Choke for Smoke

My most recent blog involved the intellectual gymnastics I went through trying to figure out how to choke a 28-gauge gun for quail. I’m not sure it had the slightest effect on my shooting, but it made me feel better.

The result was that technically a 75% to 95% 30” pattern gave the largest effective pattern when using 3/4 oz of No. 8s. Of course, centering a bobwhite in the middle of a 95% pattern will have the plantation cook screaming at you if hash isn’t on the menu. According to Lowry’s “Shotshell Ballistics for Windows” program, a perfectly centered nine-square-inch quail target would be mulched with more than 11 pellets. A 75% pattern center would only hit the bird with five pellets. Perhaps the cook, not the ballistic expert, ought to determine choke.

Clay targets are different. Unlike the public health warnings on that packet of butts, smoke is good for clays. When I was younger and had all the answers, I loathed seeing smoke when I shot a clay. I reasoned that a smoked target was a waste of pellets. After all, it took only two or three pellets to reliably break a clay. Any more than that meant that my pattern was too tight and that I as “wasting” pellets.

Dumb ’n dumber. Lowry’s program is based on the fact that patterns emulate the Gaussian distribution. Translation: graphed, a pattern looks like the conventional bell curve. Like an anthill, the pattern graph is higher (denser) in the center and lower (thinner) at the edges. Shotshell patterns follow this immutable mathematical rule. The perfectly distributed pattern that you hear choke makers trumpet is the figment of some flakmeister’s imagination or the result of incomplete sampling.

Since all shotgun patterns get thinner toward the edges, once you find the diameter in the pattern where the pellet count is the minimum acceptable amount to break your target (called the “effective pattern”), everything outside that point is too thin to reliably work and everything inside that point is heavier than needed. Has to be. Got to be.

Therefore, if you have the ideal pattern with the largest possible effective spread, anything you center will be hit harder than necessary. Only the thin little ring at the very edge of your “effective pattern” will be the ideal balance between too much and too little. If you center a clay and you get a nice, even break, chances are your pattern isn’t optimally large. Strange, but true.

That’s all the mathematical drivel you get this time. Boots off. Beer open.