Damascus chokes

[Cold Spring]

I have sets of full-tapered choke reamers and tooling for 12-16-20g and have opened many chokes on damascus, twist and steel barreled guns using a drive rod from the breech end. Almost all of them done for myself and just a few for close friends. Sorry readers, I don't do commission work. My favorite combo is Light Mod and I-Mod. IME damascus and twist barrels are easiest to ream, with Parker steel next in line, then Ithaca and LC Smith steel, and AH Fox tubes are generally the hardest as regards ease of reaming the factory choke tapers forward. If that's what you want, I don't see any reason for not opening chokes on composite barrels that are otherwise in good shape with no heavy pitting and with sufficient barrel wall thickness as measured at the the choke leades. Alternately, good spreaders can be used for the relatively few shots taken while close cover hunting, but imo spreaders aren't a cost effective option for those that shoot volume sporting clays or skeet.

Again I say good spreaders, as confirmed by paper pattern testing at increasing ranges.

Of course a real downside of having a 'smith open chokes using a conventional parallel sided adjustable reamer (not tapered) is that it’s a dead giveaway of that work when trying to sell an otherwise high condition/all original vintage double-gun.

[Drew Hause]

Someone apparently figured out how to cut chokes in pattern welded tubes > 150 years ago

W.W. Greener produced new shotguns with damascus barrels in 2007-2008.
From the Greener website in 2007:
“Barrels - are made of the highest quality steel and bored to maintain the famous choke boring improvements, made by W W Greener in the 1870s, to optimise shooting performance, and to ensure patterns of shot guaranteed to meet customers' exact requirements whether for game, wildfowl or clay pigeon shooting. A few pairs of guns are being made with interchangeable steel and Damascus barrels.”

Vic Venters (Dec. 2008) wrote an article in the Sept/Oct '07 issue of Shooting Sportsman regarding the Greener guns:
“They are indeed newly made damascus barrels, built on vintage tubes that David Dryhurst - Greener's master gunmaker - has been collecting since the '60s and '70s. Some are old Greener stock, some are English and no doubt some are Belgian. A few of these sets came from Dyson..."

Vic shared that Dryhurst told him that cutting choke in crolle tubes was more difficult in that the metal would occasionally fracture.
Pattern welded tubes, related to the high heat hammer forging process behave as a monometal.
It would have been valuable to prepare photomicrographs of the micro-fractures to see if they occurred at the iron-steel alternee welds.