What is the difference between modified and full choke

They work best at yards. Improved Cylinder Choke: Improved cylinder chokes are still used at short range. This choke is most effective inside of yards. Modified Choke: This is the mid-range choke containing more constriction than the improved cylinder choke.

While it may still be possible to shoot slugs from the gun, it is not recommended for the long-term health of the choke. This choke is one most preferred by hunters because of its versatility. It is most effective at a 30 to yards which gives hunters a devastating coverage at short to mid-ranges. Full Choke: A full choke is used primarily at longer distances.

It increases the constriction of the shot by a significant amount which means the pellets travel farther before spreading out. However, this choke requires significantly more accuracy to be effective at short ranges and may not pattern well at close range. With a basic understanding of chokes and loads, today's waterfowlers can tailor their shotguns to any type of shooting.

Like a garden hose nozzle that can be tightened down to emit a single stream or opened to a wide spray, chokes compress the shot charge to varying degrees as it passes through the last few inches of the bore.

Shot doesn't flow like water, however. That's how pellets react when they're squeezed down. Wad-stripper chokes, like those made by Patternmaster, have no constriction. Instead, they have studs that grab the wad, slowing it and helping the shot pellets separate cleanly and without the disruption of being rammed by the wad.

Although wad-strippers and conventional chokes seem quite different, they have a lot in common. All chokes slow the wad as it passes through the constricted section, and it's possible that the studs of wad-stripping chokes also constrict the shot charge somewhat. There are several ways to identify a choke: by thousandths of an inch of constriction, by their traditional names e. Practice with the same shot you will be hunting with.

Experience is the best teacher but these lessons can be painful if learned in the field — for you and the turkey. Give yourself the upper hand and confidence in your equipment that comes from repetition. Manufacturers realized it was more lucrative to make chokes for specific guns than to create universal ones, so not every choke will fit in every shotgun.

A general thing to note on shot size is that while larger pellets No. Smaller pellets pattern better, but are more impacted by cover twigs and vegetation between you and the bird. The final thing to note is the penetration power of your pellets. Below are some benchmarks for effective setups that you can be confident will deliver an ethical kill shot:.

I would encourage you to explore those resources relative to your specific gun and decide which choke and shot combination will give you what you want. For turkeys this will most often be the combination that gives you the tightest pattern and most power for the longest distance.

If nothing else, I hope this brings clarity to how much variability there is between setups and suggests some starting points for determining what might work best for you. What is a choke tube and which one is best for hunting turkeys? If I use a different cartridge do I have to change the choke? Is cartridge performance lost due to the wrong choke, or is it the wrong cartridge for these chokes? Initially all smoothbore guns had regular cylinder bore barrels.

In other words they were the same diameter in the core and at the muzzle at the end of the barrel. The only solution to improve the density and increase the chance of hitting game at longer ranges with an effective spread was to use shotguns with very long barrels, which also improved aiming precision as you have an extended line of sight. One good example of this is old English shotguns. As early as European hunters heard that the Americans had started using an innovative method to bore shotgun barrels , creating a choked section towards the end to obtain more compact spreads, producing notably better ballistic performance than the usual, ubiquitous cylinder bore barrel.

As soon as they learnt of this new barrel, the biggest gunsmiths such as Scott, Greener, Purdey, Rigby and Dougall started doing research to produce their own barrels that narrowed towards the end, and used the same in the competitions that were now being held all over the world.

For clay pigeon shooting, which was very popular at the time, the effectiveness of choked barrels was immediately obvious , unequivocally proving this innovation was superior to anything that had come before, in particular for your second barrels used to take a shot at a longer range at the very limit of the enclosure.

An old Greener shotgun with external hammers. Of the many companies involved in the development and refinement of chokes, a gunsmith producing harquebuses called Greener , who had perhaps already done quite a bit of research into choked barrels even before the Americans, after various tests, made a name for themselves.

This was because the air friction that causes delay had less of an effect on pellets travelling the first few meters in a very dense swarm compared to those fired out of cylinder bore barrels. Conserving more energy obviously meant more residual energy at long ranges so greater penetrating power, which was measured using fir wood or counting how many sheets of paper the pellets managed to penetrate. The American idea inspired European gunsmiths, and choked barrels became so popular that today all smoothbore shotgun makers use chokes to improve the performance of their guns.

During the last century, many gunsmiths realized that it would be a much better idea to be able to change the choke on a gun so it would be better suited for different hunting conditions depending on the environment and the type of game being hunted. Being able to change the choke by simply changing the last part of the barrel with the choke made shotguns a lot more versatile as they could be adapted to any conditions, and used for hunting or competitions.

There are external and internal chokes, chokes that extend the length of the barrels and ones that fit into the last part of the barrel, threaded on, or in a few cases held in place by a locking ringnut that screws onto the barrel.

One of the first Italian gunsmiths to start an in-depth study on the development of interchangeable chokes was BREDA a gunsmith from Brescia, who developed a choke that screwed onto the outside of the muzzle.

It was called the Quick Choke and was locked in place by a tiny wire spring, which protruded from the area near the front sight and engaged with a crown on the part at the base of the choke with the largest diameter when screwed on. BREDA developed six standard chokes from 0. In Beretta presented its A automatic with short interchangeable Mobilchoke chokes held in place by a big locking ringnut screwed onto the end of the barrel. Their next mod. A had chokes of a similar design, but without the locking ringnut, as they had their own thread on the end.

Many companies immediately started specializing in the production of chokes. Gemini opened in Italy a few years ago , a company specialized in producing fine chokes of every brand, design and degree of restriction. This obviously makes a gun much more versatile and perfectly adaptable to various types of hunting and environmental situations. One very simple way to explain how a choke works is to compare it to an adjustable sprinkler.

If you close it, the jet is narrower but reaches further. The hose is the barrel of the gun, the water represents the pellets, and the adjustable sprinkler is the choke. There are many different chokes, but major gunmakers mostly use 5 on hunting shotguns:. As well as these basic chokes there are also extreme chokes with more choked profiles Ultra Full or bottleneck profile, or spreader chokes Skeet.

The extreme chokes are designed to produce very compact spreads and are mostly used for hunting waterfowl and turkey, while spreaders are used for hunting game at very close ranges in woodland or for skeet.

Chokes are classified, as is the typical European custom, on the basis of the choke value, marking them in various ways.