Fox Collectors

A grouse hunting friend just snagged a nice 16 bore L C Smith Ideal Grade but she was choked 26 and 29 points (Full and a bit Fuller). That won't do for PA birds. He came by this morning and we opened them to 6 and 16 points, about IC and Mod.

My choking reamer is inserted and driven (turned) from the breech end, and uses two bronze pilot bushings that are exactly sized to the bore and held captive at about 6" and 10" behind the front of the reamer. Right now I have six sets of bushings for 16-gauge and keep finding new bore sizes..

You'll see the reamer drive rod in each pic, note how it looks relative to the center of that chamber. My friend noticed that and got kind of edgy but those two pilots insure the choke is re-cut dead nuts on center of each bore out toward its muzzle. Kind of interesting to see how the centers of the chambers don't align with the bores at the chokes due to the “swamp” of the tubes. frank

I am learning so much in here, thanks for posting this. Really thank you

Very impressive Frank. Thanks.

Thank you for the illustration, I've wondered how barrels were joined as it seems they would be brought closer to parallel around 8" from the muzzles or so, then the exteriors filed for external straightness of line. Either that or the chokes would be cut so as to reduce the angle of barrel convergence which would show itself at the muzzles.

This is some seriously good stuff right here. I’m hoping to have all the tooling someday to take on the task of opening fixed chokes. Frank, after reaming do you hone as well or does this leave the bore pretty smooth?
Thanks for taking the time to show this.
-Matt

Good stuff and good pictures Frank.

Matt, this was a later LC Smith and they were typically furnished with a taper - > parallel choke profile; hence I did this one with a parallel reamer to match with the factory work. After reaming I lightly hone just the parallel run out to the muzzle and then faux age-color it. On the other hand Fox chokes as furnished are full-tapered out to the muzzles but with varying length depending on the constriction, and I wouldn't have used a parallel-cut reamer if this had been a Fox. Parallel choke out to the muzzle (while that works) is generally a dead giveaway that a Fox choke had been opened post-factory and for many Foxers that's a key consideration. .

For personal reasons I've gotten to rarely reply to/write tech stuff here on the public forums and I mainly post on the Members Forums for the more serious Fox brethren who support the AHFCA and this site. Access gets enabled when you sign up. Those paying members with access know that I've written there for years on all kinds of Foxsmithing topics; and regarding choking I recently invested in the tooling to be able to do piloted tapered choking for 12 and 20-gauge Fox, Syracuse Lefever other similar makers that choke profile. 16-gauge on order and about 2-3 months out.

frank

Frank;
If we had a "like" button I would have worn it out by now. Great stuff and many thanks for sharing.

DarylC wrote:Frank;
If we had a "like" button I would have worn it out by now. Great stuff and many thanks for sharing.

+ 20 , Thank you for sharing Frank !!!

DarylC wrote:Frank;
If we had a "like" button I would have worn it out by now. Great stuff and many thanks for sharing.

+1

SRH