wizzard83 Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 Hi all, I've been on the lookour for a first shotgun and I've been getting some advice, mainly on chokes and pull, and I've been advised to look for 1/4 and 1/2 chokes for clay shooting. I saw an old Baikal recently on guntrader that looked perfect, single trigger, ejector, etc. But when I looked closer the chokes were noted as 1/2 and 1/4. I presume the order relates to the order that the barrels fire, so my question is under what circumstance would you want the tighter barrel to fire first? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cosd Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 I don't know about the Baikal, but many shotguns have a barrel selector where you can choose which barrel fires first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stubear Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 My S/S shotgun is fix choked 1/2 and 3/4, the tighter the choke the tighter the shot will group out of the barrel and therefore the tighter the shot group will be once the range increases. If you were to choose I'd say you'd want to use the tighter choke for the longer range stuff and the looser choke for the closer in stuff, so that the shot grouping remains tight when you're out to 40-60 yards and then spreads early for the close in stuff so you have a decent sized shot cloud at that range (rather than a spread 3" across hehe). If you do it the other way round then the theory is the shot will have dissipated and have holes in the pattern at longer ranges, and then conversely the grouping is so tight close in that its easier to miss. In my experience the reality is that the difference between 1/2 and 3/4 isnt utter chalk and cheese and if you're a good shot then you should be able to bust clays at most ranges with either choke. I know a lot of guys who just choke 1/2 in both barrels and leave it at that! If you used say an open choke and then an extra full you'd definitely notice the difference! One would be like a blunderbuss and the other more like a rifle, but TBH 1/4 and 1/2 or 1/2 and 3/4 is a pretty all round decent set up and will cover you for pretty much everything sporting wise. Even with a M/C gun I cant really be bothered to swap choke tubes around all the time (though I know folks who do) for normal sporting shooting or swapping between disciplines, and TBH I'm so used to 1/2 and 3/4 now that I can pretty much shoot everything from long range sporting shots to skeet with that gun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oliver90owner Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 Driven game is one. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neutron619 Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 I use ½ and ¾ in my 28 gauge and often set it to the ¾ barrel when I'm wandering around rough shooting, rather than setting up a hide and decoying etc. For example, if you're walking a tree line and a bird drops out to fly off, they're usually on the edge of shotgun range when they go anyway, so the tighter the choke the better if you want to have a snap shot at it. Whether the second barrel gets fired in those situation usually depends on which direction the bird flies off in. I guess your question was about when you'd shoot the tight choke first and implied firing both barrels, so I realise that might not be valid answer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizzard83 Posted July 30, 2015 Author Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 all valid answers neutron, I am a total beginner so all info is useful. Thanks for the answers guys. The gun does not have selective fire, so I think I might have to give it a miss. seems like it is more of a game gun than a clay popper. The search continues! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
littlerob Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 Baikal do have a type of barrel selector but its hidden brake the gun open push tigger forward top barrel will fire first you can get the new baikal under over multi choke steel proof basic walnut stock for 400 and come home with some change my one was 390 new Baikal do have a type of barrel selector but its hidden brake the gun open push tigger forward top barrel will fire first you can get the new baikal under over multi choke steel proof basic walnut stock for 400 and come home with some change my one was 390 new Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clayman Posted July 30, 2015 Report Share Posted July 30, 2015 (edited) Its normal to fire bottom barrel first, and its normal that bottom barrel is the more open choke. A std gun would be described as an U/O ( under first open, over 2nd tighter choked). Many persons will not distinguish order when noting chokes / barrels etc, and to have an U/O described as an "over and under", or noting chokes in reverse order is pretty common. Its likely the Baikal you are looking at fires bottom 1/4 first regardless of the way the seller may have advertised this. Interesting about the trigger forward may change the barrel selection - have had and sold some ST Baikals and never knew this detail. There are SST Baikals around as well, so if the ability to choose barrels is important to you check if this gun has this trigger feature, or later ones have SST option on many ( Single Selective Trigger). Things like optimised choking make small differences to your kill rate - whether you have 1/4 & 1/2 or 1/4 and 3/4 or 1/2 & 3/4 is not going to make any significant difference to your scores. You wont be missing many because the choke is not ideal, 95% of the misses will be just part of the learning curve and down to technique and skill ( or lack of). Getting a set choke Baikal SST, Lanber, Laurona; Bettinsoli; Webley; Rottweil; Lincoln; Rizzini - any of these guns will do nicely as a starter gun from which you can learn what you really need and want our of a later upgrade to Browning, Beretta etc.Pay another £50 - £100 for a M/C version if your budget can afford it - better resale values and easier to resell later ( hence why set chokes guns are keenly priced 2nd/h, but while a bargain to buy in the first instance, are harder to shift when you want to move on). In general, the reason for a barrel selection system, is to emulate the D/T game gun in an ST clay gun. The game shooter may well treat their gun as a "double gun" - ie, the two barrels have different loads. Say a 30g 7 pigeon load on the open choked barrel, and a 36g no 4 in the tighter top. When game presents, the shooter either chooses the optimum barrel and load by trigger selection on a D/T gun, or with a safety selector on an SST gun. Some, like AYA, have the selector in the trigger guard. In this situation, there is a significant difference between the barrels, one for lighter game closer in, and the other for heavier, more distant game. Choosing the right barrel for the shot is important, as a 30g no 7 on 1/4 will not kill a rabbit at 40yds, while a fox load on a close pigeon will leave some bones and feathers floating down if you were lucky enough to hit the pigeon at 15 yds on 3/4 chokes pattern about 12" across at that range. No breast for the pot. Clay shooters do not generally expect such radically differing performances from their loads and choking, and if you have no 7.5 in both barrels it would be hard to discern the difference between 1/4 and 1/2 in use. !/4 is a little more open, 1/2 would add another 5m to effective range. Small differences that as a novice will be of little relevance - hence the the reflections by others that as a novice clayshooter, any fairly normal choking combination of 1/4; 1/2; 3/4 is going to be perfectly good for your use, and you would be unlikely in clays to want to change barrels shooting order under normal circumstances. Driven incomers really being about the only reason to change to top first - but the downside of doing so for a small improvement in pattern size optimisation may well be outweighed by the resulting muzzleflip from top barrel fired first. As the pressure line of an U/O bottom barrel should run directly into the heel of the stock, the gun is stable for first shot. Top barrel ( or either in a S/S) fires above the heel in the recoil pressure line, which causes the gun to lift. So, if you take two shots in quick succession, top first, you may have to bring the gun back under control from the first shot . This is why S/S's kick like mules, compared with the U/O fired bottom barrel first. On the S/S, the direction of pressure in first shot above the heel lifting the gun, which digs the toes in and can deliver a real "ouch" on second shot. Clear as mud? Bottom line is, as a novice, get a budget gun, stick cartridges in it, and pull the trigger. Don't loose sleep over chokes and which barrel until your scores are pushing you through B grade towards being an A shooter, when small improvements on overall scores start to count, and by then you are unlikely to still be a Baikal user. Edited July 30, 2015 by clayman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
casts_by_fly Posted July 31, 2015 Report Share Posted July 31, 2015 clayman, The SST on the baikals is a neat trick, but not terribly useful in the field or for a quick snap change. You have to push the trigger forward fairly firmly and then get your finger back around the correct side of the trigger to shoot it. IT also only stays switched until you open the gun. So shooting a day of driven birds and wanting to fire top barrel first will mean pushing the trigger forward every time you shoot the gun. Mine had choke tubes, so not a big deal to overcome. thanks, rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neutron619 Posted July 31, 2015 Report Share Posted July 31, 2015 (edited) clayman has written a lot of good stuff there and I'll echo his main bit of advice: get a gun that's got any combination of ¼, ½ or ¾ chokes and learn to mount it properly and consistently. Then worry about chokes later. I say that as someone who worries too much about chokes but who can recognize his own vices! Then, if you're shooting clays, buy the cheapest cartridge you can get that's got #7½ shot in it and don't change it unless you're finding the recoil to be a problem. Lots of fuss is made about how "fast" a cartridge is and it makes next to no difference to 99% of people, but chopping and changing between fast and slow makes it difficult for your brain to get used to the amount of lead (that's lead sounding like "leeeeed" rather than "leddd" the substance) to give to a target. Consistency is the key to good shooting. If you're shooting vermin or game, pick a sensible, middle-of-the road cartridge - anything with 28-32g of #5 or #6 shot will do - and then expect to use it for everything, at least to start with. In time, you'll probably end up buying specific cartridges for specific jobs - big shot for fox, for example and you might move down to a #7 or #7½ for pigeons - but if you start with something "for all seasons", you'll do well. You asked about chokes and I'm talking about cartridges - the reason is simple: with the kinds described above, you can be sure that you're going to get a reasonable pattern out of any gun that has the ¼, ½ or ¾ chokes I described above. As you get used to it, you can adjust components of the load weight, shot size and choke equation as your mood takes you. Remember also that a describing a gun as having "½ and ¾ chokes" is indicative, not factual. What you certainly won't get from a gun so described is 60% and 65% (for ½ and ¾ respectively) of the pellets of any cartridge you fire down those tubes in the standard pattern (30" circle) at standard distance (40 yards). Shotgun patterning depends on the factors inherent in the cartridge and on the geometry of the choke tubes as well as a whole load of other things which can't really be predicted, so the only way to know exactly what's going on is to pattern your cartridges. Then, the best you will be able to say is that "cartridge X produces a Y percent pattern in this gun". However, if you do, you'll have done more than 99% of shooters ever bother with and you'll be able to tell from the experiment whether you've got a good cartridge and gun combination. Again, you may not see the point of saying all that and again it's simple: the differences you'll see between hit and miss to start with won't be much to do with choke. They'll be to do with consistency of mount, cheek weld, getting used to recoil and being able to predict the flight of targets / quarry. In time, you will find that you prefer this choke or that choke, this cartridge or that cartridge, but even after 4-5 years of shotgun shooting, I'm only just getting to the point where I can feel reasonably sure that a bird came down flapping because the pattern wasn't good enough at the range I was shooting rather than because I didn't shoot in the right place - that's when you get the choke key out and tighten them up a bit. As an aside: I have guns and cartridges that shoot better, tighter patterns through a half choke than a full choke. It's counter-intuitive and unusual (though there are reasons it can happen) but again, until you buy a gun and shoot some cartridges through it, you'll never know. The gun you talked about above may be worth the risk for a first gun as it avoids any "extremes" of specification. Provided you do that with gun and cartridge, you'll do fine with pretty much anything you buy. Hope some of that is useful, Adam. Edited July 31, 2015 by neutron619 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ditchman Posted July 31, 2015 Report Share Posted July 31, 2015 Maybe this will give you an idea..............Be Aware.............shotgun chokes their discription vary and the whole issue is a nightmare !! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ditchman Posted July 31, 2015 Report Share Posted July 31, 2015 Couple more examples.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizzard83 Posted July 31, 2015 Author Report Share Posted July 31, 2015 Thanks all, I managed to solve the issue by talking to a local rfd th today who just reached behind him and pulled out a Baikal 27 single trigger ejector with 2 sets of barrels, 1 @ 1/4 &1/2 and the other with tighter chokes that he is going to do me for £150. Best of both worlds without spending the extra on a multi. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wizzard83 Posted August 1, 2015 Author Report Share Posted August 1, 2015 Ok, New question! I've got my Baikal now, but the rfd who sold it to me was not sure of the chokes in the spare barrel. He has said that they look like 1/2 and 3/4 but is there any way of checking them? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clayman Posted August 1, 2015 Report Share Posted August 1, 2015 (edited) Yes, but its not by measuring them The charts so kindly presented give THEORETICAL measures of an ideal gun in perfect bore order with ballistic matched cartridges. The reality is that choking, being a function of the gun that is measures AWAY from the gun, can only be accurately determined by pattern plating and pellet counting. Cy on a 12g is 0.729 and 1/2 is 0.711 - approx 10thou of choke for each increment 1-5 in std system, or 5thou in the Perazzi 10pt system. BUT, BASC ballistics committee prepared a report ( free to BASC members) in which 1/2 choke designated on the gun, is measured for true output, and differences of as much as 2 makings were found - ie marked 3/4 and throwing 1/4 on the plate. It also confirmed that std 10th increments do not give a linear reduction - ie cy = 30" at the pattern, and 1/4 should be (say) 26"; 1/2 ( say) 22" and progressively smaller. The BASC tests indicated that really a choke set gave only two chokings: - viz, no choke Cy, and the next down 1/4 has a significant pattern size reduction, say 24", but each below that is only small amount tighter, the Full being only say 20". I havnt the report in front of me, so these are illustrative figures. They tested new and old guns, and found new better guns, ie Beretta, were closer to designations than older guns. Clearly , barrel wear causes a gun to throw poorer patterns which are wider ( loose edge flyers) than new barrels. If you actually want to know what your chokes are, measuring them effectively only tells you the ORDER in which they reduce. The truth is, you will only ever know what the true output regardless of the ** or III's on them, if you test the gun on a pattern plate. You can use a taper mandrel or engineers drop gauge, or a set of inside callipers to measure the end of set choke barrels, or tubes, to give you the O/D. This will tell you which is more open than the other, but not much more as in reality, the charts are purely hypothetical in an ideal world, and most guns are not either linear in choke reduction on M/C, nor output what the tube says. Even then, if you do test, its only one possible result as different wads, powders, how hard the shot is % antinomy, and even the temperature and humidity of the day that alters powder burn rate, has a bearing on the pattern you get. At the high end, you can have chokes regulated by top end gunsmiths. This involves choosing a particular load and making chokes with constrictions that ACHEIVE a linear 2" reduction from 30" for each choke size down in the 1-9 series.ie SK 1/8 would be 2" less than Cy and so on. This is done by reaming each choke out a thou or so and testing the output until it matches the reduction required. The result is then accurate, but only for that load - others will alter the pattern resulting. So, yes, its a nightmare - stop thinking about it, put cartridges in the gun and shoot it. Edited August 1, 2015 by clayman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guzzicat Posted August 1, 2015 Report Share Posted August 1, 2015 If you are hitting choke choice does,nt matter, If you are missing choke choice won,t help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
motty Posted August 1, 2015 Report Share Posted August 1, 2015 If you are hitting choke choice does,nt matter, If you are missing choke choice won,t help Wrong, unless you're just talking about clays. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neutron619 Posted August 2, 2015 Report Share Posted August 2, 2015 Ok, New question! I've got my Baikal now, but the rfd who sold it to me was not sure of the chokes in the spare barrel. He has said that they look like 1/2 and 3/4 but is there any way of checking them? Again, clayman has covered this (and I think I touched on it above) - measuring them is the only way. What's stamped on the barrels is only an indication of what might happen - you have to measure the chokes' effects for your cartridge in your gun. It's the only way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robbiep Posted August 2, 2015 Report Share Posted August 2, 2015 Bottom line is, as a novice, get a budget gun, stick cartridges in it, and pull the trigger. Don't loose sleep over chokes and which barrel until your scores are pushing you through B grade towards being an A shooter, when small improvements on overall scores start to count, and by then you are unlikely to still be a Baikal user. I'd say that's the single best piece of advice. Point. Bang. Repeat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChrisAsh Posted August 2, 2015 Report Share Posted August 2, 2015 One point not mentioned above is there is no set diameter for 12 bore guns just a average on the actual inside diameter of 12 bore guns are allowed to vary a lot some very close to what would be 11 bore an the same the other way to 13 bore, hence chokes are always measured in percentages and the drop in choke gauges are only aproximate and not much good in reality Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris1961 Posted August 2, 2015 Report Share Posted August 2, 2015 Dont worry about chokes just shoot and enjoy that's what it's all about have fun Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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