Free For All Friday: 4-4-2014
It’s Friday again! I don’t know about you but I look forward to Friday the moment I wake up on Monday morning. It’s been a good week, actually. I’ve been able to increase my updates a little bit with industry news and such. At the same time, I had a lot of fun with the review of the Portal Gun for April Fools. Questions? We’ve got three this week. Almost had a skeet shooting hat trick this week but there’s definitely a clay sports theme with the first two.
“What is a good 12ga Shotgun to start with for Trap/Skeet shooting? Do any have a pistol grip and a stock?” -James S.
There’s two main scenarios possible here: You’ve never tried skeet shooting before and want to give it a shot or you have tried it and love it and want to shoot it on a regular basis. If you’ve never tried it, I’d highly recommend trying to find someone to try it with or take a couple of lessons. If that’s just plain out of the question, you’re going to want to go inexpensive to start because you might wind up not liking it. The chances of that are slim, mind you, but still. Frankly, any shotgun that has choke tubes can be used with skeet and trap. Some recommendations for that first, inexpensive gun would definitely be the Stoeger line. I did a review of their Condor Over/Under a couple months ago. They also have some semi-auto shotguns that are awesome starters as well. Personally, I prefer an over/under over semi-auto.
If you’re a bit more experienced and are planning on spending a lot of time shooting skeet, CZ-USA has a lot of great options that won’t break the bank. Some others that come to mind are Franchi, Mossberg and Remington. The Benelli Supernova is an incredible gun for under $600. You can’t go wrong with Benelli.
As far as the second part of your questions, most shotguns in skeet have a molded pistol grip stock. I wouldn’t recommend a separated pistol grip (the kind you would find on tactical style shotguns) as the grip angle would make it much harder to hit the clays. It’s not impossible, but why handicap yourself right off the bat?
Ultimately, fitting the stock to you will do much more for comfort and accuracy than a pistol grip in this particular case. If you’re planning on shooting clays on a regular basis, it’s worth it to get the stock fitted. I’ll should note, however, that it’s very important to get a good grasp of the technique before getting it fitted otherwise you’ll be matching the stock to bad skills rather than the stock complimenting good skills.
“CHOKE tubes? I am starting to shoot trap and skeet but don’t know how to properly use choke tubes. My Benelli came with 4 of them. Which one do I use and when?” -Skylar R.
Let’s start out with a quick rundown of what choke tubes actually do. When the shot leaves the barrel, it starts to spread out. In a perfect world, you’d have a perfectly round pattern with a perfect distribution of shot throughout. The problem is, the world isn’t perfect. What you wind up with, thanks to physics and such, is a tight grouping in the middle and a bunch of stragglers around the edges. Choke tubes change the size of that center grouping.
The reason we have so many tube choices is because different applications benefit from different shot patterns. While it ultimately comes down to personal preference, here’s a rule of thumb to get you started: Trap shooting = full tube, Skeet = skeet, improved cylinder = sporting clays. Now, like I said, that’s just typical guidelines. If you find using an IC choke for trap works better for you then by all means use it. No one is going to give you a swirly for it. In all actuality, the IC choke could be considered a “Goldilocks” choke and used for just about anything.
Personally, I just keep IC in mine the majority of the time and focus mostly on technique. I’m not at the point yet where swapping out the chokes constantly is going to make much of a difference.
How often should I give my guns a general cleaning and how often should I strip them down completely and service them. Same goes for my magazines. -Christopher H.
We’ve touched on this before but for a quick refresher: it depends on how clean you want your gun. I like mine looking like the day I got it from the store so I clean and lube mine after every trip to the range. You can go quite a few trips to the range before it really needs a cleaning, however. I do a full breakdown and deep clean twice a year at the time change. If it’s your everyday carry gun, you want to clean those once a month.
I break the magazines down and clean them at the time change as well but I still will wipe them down after the range.
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