jug choke

[ERH]

any body have any experience with a jug choke barrel ? how do they shoot shot /round ball ? who will do it ? and how much dose it cost? 

[Daryl]

I jug choked a .44 smooth rifle years ago and it shot very well with both round ball and shot.

[wattlebuster]

I have a 12 ga 30 inch barrel that is jug choked full for turkeys an it does very well with both. But I have not tried the roundball past 50 yrds so after that I cant say how good it would be

[Daryl]

My 20bore has a normal choke. While it will put 5 into an inch on centres at 28 or 30yards, it's lousy at 50. I need to do some more work testing it.

[camerl2009]

jug chokes soeem to be a good place for powder fouling to hide and not a easy place to clean or oil (it also seems to be a good place for cleaning patches to get stuck unless your using a patch holder and not a jag)

[wattlebuster]

Carmerl..I use a 12 ga jag on mine all the time an have never a stuck cleaning/roundball patch. Have not had a fowling issue yet either. If I ever build another fowler it WILL have another jug choke job by Danny Caywood

[ERH]

is there an one other than caywood doing this ? i am trying to get a 54cal or 28 gauge done and caywood dont do that cal.

[wattlebuster]

ERH.... Try this guy Lowell Tennyson at 563-381-3711  I dont know if he still does them but its worth a call to see.  Good luck to ya

[George Sutton]

I have a .75 caliber smooth rifle with a jug choke. It shoots a roundball just fine. The first day I shot it we were hitting bowling pins at 100 yds.

Centershot

[ERH]

Hey guys thanks for all the help !!

[TMerkley]

Being a rookie, can anyone explain what a Jug choke is?

I understand the choke, not the jug

[James Rogers]

A jug has straight sides for a ways and then cones or tapers in towards the mouth or opening. A jug choke does the same thing on both ends of the recess as it goes back to the bore size.

[Daryl]

I'd assume you lay a bottle of jug on it's side, and visualize a hole all the way trough it, as if it had the restriction on the butt as well. I really don't get that, but it's got to be why. The jug part of the choke is the enlargement. When the name came about, or was coined, terminology wasn't very detailed, but a generalization.  This seems to be the only reasonable explanation.

Sorry James-  I didn't see you answer to the quiz before posting mine.

[Daryl]

Unless someone comes up with the actual reason for the name, proved to have been written whenever this style of choke was invented, (does anyone know the first mention of Jug Choking?) all we can do is to speculate, as is the law concerning unsubstanciated fact.

[James Rogers]

A jug has straight sides for a ways and then cones or tapers in towards the mouth or opening. A jug choke does the same thing on both ends of the recess as it goes back to the bore size.

That does make an awful lot of sense of course...but curious, is that speculation or is there some sort of official root to that description?

I can't cite a wikipedia page but there are other things that are given the same descriptive as being judged or jug shaped. It is really a slang term because of it's jugged shape. Seriously, look up jug. The smaller mouth of the jug is how the choke style gets it's name.
Now tell me about a Tula choke : )

[Daryl]

The Tula, ie: Russian choke for Skeet shooting had quite an enlargement, then slightconstriction but still overbore size, then another enlargement, didn't it? I probably have this all wrong.

 It was to give especially even, wide patterns for skeet shooting. The Russians dominated Skeet when it first came out.

I just googled it, but they mentioned similar design as my first sentence. I would think they wanted a shorter shot string, though, not a longer one. This would counter a number of posts as to what has been stated.

I'd think in Skeet, or any fast moving target game, that the shorter the string, in effect throwing a sheet of plywood (shot) at the bird to interstect it with the entire shot cloud, would be the best plan.

I remember reading about Tula Chokes back in the late 60's or early 70's in the Gun Digest.  Short shot string, I'm sure was the object or reason for it's rather wierd design.  For many people nowadays, younger perhaps who didn't see the first writings, to have the design reasons backwards, would be normal. Perhaps I'm wrong - oh well.
I guess we've strayed.

[Dennis Glazener]

I'd think in Skeet, or any fast moving target game, that the shorter the string, in effect throwing a sheet of plywood (shot) at the bird to interstect it with the entire shot cloud, would be the best plan.

Unless you are a tad behind the bird and the back of the string gets it

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Jug choked...gunsmith was into the jug when reaming the barrel.... made a mistake but... serendipity!! ... it shot a better pattern........


Sorry..    Couldn't resist...

[Daryl]

Putting the sheet of shot onto the bird as it's going by gives you a 3" diameter sheet of shot to hit it with and is easier than trying to hit it with a string of shot that has a few pellets here and here over a 20' long rope of lead that has gigantic irregular holes all over it at any one time of the bird passing through it.  By bird, we are talking about a clay pigeon, not a pheasant or duck. 

Perhaps the Tula did exactly as noted - perhsp it did create a longer string which proved to suck big time and that's why it is not used today and the reason Tula choked guns are so plentiful and as cheap as Borsht?

[FL-Flintlock]

Tula chokes go back long before the 1950's and had nothing to do with skeet.  The choke design is highly complex and tuned to produce a specific result with a given load, changing the load can produce a completely different pattern.  What's commonly referred to in relation to the skeet thing is a specific choke that was tuned for the loads the Russian team was shooting, it produced a wide pattern and fairly long shot string length as the only objective was to break the clay at short range ... one does not obtain a higher score if the bird is powdered or simply broken in two, it just has to break.  The term "Tula" applies to any of the choke designs that even remotely resemble (or not) the style of chokes that originated from the master gun makers of Tula.  Tula was the gathering point of gunmakers prior to becaming the official in 171x (1712/1713) when Tsar Peter 1 commissioned construction of the official state armory in Tula (just south of Moscow).  The Tula armory was the first gun factory to make extensive use water powered machinery and interchangeable parts.  Tula chokes utilize an expanded area of the bore with specific shapes and lengths (short, long, egg, elliptical, trapezoidal...) which may or may not be combined with constricted are following the expansion.  Some will recall SKB of Japan pushing their “new, improved”, and whatever other sales hype they came up with, chokes following their split with Ithaca, there was nothing “new” they were merely copies of a Tula style that was invented more than a century and a half earlier.  Some will recall a variety of extra-long screw-in choke tubes that came about following the falsus in omnibus steel shot for waterfowl law, most of which failed in their attempt to employ Tula choke characteristics.
Mark

[Daryl]

HA! - well, there ya go. Tks Mark.  I had that one all wrong, but did read about it in a Gun Digest, though, Red or pinkish cover iirc.

[James Rogers]

I have never seen any exact details of how the various "tula" chokes can look in profile but as you can see from Mark's post how one can apply the name to a jug choke as we know it. I know many who do and they are usually the same who relate the skeet team tula as THE tula choke.
It would really be neat if anyone could provide some Tula bore diagrams.
Without a second constriction though, I would not think it  "Tula" or a "choke". Those types of bore altering  attempts for pattern go back at least to the 17th century. English guns used them quite a bit well into the last quarter of the 18th century.

[Daryl]

Roper was choking guns with screw-on chokes in the 1850's I believe. Choking might even have gone on earlier than that with a choke in the middle of the barrel being thought by some in the mid 1800's as being the best for both shot. It was WW Greener in the last part of the 19th century who actually perfected the early chokes as we know through to today.

In the 70's, WW perfected a choke for the military that would throw a 6 foot diameter pattern at 150 meters from a military semiauto 12 bore shotgun with the 7mm load. That was 9 balls of only .28 calibre comprized or made of tungsten.

The particulars of that choke have not been publicised, as far as I know. The same pattern was made with the 000 load of 9 balls. That they were buffered is known. The 9mm load apparently penetrated an issue helmet of 1984 at that range.

[FL-Flintlock]

Before the Putin administration locked the doors, many historical documents were available on-line.  One from latter half of the 18^th century speaks of a demonstration where fowl was repeatedly taken from the air at ranges to 30 sazheni (70 yards) but, as is common, the documents remain silent as to the details of the guns/loads since such information was (and for the most part, still is) considered "state secrets".  I'm given to understand that, the majority of such documents have been consolidated at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and one must now file a written request with the govt to view documents and only those documents/parts-of that are cleared for release can be seen.

Daryl,
If we're on the same page, I think what you're referring to has more to do with the load than the choke.  Win did make some guns for buckshot that had the last 3"-4" stepped down to a parallel wall full choke (it was nothing more than a longer-length of the common restriction choke).  I don't believe they ever went into production as I never see any turning up on the collector auctions.  They also experimented with some having the first 8" or so of the bore relieved (back-bored/enlarged) in an attempt to run loads with higher initial pressures, the theory being to obtain much higher MV's but faster acceleration only proved to destroy patterns.  WW (and I believe S&W) also experimented with buckshot loads that were formed into a wax type substance that was supposed to hold the pellets together for X yards, much like the old caged loads but they proved to be completely unreliable.

[Daryl]

I was referring to the special US Military loads for the Atchison(sp) and other semi and full auto 12 bores developed for the Military.  The ammo wouldn't chamber in normal 12 bores due to alterations of some sort. The ammo was producing 28,000psi, some 16,000psi higher than normal shotshells.

I read about this in "Military Firerams" - or similar named monthly rag, back in the late 80's - around the time the Apachie choppers first were detailed for the public. The article was quite comprehensive and all secret as to the choke systems. They did detail the downrange testing results though, which showed amazing patterns for smoothbores ie: 6 foot circle at 150meters. Winchester was named as the one with those special chokes and would divulge no information on them at that time.