According to patents, in 1866 American Fred Kimble and a Brit named Pape of Newcastle, England, developed shotgun choke boring in their respective countries. Prior to then, all shotguns were probably the equivalent of cylinder bore, and consequently shot wide patterns. Choke allows the shooter to have either a wide or narrow pattern, or anything in between, to match their shooting conditions. If there was a fault about choke, it was that you were stuck with the choke your gun had.
That situation changed at least as early as the 1950s when variable chokes came on the market that allowed shooters to dial in the desired choke constriction. Changing choke as such resulted in a wide pattern for close in shooting, or a tight pattern for long range work. The problems with those chokes were that they had to be permanently attached by a gunsmith and if the choke was installed eccentric, then the gunsmith had to bend the barrel to correct point of impact.
Today most shotguns come with changeable choke tubes. If you don’t want to change chokes, then TruGlo has an adjustable tube cleverly called the Titan. Get it? “Tighten.” It’s a collet-type adjustable choke with splines that are squeezed closer together or allowed to flex farther apart by twisting an external collar. You can adjust it to full choke or cylinder bore and anything in between.
I recently compared the adjustable Titan to factory WinChoke tubes in my Winchester Model 120 pump shotgun. There is no question that the Titan works in varying the percentage of the shot patterns. Dialed down to full choke setting, the Titan produces tighter patterns than when dialed to modified. Dialed to modified, the Titan produced tighter patterns than when dialed to cylinder. At all settings, the Titan delivered pattern percentages in a 30-inch circle within industry standards for the respective chokes, and also patterned similarly to the factory WinChokes.
There’s only one annoyance–twisting the Titan from full to a more open setting requires turning it in an “unthreading” direction and that can cause the tube to unthread from the gun, so make sure it’s in tight. One cool thing I noticed is that Buckshot patterns from the Titan seemed much more evenly distributed and round than from the WinChokes. I checked the fired wads and noticed that they were swaging into the cuts between the splines. There are several straight-rifled choke tubes on the market that claim to deliver better patterns by arresting any in-bore wad rotation and the swaging in between the Titan’s splines would appear to have the same effect, if that is actually what’s causing the improved patterns. With birdshot, patterns from the Titan were similar in density and evenness to the conventional WinChoke tubes.
With the Titan, TruGlo has resurrected a good idea that suffered only from its execution. By overcoming those execution difficulties using modern materials and design, the Titan could prove to be the practical answer for shooters who often find themselves shooting or hunting in multi-choke conditions.
Scott Mayer
www.tacticaltshirts.com
www.john1911.com
“Shooting Guns & Having Fun”
In 2008, Mayer returned to the editorial side of publishing, this time in the digital field, as Editorial Director for Guns & Ammo, Shooting Times, Handguns and Rifleshooter online magazines. After a brief stint in 2011 as the Digital Media Director for an ABC TV affiliate, Mayer returned to the outdoors industry and Safari Club International where he is currently Assistant Publisher and Multi-Media Communications Editor.
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