Need some advice from people with experience: What is the best yardage for testing shotguns for point of impact? 10 yards? 15 or 20?

I shoot a variety of older field shotguns at clay targets, mostly 5-Stand. As a former ATA trap shooter (27-yarder)I'm quite aware that the pattern percentages above/below the bead vary from gun to gun. Plus I want to find out if they are shooting a foot or so left/right at 35 yards. I'm dealing with a number of 50-70 year old 'pawn shop rescue guns' that have lived a hard life and barrels minutely bent a bit off wouldn't surprise me.

I have access to a patterning board and once I figure out the POI issues, I'll deal with 'patterning' at distance for choke purposes. First I want to deal with determining the 'center' of the pattern.

Hopefully one of you have done this drill before and can shorten up my learning curve.

13 yards is a good distance to do a quick assessment. Patterns have not had enough time to open up and it is easy to see windage issues. My main interest is trap and tripling the 13 yard POI is a good approximation for most guns at 40 yards which is about where 27 yard Handicap targets are broke. Very high ribbed guns and un-singles are a different ball game.

Lots of people use 16 yards to simplify stock adjustments, ie. 1/16" of change in comb height equals 1" shift in pattern at 16 yards.

Michael

Thanks Mag410. I've seen the 13 yard distance mentioned before. I'll start out with that and see if that tells the story of POI.

I prefer the 16yd because the wad has time to get out of the way and not tear my paper right where im shooting.

Sixteen yards is also a good distance for other reasons. This range will concentrate the pattern enough to really tell the center of the pattern, especially shooting several shots.

The big reason, though, is that at 16 yards a movement of the comb of the shotgun of 1/16" will move the POI 1".

Techniques for patterning matter also...never look at the gun, shoot quickly looking hard at the target (as in wingshooting).

For checking barrel convergence with the gun, the opposite is true - sight the shotgun like a rifle to see if it hits where aimed (finding a barrel or choke problem, checking barrel convergence).

I always check poi at a typical distance I expected to be shooting most of the time. I.E. if I were shooting skeet, I checked poi at about 22 yards, trap at about 35 yards, etc. If I were hunting, with these guns I would check them at about 20,25 yards.