Guncraft

When Gough Thomas commissioned a bespoke “best” gun from Henry Atkin, Ltd., in 1947, he was especially particular about its chokes and the cartridges they were regulated to. From surviving correspondence between Atkin’s and Thomas, we learn that after the gun’s initial delivery, the latter sent it back to have remedied several unspecified “barrel defects.”
    In a letter accompanying the gun’s return to Britain’s most renowned shotgun authority, Atkin’s wrote: “We have since shot the gun for pattern and it has not altered one pellet from its original trial at the ‘plate.’ We plated it with the load as stipulated by yourself, viz. 33 grains of ‘E.C.’ and 1-1/16 oz of No. 6 shot, and the patterns were . . . .” Atkin’s then listed the pellet counts at the plate for five shots per left and right barrels, which in this case placed an average 58 percent of the specified load in a 30-inch circle at 40 yards. Thomas had ordered both barrels with “Half Choke” (throwing roughly 60-percent patterns), which approximates America’s Modified choke. Though Thomas’s comments are quite detailed, nowhere are “points” (or measurements) of choke constriction mentioned—only performance expressed as a pellet-strike percentage using his pet load.
    As a trained engineer and ballistic expert, Thomas was no doubt fussier than most, but his request—hand-regulating chokes for specified performance with a chosen cartridge—long had been standard procedure when ordering a bespoke gun.
    This state of affairs hardly exists nowadays, thanks to a confluence of changes in cartridges and choke manufacturing over the past half-century. Not only have there been vast physical alterations in shotshells—plastic hulls, wads and pellet protectors; better powders; increased use of buffering; and new nontoxic shot—but now there also are a bewildering variety of loads readily available to shooters. Moreover, screw-in chokes are increasingly ubiquitous, even in best-gun circles. Notes Purdey Chairman Nigel Beaumont: “We are fitting removable chokes to a great many of our guns now. This is approaching 50 percent, and it will keep rising.” Many fine-gun makers in Britain and elsewhere no longer even regulate chokes—they are simply bored to a desired constriction in a fixed or screw-in configuration, and it is left to the owner to find the shotshell-and-choke combination that best suits an intended purpose. This makes old-fashioned choke regulation, if not a dying art, a craft of gunmaking fast receding in the tides of technological change.
    But not at Holland & Holland. The storied London firm is one of a handful of gunmakers (Purdey’s included) that still regulates its chokes by hand—and Holland’s is perhaps unique in that it employs a full-time barrel and choke regulator at its Northwood Range and Shooting Grounds to perform solely that function. Last fall I visited the grounds to meet regulator Steven Cranston as well as Russell Wilkin, Holland’s director of technical gunmaking.
    It is worth noting that H&H made its reputation not only on the mechanical and aesthetic excellence of its guns and rifles, but also on how perfectly they were regulated. William Froome, Holland’s director of gunmaking in the late 19th Century, was noted during his day as being Britain’s most-skilled rifle regulator, and the firm owes him much credit for cementing it as one of the world’s greatest gunmakers.
    Today Cranston wears Froome’s mantle and is heir to his legacy. A 28-year veteran of Holland’s, Cranston—tall, loquacious and with a head topped with a shock of close-cropped hair going white—was trained as a barrelmaker for four years before moving to the shooting grounds to specialize in regulating. Given the importance of riflemaking at Holland’s, much of Cranston’s craft centers on bolt- and double-rifle regulation, but he also fine-tunes the chokes of every Holland smoothbore at his dedicated workshop on the grounds.
    As noted in my prior two columns on Holland’s barrelmaking (Sept/Oct and Nov/Dec), rough chokes are established (to Full constriction) in the machining process and later are reamed out by the barrelmakers to desired nominal points of constriction as the tubes are made into a set of barrels. Proper barrel convergence is built in early by meticulous machining of the breeches to predetermined angles, and careful assembly assures it during the barrelmaking process.
    Cranston gets the gun when it has been made fully functional but is still in the white. It is his task to plate it, count pellet strikes within a 30-inch circle and determine if the chokes not only give desired percentages matching its nominal choke borings but also produce game-getting patterns—in Cranston’s words “nice, consistent, even patterns.”
    Almost invariably, the chokes will need some tweaking, and Cranston achieves this by altering the angle and shape of the choke cone. His tool of choice is an old lathe with a revolving rod tipped by a modified bore-lapping lead—split at its head to accommodate a wedge than can be tapped in or out to change the lead’s angle and the force brought to bear on portions of the cone. Cranston coats the lead with an oil-emery paste, holds the barrels in his hands, inserts the spinning lead from the breech end, quickly runs it up the barrel to minimize contact with the bore, and then goes to work on the choke cones.
    Here is where Cranston’s mastery of the “black arts” of traditional guncraft comes into play. The talkative regulator was momentarily at a loss for words when I asked him to describe his technique. “It’s all by feel,” he said finally. “That and by experience. When I touch the cone, I can feel the shape of it and the way the lead bites.”
    Cranston will work the lead in and out against the cone, varying the pressure and sometimes spinning the barrels as he works. “Then I’ll put a cleaning rod through it and check the cone formation,” he explained. “Depending on what I see, I might tinker around a bit—maybe tap the wedge in a bit, maybe pull it out, and touch the cone again.”
    Then it’s back to the plate to check patterns. Plating and honing are processes repeated as often as needed, with an average of about 25 shots taken at the plates per barrel. “During regulation, I’m just changing the shape of the choke cone,” Cranston said. “I like to keep angles in the cone as soft as possible; for one reason I don’t know what sort of loads the owner will put through it in the future.” (For example, hard nontoxic shot, particularly of large diameter, passing through tight constrictions with steep cones is suspected to be one of the causes of bulges at the choke.)
    Cranston’s ultimate goals are to ensure that the gun prints its patterns to point of aim and that its chokes produce patterns as well as the laws of physics governing pellet distribution allow.
    Conventional British chokes traditionally have been made to a conical-parallel design—that is, with the choke cone transitioning from the bore to a parallel section of a certain constriction and length (see illustration). Within the broad parameters of this design, UK gunmakers have arrived at any number of variations: in the length and angle of the cone as well as in the length of the parallel section, with each individual firm having its own ideas as to ideal form.
    Dr. Derek Allsop, one of England’s foremost contemporary ballisticians, developed an electronic probe used to measure choke profiles in guns of differing makes (see charts, p. 90). He noted the following of his measurements in guns from  London’s two leading firms: “Purdey and Holland & Holland have totally different philosophies to achieve their choke pattern. Purdey deliberately give their choke profiles a sharp angle with a short parallel at the muzzle, whereas Holland & Holland bore their chokes with a shallow angle and longer parallel muzzle section. There is no doubt these well-known gunmakers achieve excellent patterns but by using totally different approaches.” (This example could be expanded upon almost ad infinitum, given the variety of choke configurations in use today.)
    Cranston discussed Holland’s preferred design: “With a game gun, we like about a one-inch parallel at the muzzle—three-quarters of an inch minimum—and a soft slope to the cone and a straight tidy bore from the breech forward. There should be no recesses in the bore, and we try to keep everything as tight and straight as possible.” A long parallel potentially serves a couple of purposes: It can help protect the critical cone area from dents or damage that could occur were it located at the muzzle, and—according to one traditional theory, anyway—it helps stabilize the shot column after it passes through the cone before exiting.
    Ideally, chokes should be regulated with a customer’s preferred cartridge—per the Gough Thomas example—but this is hardly the case anymore. “It’s very rare now,” Cranston said. “Only one or two customers a year asks us to regulate using their own cartridges.”
    When a customer doesn’t specify, Cranston regulates using a traditional load for the particular gauge (or bore) of the gun. In the case of the ubiquitous 12-bore, this is a proprietary 67mm 1-1/16-oz load of English No. 6s with a fiber wad made for H&H by England’s Hull Cartridge Co.
    This long has been the standard payload and shot size for regulating guns in the UK, and fiber remains popular in Britain because many estates where driven shooting takes place require biodegradable wads.
    “We try—we try—to get what we perceive as the perfect choke formation,” Cranston said. “In doing so I will regulate for a certain cartridge, get it right, then if the owner wants, he can play around and change cartridges for different applications.”
For best results, Cranston emphasized, this requires the owner to invest time at the plate or at the pattern board. “You’ve still got to do your homework,” he said. “If you don’t like the patterns with what you are using, then you change the cartridge and find something that works.”
    Given potential performance variability from changing shells, does the sort of old-fashioned choke regulation as practiced by Cranston still matter? As noted earlier, many fine-gun makers no longer think so.
    It’s a question, however, that really should be considered on a couple of levels. At the most fundamental, Holland’s entire barrelmaking process—including Cranston’s careful choke regulation—does assure that the chamber, forcing cone, bore, choke cone and parallel are all concentric with one another and that both barrels will print where pointed when fed appropriate loads. Should the gun be used with cartridges to which it was specifically regulated, the shooter can enjoy full confidence that it will perform—within the constraints of the laws of physics and the vagaries of cartridge manufacture—exactly as promised.
    And confidence is of not inconsiderable importance in the art of shooting—promoting in the gunner what Gough Thomas called “relaxed preparedness” when confronted with challenging birds. If the shooter has utter confidence in his choke-and-cartridge combination, that in itself often promotes better shooting.
    In that regard, the answer will be evident in a bigger bulge in your game bag.

Author’s Note: Special thanks to Steven Cranston, Russell Wilkin, Nigel Beaumont and Derek Allsop for their assistance. Aspects of Cranston’s craft can be viewed in the excellent DVD “A Look Inside Holland & Holland: The Royal Gunmaker,” available from www.HollandandHolland.com.