Shotgun Choke and Pattern Explained

hey guys today on backcountry college we're gonna talk all about patterning shotguns we're gonna talk about chokes shot shells and what that means downrange as far as your pattern goes [Music] we're gonna shoot at a couple of different ranges we're gonna try some different chokes and some different shell combinations and see what happens now for those of you who are new to shotguns I just want to take a quick minute just to explain what I mean by choke so basically a shotgun barrel is a perfect cylinder from back here where your shell is chambered all the way up until just before the muzzle now most shotguns you're gonna buy these days they're gonna have a removable choke in the front here now what a choke does basically is it next down or chokes down the cylinder that is your barrel and so on one end of the spectrum you have your full chokes and you're super full chokes is which is the tightest you're gonna get it's gonna throw the tightest pattern and then on the other end you're gonna have like your skeet chokes and then in the middle you're gonna have like an improved and then a modified and then it moves up to the full chokes now the choke that you're going to select it's really going to depend on what you want to do and how far you're expecting to shoot now if you're shooting flooded timber shooting ducks coming down through there and your shots are less than 20 yards probably modified or and improved even is going to be best for you if you're past shooting ducks or dove and they're out there pretty good ways maybe you want a full choke but if you move if you go with a full choke in a really tight shooting situation where your target is closed just remember your patterns going to be real tight and if you do hit that bird you might just make hamburger out now what we have in here right now is an improved cylinder which is still pretty wide open it'll go from improved to modified to full and we're going to take a look at what the pattern that each of those cylinders or each of those chokes throws now for this improved cylinder I'm at thirty yards right now which is a pretty long shot so let's walk up there and take a look and see what it did so you can see at thirty yards I was obviously a bit high on that I was expecting those pellets to drop a little bit more than they did but you can really see how far that that pattern is spread out we'll go ahead and change targets move up to about 25 yards or let's move to 20 yards and just see what that does now you can see with this improved cylinder now that we moved up to 20 yards it really tightened that pattern up whereas at 30 yards we had shot scattered all over the target now pretty much the whole pattern is within that 30 inch circle so I'm going to go ahead and take that improve cylinder out and put a full choke in and back up again 230 yards and see what we get now with the full choke we were able to back up to 30 yards and still get that full pattern within this 30 inch circle and we still have quite a few pellets within the kill zone so now that we've taken a look at some of the differences between chokes and the patterns downrange I want to take a quick look and see what difference your shot shell can make on your pattern now we've been shooting two and three-quarter inch high brass number sixes and I've got some three-inch shells here these are number sixes as well now the big difference here aside from a little more powder is that your two and three quarters here has one ounce a shot and this has an ounce and a half show you so we should see a big difference in the density of her pattern at a given range so you can really see with this 3-inch shell you have a lot higher density in your pattern now this shot is obviously off to the right a little bit but we still killed that bird there's still a lot of pellets in the kill zone so it's always a good idea to get out there and shoot your gun with different chokes different shell combinations just to see what happens you'd be amazed at the difference that in your pattern that just moving from one shell to another shell will make well that's going to wrap us up for today I hope you guys learned something and here in North Idaho turkey season is just getting started and I can actually hear a bird gobbling down in the canyon they're a couple hundred yards away so get out there get after them and don't forget to check us out at backcountry hunters dot org we'll see you there

Channel: Clay Hayes

Views: 150,604

Keywords: shotgun, choke, shotgun choke, shotgun choke patterns, shotgun choke patterns explained, shot shells, pattern, pattern density, Clay Hayes, shot density, full choke, modified choke, modified choke vs full choke, turkey hunting, pattern a shotgun, how to pattern a shotgun, how to pattern a shotgun for turkey

Id: VCkDCRTsC_c

Length: 5min 23sec (323 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2019