cra1948,
[quote] There's not much you can do to extend its effective range or accuracy. Yeah, I know, there's a whole cottage industry developed around selling supposedly high-tech screw in chokes to those gullible enough to think spending a hundred bucks or so on the latest, greatest will enable them to kill ducks another ten yards out, or jelly-head a gobbler another five. Truth is, those little round balls run out of steam pretty fast. Same with loading for them. If you want to tinker with miracle wads and different powders to see if you can beat factory loads, more power to you....live it up. There's really a very limited amount of performance improvement possible. [quote]
To a certain extent I agree with you, especially about magic chokes. But have been experimenting considerably with newer shot since the mid-90s, and it makes far more difference than chokes.
I played around a fair bit this past Spring with TSS in a .410 as well as a 20, and for certain the results on the pattern board are pretty impressive. These were my first real pattern tests after slinging shot at stuff for 50+ years, and I learned a good bit, including that my new O/U had considerable divergence between the upper and lower barrels, perhaps 8” at 40 yards. After some on-line research, I discovered that it’s far from uncommon, even with much more expensive guns than mine, and the solutions are troublesome and/or expensive. I’m actually fortunate in that my gun’s barrels at least put the shot on the same vertical line, and 8” is not as bad as many. I’m going to try futzing around with loads and chokes to improve things, and am also going to try a Fastfire 3 on clays next week. I used a 3moa model during the Turkey season, but have an 8moa on it now. I like the gun otherwise, and hope to be able to keep it. I’ll be using lead of course, not the precious-metal loads I was testing last Spring.
BTW, in case Ms. Clarke didn’t tell you; you now have one less copy of your shotgun book. I have
Western Skies here somewhere too, unless one of my children made off with it.
