choke question

[Mike of the Mountain]

Originally Posted by Paul Ehlers

Just to add my two cents worth to this discussion.

All of the above posters are spot-on with their explanation of choking. Parker themselves relied heavily on the patterning board for the purposes of determining the choking of a particular set of barrels.

I have several PGCA letters on the various Parkers I have owned. In a majority of these letters Parker in their records recorded choking as percentage of a certain size of pellet patterning in a specific size of circle at a specified yardage. As an example "left barrel patterns 180 pellets of #7 shot in a 30" circle at 40yards distance"

In my small sampling of letters. I have found this to be the normal means the factory used to determine choking. I do have a few letters where the chokes are stated as Full & Full, IC-Mod etc. My conclusion based on the letters I have seen is that Parker spent a lot of time at the patterning board to get their chokes just right for any particular gun.

Bottom line is the only way to really determine how your gun is choked is to spend time at the patterning board.

Yup, Paul nailed it. Fox did the same thing. They patterned the guns for specific chokes. I see it would be the technologically correct way to get the actual choke/pattern combo instead of the modern industry standardization, but I wonder if there was more to it than that? Issue with components and reliability? Difference in individual barrel smiths and the way they made their product? Difference in machining? Anyone know?