‘Clown nose’ a great attachment
Few things in the shooting world are as maligned as the adjustable collet choke for shotguns, but the hideous appendage is ideal for target games.
An adjustable collet choke attaches to a shotgun muzzle. It enables a user to instantly change his shotgun’s choke constriction by twisting a knurled ring. It has two major disadvantages, though. Most collet chokes are welded inside the bore. It is permanent. The only way to remove it is to cut off its portion of the barrel, which leaves you with a severely shortened barrel with an open cylinder bore.
It’s also very ugly. It is bulbous and wide, giving an elegant shotgun the appearance of having a clown’s nose. Its presence wrecks a shotgun’s resale value.
All modern shotguns come with a set of factory choke tubes in Full, Modified and Improved Cylinder constriction. You can buy additional tubes in different constrictions like Light Modified, Extra Full, Skeet, Skeet 1 and Skeet 2.
The downsides of tubes is that you have to carry them, and changing them takes time. You must remove and install them with a special wrench which you must also carry. The threads are fine, so it requires many revolutions to get a tube out of the bore and to put another one in. This taxes the patience of other shooters who are waiting their turns to shoot.
Ultimately, most recreational sporting clays shooters use just one tube. Targets on a sporting clays course are at variable ranges. Long shots require a dense pattern, and close presentations demand a wide pattern. One choke constriction does not cover them all. You can cheat a little with double barrel shotgun with different constrictions in each bore, but that only works if you remember to select the proper barrel sequence before the targets fly. If you forget, you might mistakenly shoot at a close target through a Modified choke and shoot at a distant, going away target with an Improved Cylinder choke.
An adjustable collet choke enables you to select the appropriate constriction on stations where the presentations are at similar distances. It allows you to select an average for presentations at different distances.
PolyChoke is the eponymous brand of this genre. The collet is ugly enough. Add a muzzle brake to the end, and you have a gun so ugly that it’s almost impossible to love.
As soon as you use it, it’s almost impossible not to love.
I started shooting sporting clays in 1999 when I worked at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. I used a 20-gauge Ithaca 900XL, a sweet little semiautomatic. I bought it from a pawn shop for $250. Its PolyChoke made the gun look as if it made its living as sparring partner in a boxing gym.
Jerry Shaw, one of the ODWC’s deer biologists, called it, “the quail gun from hell” because of how effective it was on a clays course. Dialing the PolyChoke to FULL handled the two targets that zipped over the trees from a tower behind the stand. Dialing it to CYL or IMP CYL handled the rabbit targets and the flushing quail and pheasant targets.
I’m one of the few that actually likes the clown nose look. It doesn’t affect your shooting. If you acquire your targets properly, you don’t see the clown nose at the end of the barrel because your eyes are focused on the targets.
Over the years I acquired other guns with PolyChokes. One was a 16-gauge Winchester Model 12. Another was a standard weight 16-gauge Browning Auto-5.
In the early 2000s, Truglo made a screw-in PolyChoke. It was an ideal compromise. I used one in my Winchester Super X2 for several years. Its most remarkable performance was at a duck hunt at Hampton’s Reservoir with former Arkansas Game and Fish commissioners Sheffield Nelson and Brett Morgan, the late Scott Henderson, the AGFC’s former director, and the late Steve Smith, former president of the Arkansas Game and Fish Foundation.
I shot 3 1/2 inch cartridges loaded with No. 2 steel shot through a PolyChoke dialed to Super Full constriction. Ducks didn’t work well that day, so I took down a limit of birds that were so high that my companions demanded to see my ammo. They thought I was shooting lead. They were garden variety Winchester DryLocks. Morgan called them “Winchester ducks.”
Adjustable choke tubes eliminated any demand that remained for a collet choke. Truglo discontinued the last mass-produced model several years ago. It was a screw-in dove hunting accessory that had only two settings.
Custom choke manufacturers still make permanent models. You can find screw-in PolyChokes on Ebay, but they are expensive. If you buy one and use it properly, you will agree (begrudgingly) that it’s a wise investment.