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Frances Sell wrote some good books on shotguns, as did Mr. Greener himself.

Yep--and the Gun Digest annuals are good source of material as well, especially the older ones, when John Amber was the editor.

There's just not as much to write about with shotguns. A shotgun is like a golf club, if it fits you, and you swing it right, you'll hit with it. 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. Rifles, on the other hand.... put a new barrel on it, a different twist, throated for a specific bullet...a lot of fancy machine work that can be done to ensure shot to shot mechanical consistency. If you're tired of shooting it at 200 yards, stretch it out to 300, or 400 or spend some time and money and play with the big boys waayyy out there. There are so many things you can do with rifles (or handguns.) There are, in most places, year round hunting of some kind, there are all kinds of sport disciplines with rifled bores. At our club (all rifles and handguns) there are probably ten disciplines going on regularly. It's an unusual weekend when there aren't at least two or three events. With shotguns you can hunt birds, hunt ducks, or shoot clay targets. There's trap, skeet, sporting clays, 5-stand and FITSAC and their similarities are greater than their differences.

Don't get me wrong. I love shotguns and have at least one specialized shotgun for every use I have for a smoothbore. I have a couple that I consider really, really nice shotguns. Back when I would spend as much on a shotgun as my friends might on a snowmobile or motorcycle they thought I was crazy. Most of those snowmobiles and motorcycles went to the junkyard decades ago. I'm still enjoying the shotguns and, if necessary or desired, I could get a significant portion of my money back after having used them for years. But I get them out, use them, clean them and put them away. There's not a lot of tinkering to be done with them.

Besides, Elmer Fudd carried a shotgun.

My first shotgun was a model 37 Featherlight 20 gauge. I once hit a triple on a rising covey that flushed BEHIND me after I'd walked past. Wish I'd had a witness as I was 15 years old and nobody believed it. Next was a 1100 12 gauge which was not great but OK. I sold it before I was twenty.

After I'd learned about shotgun fit (Brister ) and also knowing I could never afford it done right I spent my time looking for sub $1000 guns that shot where I was looking. All Citoris were out for me much to my dismay. I once shouldered a Beretta 682 "greystone" that felt like it was part on my DNA, but was about double my budget at the time. I should have traded the 1976 Monte Carlo I was driving for the gun to the shop owner. Live n learn.

I pretty much gave up on a properly fit shotgun mostly because bird hunting was about 10 percent of what it was when I was a teenager so I went hard into ducks. I think this is why I never got into buying books on shotgunning---it was too upsetting.

All the guys I duck hunted with basically bought an 870 every year and threw it away at the end of the season and bought another in September. LOL I bought an 870 Special Purpose and actually cleaned it after a morning in the swamp. I can hit with it pretty well, but it feels like I'm swinging a lead pipe and I only tolerate it.

True Story on shotgun fit:
I shot Trap and Skeet every Saturday morning with an older guy that worked at the same gun shop I did. My mom would drop me off and he would get us to work before the store opened at 10:00 am I was 14-15 at the time. I had run 95-96 many times in Trap with one gun or another, but always choked at running 100 straight. A few years later I was home from my first year of college and went to the range with a girl I was trying to impress. I rented a cheap Winchester autoloader (1200, 1400?) anyway I never let on to the kid that pulled for me that I had done this before and he was stunned when I hit 25 ( what I had paid for ) and asked if I wanted to keep going. On the 100 shot and and hundred broken clays he was losing it! He ran into the club house and started recounting to everyone in earshot the newbie that busted 100 straight with a rented gun and cotton balls stuffed in his ears. I never let on but I learned that day that cheap Winchester fit me and I found one for sale at Roses Dime Store ca. 1982 and bought it for about $125 on sale. It jammed constantly on anything I ran in it so I sold it frustration. Have got two 870's now and still hope I come across a Greystone one day. And if I do it will go everywhere with me rain or shine!

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.

Bell debunked a lot of "common wisdom" regarding pressures and chamber length. Even today, people don't want to hear it; it goes against their years of wrong-thinking.


I realize the limitations of writing for a magazine. Your recent article on drillings covered a lot of ground in an entertaining way.

Rifles have a long history of being the shooting star in the minds of Americans, with shotguns being the more utilitarian tool. It seems that the Europeans and Brits had a bigger love affair with shotguns and made many as works of art.

5nDime : You’re breaking my heart ❤️
What happened with the girl ? Did she Out Shoot you ?

I consider myself a shotgun loonie, statistics are so much more esoteric when analyzing patterns, rather than the aggregate average of a sequence of individual shots.

I’m still looking for a shotgun smith that can “convert” one of my 20 ga Red Labels to 16 gauge , and lightly backbore it of course.
Weight is perfect for that perfect Upland hunting 16 gauge. Bore is not much different from a back bored 20 to a standard 16 , So I Prefer to retain the 20 ga chokes if possible, but not mandatory I suppose if they end up not too tight.
Skeet 20 would become Light Modified 16, If You Follow.

Along the same lines , I have a couple of 12 ga Express barrels that want their forcing cones lengthened, and some parabolic backboring. Again retaining the factory RemChokes & Threading

The choke becomes a tuner for the long full barrel length parabolic backbore choke.

Loony Enough ?

I don't claim to be an expert, but I've read what some experts have written. As mentioned, fit to the user is important for most of us, but someone really skilled and talented with a shotgun could borrow yours, mine, and anybody else's and embarrass most of us.

I think it was Brister, probably among others, who preached the importance of shot string and did some testing that took a lot more planning and effort (and risk) than most are willing to put in. Mule Deer has written about the importance of good quality shot for good patterns although cheap shot can be beneficial for scattered short range loads.

Optimizing the combination of shot type, shot size, choke, etc. is the way to optimize distance and effectiveness. Don't think that's all that different than trying to take a rifle shooting 1.5" groups and find what will make it shoot sub MOA groups. Just not as many people have that interest in shotgun optimization as someone else mentioned.

That's pretty loony!

Though Eileen and I just spend a couple hours weighing various 20-gauges we own, along with measuring the chokes, etc. The daughter of some of our old friends wants to start bird hunting (we helped her get a first deer a couple years ago), and beforehand we had her shoot several of our rifles--and let her choose her favorite. Which of course probably works better than somebody choosing one for her.

We're going to do the same thing ASAP with various guns, along with some shooting instruction. Eileen is particularly good at that with other women.

A couple other thoughts.
1. Several years ago Tom Roster did a lot of work with steel shot and chokes that was I guess proprietary that I used to see in state game and fish agency waterfowl reg publications. Apparently he compiled data from thousands of shots.

2. The woman who won the Olympic gold medal for trap, which is international trap (targets at around 60 mph compared to around 40 mph for American trap), went 125 for 125 in the two days of qualifying for the finals. IIRC her closest competitor missed at least 3 or 4 (perhaps 5) targets in the qualifying round. I imagine a lot of work went into finding the right combination of choke and load components that she used.

Fit is everything .

If it fits right, and you only have to point and hit the switch, you won’t feel the recoil.

Move, Mount, Shoot. Don’t Stop Swinging to admire the break.
Just Paint out your target with the shot string

Aiming is for rifles, and has its place.

There be more mechanics that artists in the shooting world. The former tinker with their toys while the latter use a broad brush, active imagination and a vision unrestrained.

Put another way, if Dirty Harry carried a shotgun he wouldn’t have asked the punks if they felt lucky.

I think it is possible to do too much reading and thinking about how to do it. It took me a while to realise that.

My old man was a terrifically good wing shot, to the extent that he would do it with a .22, just for giggles, because a shotgun was too easy. He never could explain it to me though, or at least in a way that made sense to me. He would just see the bird and shoot it. I don't think he ever gave it a moment's thought.

Meantime, as a kid I would read about various theories on lead, and yet on any shot where I had time to think about it I'd likely miss. On a shot where I had no time to think, such as a bird erupting under my feet and catching me out, I'd have no such difficulty.

It took me a while to put two and two together, and that was helped by another bloke, who had been a champion shot and could also explain how to do it (the two don't always go together), and from reading Ruffer, and that was that I was missing the easy ones because I was thinking about leading - overthinking it in fact. This bloke (and Ruffer) both pointed out that your brain is perfectly capable of doing this subconsciously, so long as you don't let your conscious thinking get in the way. He also showed me the importance of gun fit and a smooth moving mount, just as you say, and firing as soon as the buttplate hits your shoulder. Forget about lead, and your subconscious will attend to it for you.

That is how I do it. I don't think about lead at all. I focus on the bird - in fact on the head of the bird if I can see it, or on the clay, and stay focussed on that as the gun comes up, hits my shoulder and goes bang. I don't think about anything, least of all lead. I don't look at the barrels, or anything else but the bird or clay. I have shot a good deal of sporting clays, as well and gamebirds, pest birds, ducks and ground game, and a bit of trap too. Won my share of prizes as well. This is what works for me.

True.And handguns, and rifles,and bullet casting, plus a muzzleloader and flintlock expert. Also, a PH in Africa, and a World IPSC Champion.

We got about 10% of what he could have written before he stopped. I miss reading his stuff.

Not recommending you try this without proper backstop, but
.22Lr has a very similar trajectory to each individual shot in flight.
MV is very similar, BC not all that much different

I shot my shotgun on paper with all 3 chokes. The improved cylinder choke actually made a donut large enough to miss a clay or bird, about 8" in the center with no pellets, (Was testing with #8 shot standard shells. I bought 4 Briley choke tubes (longer than the original). They made perfect patterns. I now have extended choke tubes in cylinder, ic, light mod, mod, and full. I shoot much better in sporting clays with extended choke tube than with the standard short choke tubes. It does make a difference.

Some manufacturers are now making their choke tube longer with better pattern results.

Idea is to get the most pellets in a 30" circle at various yards, like 20,30, and 40 yards. Enough pellets to make a clean break or kill. For me, the results were cylinder for 15 yards, improved cylinder for 20 yards, light mod for 25 yards, modified for 30 yards, improved mod for 35 yards, and full choke for 40 yards. Extra full chokes try to extend the range to 50 yards for turkey hunting.

Anyway, good shooting, if you can find shells and ammo.

DoubleD look at the bore to choke transition with the flush choke snugly threaded
I’m guessing it won’t be a smooth transition like with the Brileys ; Hence the donut blown pattern.

Send a picture with your warranty complaint, maybe they can resolve it, or not.
Sometimes a flush IC is all you want to Hunt with, so it is worth pursuing.

What shotgun is it ?

Bailey chokes are top tier, but not always perfect. I got a set once that needed the threads cleaned up

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.

The reason the longer choke tubes are throwing better patterns is tapering the constriction of the shot cup over a
longer distance in the newer long choke tubes reduces shot deformation. This is not a new revelation, as the shot charge constriction spread out over a longer distance in the barrel was well know in the early 1900's into the WWII years.

When "Ballistic Products" was a fledgling company in the 1970's they provided loading data in every catalog. They had a L.C Smith "SXS" that would shoot killing patterns on duck loads out to 70 yards. This was still during the lead shot days. To the load testers this was just amazing and of course had to find out why. The inside of the barrels were tapered very gradually before the shot charge reached the choke.

I have a 1901 built Parker Brothers side by side 12 gauge build on a #2 frame that throws just wonderful patterns. The barrels are choked "IC" and "LM"....perfect for sporting clays. You guessed it the inside of the barrels are tapered as I had the inside of the barrels measured.

doctor_Encore,

Yep, a tapered bore can make an definite difference. Probably my favorite upland gun is a pre-WWII Sauer 12-gauge SxS that has tight chokes (like many back then) but patterns beautifully with anything from spreader to long-range loads, including Bismuth. It has tapered bores.

Might also add that I have a local friend who's never patterned a shotgun in his life, whether to see where the pattern hits for him, or how the shot spreads/holes/etc. Instead he buys a shotgun and takes it hunting. If he can't hit anything with it, he sells the gun and buys another--even when he buys guns with adjustable buttstocks, as many have these days.