Rifled Choke Tubes

[longbow]

Many years ago I worked on a mushroom farm and we had a rat problem. The rats get into the mushroom beds and tunnel eating grain that is added to supplement the mushroom manure.

I managed to shoot a rat twice with the .22 LR shotshell from a rifle at close range and while the impact knocked the rat down it didn't kill it or keep it down. The foreman had a .22 mag. handgun with shotshells and that had a much better effect on the rat.

I didn't take any apart but it appeared that the .22 mag. had a bigger payload of heavier shot than the regular .22 LR. It was certainly much more effective that is for sure!

I should have checked patterns but didn't. I haven't seen shotshells for .22 or .22 mag. locally but will keep my eyes open as I have both .22 LR handgun and rifle and .22 mag. handgun. Yet another test I'll get around to eventually.

Well, the rifled choke tube hasn't seen any progress but I am in the midst of making a hammer sizing die to try sizing Lee slugs to about 0.665" or close. The goal being to remove the taper so they can be paper patched back up to bore snug fit into shotcup/bore as some of my home made slugs are designed for. So far that has shown good results and I have several home made slugs loaded up to tes. Now to add some Lee's both as cast and sized for comparison. I find the tape is far in excess of the taper on shotcup petals.

My Lee 1 oz. slugs run 0.685" nose and 0.673" at the skirt and the 7/8 oz. runs 0.682" at the nose and 0.667" at skirt. I checked a couple of each and they were very close and very round. Both moulds cast very well. The 1 oz. mould i sold style and needed a bit of deburring but now drops nice slugs easily. The 7/8 oz. is new style and also casts well but takes a couple of good taps on the hinge bolt to drop slugs. I'll likely give the core pin a bit of deburring but it isn't bad.

I have several different designed slugs in both full bore and wad slugs to try and part of the goal is so find slugs I want to test further in rifled gun and/or rifled choke tube. One day I will get a rifled choke tube of my design made!

Two totally different topics in that post! Well, I haven't even finished my morning coffee yet so thought processes are a little iffy!

Longbow

[Ballistics in Scotland]

BIS:

I can't remember the finer details regarding my sub-caliber shotgun experience.
The rat/revolver hunting mostly took place in a grain loft; You sneaked quietly into the pitch-black loft, clutching your flashlight & gun in a weaver-stance, then you switched on the flashlight and tried to nail one of the rats when they scurried for cover. The shot was about #12 and quite effective within 10 to 15 feet.

We also used 9mm Flobert shot cartridges in smooth bore single-shot guns, but even though they had a much larger payload compared to the tiny .22, they didn't seem to be anymore deadly on rats or sparrows - perhaps because they carried too large a shot size (#7 and #9) to produce a decent pattern.

As for doughnut pattern; I once tried a small load of #12 shot - with a tuft of tissue paper for wad - in my .177 Diana air gun. It gave the nicest little doughnut-shaped pattern without a single pellet in the center.

The 9mm rimfire Webley was the first gun I ever owned without air coming into it, and delivered rather good patterns despite having only a single cardboard cup wad. It was quite adequate for semi-urban pigeons at fifteen or so yards, as long as you didn't have any quixotic objection to shooting sitters. The .22 (and they made this in smoothbore too) should be just as good in the conditions you describe, and even less likely to cause structural damage.

I might find another someday. I have several pounds of primed but never loaded Fiocchi cases which I bought at auction, when the Birmingham Gun Barrel Proof House decided they were never likely to prove that many 9mm. shotguns. I intended them for .32 rimfire conversion (which I established can be done), but they would be a cheap route to shooting what is, for its size, a fairly expensive gun to feed.

I've seen it said on various threads (which doesn't surprise me) that it can be safe and nearly as accurate a true cylinder to shoot slugs from a choke barrel, as long as they will pass through without undue effort. But the reason choke tightens up the pattern is that it imparts an inward movement to the shot. It occurs to me that the same inward movement imparted to a ball which isn't central in the bore, would be a great source of inaccuracy (although eccentricity of mass, say by a bubble in a cast slug, isn't as harmful as with a rifle.)

It seems a good idea, therefore, to use some sort of hard wad with an accurately centred depression forming most of a ball-sized hemisphere, to make sure the ball is concentric with the choke.

The reason the choke must be short with birdshot, is that it stops doing anything when that inward movement ceases. There has to be only about 5/8in. or so of a parallel reduced bore after the choke. For this reason I think those long Hastings rifled choke tubes would disperse the shot by centrifugal action, but wouldn't concentrate it as a choke.

I think the doughnut airgun pattern, another thing the shooting community has inadequately tested by experimentation, was most likely caused by the tissue plug blowing through the pattern. The smaller the shot, the more likely this is to happen, as they slow down very fast.

Now that we have established that digression is OK, another item in my white elephant collection is a large container of never loaded but primed .22 Winchester-Western shotshell cases, about an inch in length. I bought those on eBay from the United States, and the seller pledged his word that he had boiled out the primer composition. I meant them for jacked bullet swaging, since Corbin said the only obstacle to accuracy as good as good can be, is the primer indentation in fired cases. I decided to anneal the first few on a cooker ring, and spilt some coffee when they went off with sharp cracks. Someday they might be used for a .20 inside-primed experiment. I always thought it a shame that the .22LR won out over the .22WRF, which didn't equal it for accuracy, but might if it had had the same amount of development work.

[longbow]

I am with you on the .22 mag. it is actually a pretty impressive performer for its size. If the price wasn't so high (not unaffordable but much higher than .22 LR) I'd be inclined to get a rifle in .22 mag. I have a Ruger Single Six convertible with .22 mag. cylinder and from a handgun the .22 mag is pretty impressive.

And just to put something sort of on topic in this post... much better with shot than .22 LR. Not sure if .22 mag smoothbores have ever been made. That should solve donut patterns.

But of course then if we moved up to .38 Special or .357 mag. (or similar size cartridges) with shot you'd have a fairly effective small bore shotgun and might even be a decent slug shooter. Kind of a smoothbore rook rifle? Yeah, yeah... "smoothbore/rifle".

So there's a question for you BIS... rook rifles seemed to be fairly common in the UK but were there small bore shotguns/smoothbore using smaller than .410 brass cartridges? Seems to me they could be quite good for shot and round ball at moderate ranges.

My uncle used to have a Marble's Game Getter which was a handgun with folding rifle stock in over/under .22/.44 smoothbore which took .44 WCF shot, .44 round ball and .44 XL shot loads. I'd have thought things like that would have been useful in the UK and Europe... at least the cartridges and in rifle length if handguns were an issue. Unfortunately my uncle "disposed" of it many years ago. I'd have loved to get that one.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

The .410, despite its more modern-sounding name, is about as old as any shotgun cartridge, although it remained fairly limited in appeal until the 2in. cartridge was lengthened to 2½in. (It was several decades before I learned why the 2½in. were hard to chamber in a friend's .410, borrowed in childhood, but it did me no harm.) It was considered a pest control or poacher's gun, and the market was dominated by the single barrelled Belgian type, which were rather good for their purpose. It was quite rare for the wealthy to indulge junior with a quality British-built double .410.

Brass cases were very seldom used, although there was a .410 version of the Lee-Enfield for riot control in India, for if a violent crowd saw their ringleaders shot, they were unlikely to count on his walking to hospital when picked up. This used a round based on the .303 cartridge, not interchangeable with the commercial cartridge, although an English gunmaker used to rechamber them for it in the 1960s. The magazine then wasn't functional.

Flobert rifles and pistols and smoothbore guns, with a lifting-block action, were imported from Belgium. Some, even smoothbores for the BB cap, were used for indoor target practice - "saloon pistols", although that term came from the French "salon", not a saloon in the American sense.

Improvements in the airgun probably killed this form of recreation. But some were used with shot cartridges for disposing or rats etc., and eventually superseded by single-shot bolt actions. I think all-brass cartridges for these were a fairly late development. Old ones I have seen, by Eley I believe, had a distinctive chequered paper body, and the brass head is duplicated in the slightly larger diameter rear portion of the modern Fiocchi 9mm. shotshell.

I never saw one of the paper shells fired, but I was told that they had the unusual property of permitting the paper body to detach and pass down the bore. This would be an interesting way of concentrating the shot, if it was deliberate, but I suspect that it was the result of deteriorated ammunition. It would surely interfere with the pattern, and it is hard to see how you could be sure a case body would never remain behind as a bore obstruction. Besides, what do you want a no.10 shot pattern concentrated for?

I don't know if the Marble Game Getter was imported. It seems like an interesting zoologist's or survival weapon, but Britain is a small island, and people seldom went more than a day trip into the wilderness. Also from 1937, and probably from 1921, any rifle and a shotgun with a less than 20in. barrel became subject to more intrusive licencing. Shotguns had been more popular than rifles, even in totally unlicenced days and I doubt if there was much of a market for it.

Someone once showed me, with an interest in selling, an Italian .410 of similar proportions with a detachable stock and a sort of Snider action. A crinkle-enamelled receiver and moulded plastic case suggested that it was of relatively recent manufacture, and I would be very surprised if it was licenced, or ever had been in the UK. I conveyed in proper polite language that I wouldn't touch it with the dirty end of someone else's barge-pole. Even if I had been prepared to break the law, it was a most unappealing firearm. So I believe he either surrendered it to the police or reduced it to its component elements.

[longbow]

BIS:

Certainly not rifled choke tubes so thread drift but that's okay.

I decided to do some digging and found this:

http://www.fourten.org.uk/mwpre410.html
http://www.fourten.org.uk/mw44.html

I'll have to look through my old Cartridges of the World as well as I seem to recall having seen the .44-40 XL shot cartridge before and possibly that went along with the Marble's Game Getter which I know is in there.

According to those links the .44 shotshell were reasonably popular as a small bore shotgun quite some time ago and I can believe that they would be useful by farmers or anyone who kept a large garden and chicken coops or other lifestock where foxes, racoons and other undesirable critters might visit. With round ball at moderate range I am sure it would kill a coyote or fox and the shotshells would be good for rats and raccoons along with crows and other pesky birds at moderate ranges in the garden.

It seems to me that in the late 1800's/early 1900's that there was much more interest in versatility and economy. If you look through some of the old Ideal manuals (Castpics) and Cartridges of the World you'll see a variety of bullets and moulds that are not to be found now and for calibers that have long disappeared. The variety is staggering and I have to think that a lot of the interest was mostly versatility from one firearm and economy in loading. People did not have the disposable income back then as they do now so factory rounds were a pricey commodity for most I think.

Anyway, strolling back around to shotguns... I have to think that versatility of the shotgun is what keeps it going and has done so from the early days. If you had to choose one gun for keeping critters under control, hunting and self defense (at least at close range) its hard to beat the shotgun. I'm thinking that is also the same philosophy that led to the Paradox, Explora, Fauneta, etc. guns ~ one gun "does it all" (more or less).

I do like the 1874 Sharps which I think is one of the absolute classics in guns but I have to say that even Quiggley would not be shooting foxes or raccoons in the henhouse with a .45-110!

I have to think that shotgun history and development in the UK and Europe must have been far greater than in North America due to population and circumstances there. I would think a shotgun far more useful overall than a long range rifle.

Do you know what the status of rifled shotguns and/or rifled choke tubes is in Europe? Russia? It seems that smoothbore slug development is still going strong in Europe and Russia.

I recall Ross Seyfried writing about rifled shotguns in the early days of them and commenting that when he was at the Brenneke factory in Germany the technicians couldn't understand why Americans wanted rifled shotguns when there were so many good smoothbore slugs that shot well. I have to think that rifled guns and slugs are now outshooting smoothbore slugs at extended range but actually finding side by side comparisons is difficult. Lots of claims but not much side by side testing I've found.

"A crinkle-enamelled receiver" Yuck! Yes, I'd be at the clean end of the barge pole too!

Longbow

[longbow]

And another link to .44 shotguns:

http://jefenry.com/main/The44-Shot.php

[Ballistics in Scotland]

It is a little puzzling why Marble should have chosen that slightly bottlenecked case. I seem to remember, though I can't quite find the picture at the moment, that the .44-40 had a longer length than the rifle round, reduced so that it would enter the throat and bore. Perhaps it did all right with a cardboard cup like the 9m. rimfire, or perhaps they inserted a wad before necking it down - which should work very well for sealing the bore, but not for handloading. I'd still think something like the .38-55 or one of the Winchester self-loading rifle cases would have been better.

There was a European directive of 1991 which laid down minimum standards which individual nations could increase. That made short or repeating rifled firearms subject to authorisation, single-shot rifled ones freely acquirable but requiring notification (i.e. registration unless they forget), and single-barrel smoothbores requiring neither authorisation nor notification. I think that is still about the situation in France, and I doubt if they make a distinction between rifling intended to stabilise a slug, and rifling intended to spread shot - which in fact will probably do either. The legislators have probably never heard of detachable choke tubes.

In the UK a shotgun certificate gives you the right to fill your house with registered shotguns, and being a member of homo sapiens covers any incomplete shotgun. But for rifled firearms or major parts you must make an individual application and convince them that you have a use for the firearm, and it won't endanger "public safety or the peace". I think anything rifled is rifled.

The distinction probably arises because it is easy to get within a few feet of an ordinary citizen you want to rob, revenge yourself on, or can't wait from a divorce from, but getting within a few feet of a politician is less likely. There was an assassination of a Member of Parliament a couple of years back, by a propeller-head who blamed her for destroying society by supporting immigration, and another in Irish politics in 1990. Before that I believe, the last was a Prime Minister in 1812, which was held to be a bit of a throwback to less civilised times.