... Like I said before Larry, the constriction doesn't tell the whole story. ...
Maybe not, but it's a pretty good indicator about what's gonna happen before you light it off. A common choke constriction with a common profile and a common shell is more'n likely to give a common result, less they not be able to mass produce these things.
Chuck, I will not argue with your statement, in fact I agree with it. The point I was trying to make is that Larry has insinuated repeatedly, at virtually every opportunity, that 28-ga. Repro M/F chokes, as they came from the factory, are useless. They certainly aren't useless in my case, how about yours?
Actually, what I have insinuated is that they are OVER-CHOKED. How they work for you is . . . well, how they work for you. And you can certainly open up any tight choke using spreaders. But if M/F 28's were supposed to be choked 019/038, then most manufacturers would choke them similarly. And they don't.
If you eliminate doves from the picture, most 28's you see in the uplands are used for grouse and woodcock, or quail. Shots on those birds tend to be relatively close. More open chokes reduce aiming error, and also keep from turning a gamebird into flying hamburger.
I will add that the Parker Repro 28's are not the only oddballs when it comes to a lot of choke in a 28ga. I recently measured a V. Bernardelli, originally marked IC/IM (4 stars/2 stars--except it looked like someone X'd out one of the 2 stars) that measured .010/.039. The very interesting thing about that gun is that it was one of those that would have fooled you completely had you tried to measure the chokes with one of Galazan's "drop in" gauges. It was significantly overbored (565/569), so the drop-in gauge read it as cyl and about IM. I shot a couple patterns, using standard target loads, at 50 feet--a fairly typical distance for woodcock and early season grouse. The R barrel pattern had a diameter of about 14"; the left about 9". I'd be OK with the R pattern if it were in the L barrel, since that's a 2nd shot deal. The L, however, would be totally useless for my purposes. WAY too tight.
Back when the Repros were being produced, if you were buying a fixed choke gun and wanted open chokes, you pretty much had to take short barrels. (True of guns like the Ithaca SKB and Browning BSS, for example.) If you wanted longer barrels, you got tight chokes--whether you wanted them or not. Today, thanks largely to an overall trend favoring longer barrels, and the writings of now-deceased outdoor scribes like Gene Hill and Michael McIntosh, it's much easier to find long-nosed 28ga sxs--with relatively open chokes. For most people, the longer-barreled guns handle a little better (because 28's are light enough as it is), and the more open chokes help them hit better without reducing close-in birds to nothing but guts and feathers.
Last edited by L. Brown; 01/03/11 10:44 AM.
