Two hundred forty-two years ago, Thomas Page of Norwich, England, published a book--
The Art of Shooting Flying containing directions for the choice of guns: Experiments Discovering the EXECUTION OF BARRELS...etc.
--in which he had his gunmaker (Aimwell) and a customer (Friendly) discuss and test the pattern and pennetration of various barrel lengths and borings in connection with various loads at various distances (20 to 60 yards). "Choke" was never mentioned because constricting the muzzle was inconsistent with loading from the muzzle. Yet the lesson well-known a quarter-millennium ago, of determining pattern by test shooting at a given distance and to produce an actual shot count on a target of given size, seems to have been lost on today's Instant Gratification genneration.
A hundred thirty-five years ago when choke boring was starting to be mentioned in the sporting press and gunmaker catalogs, Parker Brothers, America's pioneer maker of breechloaders, printed this caveat in their 1872-73 catalogs: "...satisfactory results can only be determined by repeated trials at a target."
Once choke boring was well established, Parker continued to warn that trials were necessary to establish shot count in a 30-inch circle target at 40 yards: "Caution--the dime test does not work. The shooting qualities of our guns...pattern and pennetration are determined by the form of the choking and not the exact muzzle diameter."
I have measured chokes of NIB and "unfired" Parkers that are completely at odds with the patterns achieved per the factory hanging tag's pattern tests. For example, a .695-inch "full choke" Trojan 12-bore left barrel actually patterned 51% modified and the .712-inch right barrel nominally modified patterned 40% improved cylinder at the factory in 1928 (s/n 227241, which, incidently, sold recently in Jim Julia's auction for $10,350). Further, the shells, powders, shot, wads, and loadings were all different when our old double guns were new. So what does this all mean?
Answer: Those who ignore the lessons of history in re: pattern and pennetration only being accurately determined by counting shot holes in a certain size target at a measured distance... well, these people really don't want to know the answer...or as Henry Thoreau so aptly put it: "They beat on the branches rather than go for the root." Plunking down $25 for Tony's multi-bore "Choke Measurer" is the present day equalivent of the "dime test" that Parker Brothers warned against in the 19th century. The guy who plunked down 10K for the NIB Trojan can drop the world's most expensive measuring device in the muzzles and the gun will still measure full/modified, but the only way to know how it will pattern is to fire it with the selected modern-day load at a target 30 inches in diameter at 40 yards distance, and that ain't gonna happen.
If "choke" is really important to the purchaser of an old double gun--and this is a double gun website--then actual constriction requires measuring the entire bore, and the cost of doing this would be better spent on a trial at a test target at a local gun club. Although the Gun List has since disappeared in a corporate reorganization, I recall the old days when the sellers of old Parker wall hangers felt obligated to report the "chokes" on el cheapo hammer guns that could not even be fired.
I also recall buying a Parker hammer gun at Louisville a decade ago that seemed to be too loose-chambered for a 16-gauge old paper shell. Thinking it might be a rare 14-gage I made the rounds of the "experts" who are wont to attend gun shows with their sophisticated measuring devices (well-known people!), not one of which who could pronounce my new acquisition 16- or 14-bore. I have since been warry of pundits with measuring devices who predict pattern results. EDM
