Barrel length, choke & patterning.

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Wildfoot

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I got to talking with a guy in the local gun shop the other day. I had dropped in to pick up some more steel shot to go and try plugging some geese. Well this guy starts asking about my season and what game I am going for. I tell him geese over on a chunk of private land. Well after some chatting I tell him about my shotgun (DA Grizzly - 12.5") and he just about went white as a sheet lol.

"12 inch barrel!?" he says, "You cant kill #### with a 12" barrel, first its illegal! and second, the pattern would be so wide that you cant make a clean kill!"

I kind of expected this when I decided to take the bush cannon out for some bird hunting, I get the same kinda talk when I tell people that my moose gun is .303 BR :rolleyes:

So I let him know its legal, show him in the regs where 12.5" is greater than the minimum barrel length required in BC. And then I tried to convince him that the pattern shouldn't be much different between a 12" barrel with IC choke and a 28" barrel with IC choke. Neither the gun store employee or the other customer were on my side with this one. Haha.

Well I don't think I won my argument, but I assured the guys that if I wasn't hittin birds, or if too many were being wounded that I would come back and get a 28" barrel.

I have popped off some clays and found that, other than the short sight radius and the ####ty swing, the gun killed clays just fine. When I pattern on paper I wouldn't call the patterns to be all that bad.

What do you guys think? How does barrel length affect shot patterns? Is the choke or barrel length going to be the bigger factor in determining the pattern size?

At 50 yards, shouldn't a 12.5" barrel with IC choke pattern the same as a 28" (IC) at 50.5 yards?
 
Not only the choke determines pattern; velocity, shot hardness and material, shotcup, powder, forcing cone length and finish, barrel length, the choke 'profile' for lack of a better term, shot size, etc. I'm betting you lose some velocity with that short barrel. You can test it on paper and check it out yourself. But remember, if you are losing velocity you're losing killing power, especially for geese.

Anybody have any velocity numbers for 12.5" barrels?
 
Patterns shouldn't be that much if any different but yes there is some velocity difference but not to the degree as most people think. Most people equate barrel length and velocity to being the same as rifles but it's most definitely not but I'd guess you are losing a a hundred or so fps. Most shotgun powder burns in the first 14-15 inches of barrel. Steel factory loads actually are affected more by barrel length than lead or slugs but it's still not that significant.
 
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Roy Dunlap's Book " Gun Owners Book Of Care, Repair and Improvement" describes the results of a test he and Jim Carmichel did on barrel length effect on patterns. They took a 28" cylinder choked barrel and cut 2" off at a time. They gradually reduced the length to 14" and stopped there. The result was that there was little difference in the resulting patterns (about the same differences that one might expect by switching brands of ammunition).
They also stated that there was in all likelyhood some loss of velociety which the did not test for that factor.
Cheers, John
 
Thanks for the replies.

Nice to know that I havent lost much of the versitility of the shotgun by going to a short barrel. seems this firearm is even more useful than I had originally thought.
 
Wildfoot said:
Thanks for the replies.

Nice to know that I havent lost much of the versitility of the shotgun by going to a short barrel. seems this firearm is even more useful than I had originally thought.
Click to expand...

The big loss is in shooting flying birds as short-barreled shotguns don't swing worth a darned and are very poorly balanced.
 
Clays are very easy to kill. Actually you can not tell if they are dead or wounded. They just fall to the ground and lay there. You can usually tell when you make a poor shot on a big honker, but often they just carry on as if not hit and die later.
 
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