1 5/8oz 8.5s.

I just had a new one arrive today for my Benelli M2.



It's an XF, .040, which translates to a .680-.684.

I had patterned my Benelli with Winchester Longbeard XR 3" #5, as well as Federal Heavyweight TSS #9 1 3/4oz, through a Carlsons TSS choke at .650. .650 seems really tight to me.

It did okay with TSS.



But Longbeard wasn't great. Hoping this brings a little better patterns and consisteny to lead loads.