How many rounds can you shoot before the pattern starts going screwy?
Do you clean between trap or clays rounds? Nate

Good question and I expect very hard to answer.
I would guestimate that a dirty barrel would contribute very little to pattern variation. You would have to shoot one heck of a lot of patterns and do some serious statistical analysis to come up with your answer. The only place you might see cause/effect is if you started to build up plastic in the choke. I have never encountered this with 100-200 rounds.
C.G.B.

I can't see how fouling could make a difference. I have had rifles that would start to group poorly after 25 - 30 rounds, but my shotguns break clays & hit birds just as effectively after several hundred rounds. I always clean after every shooting session, but I know some very good wing shots who seldom if ever clean their shotguns, & it does not seem to hurt their performance.

I have personally gone thousands of shells without an apreciable decline in numbers of birds hit.....

So I dont have an answer for you...

Thanks. I was curious mostly. My less than consistant scores don't surprise me to much as I just started shooting trap a few weeks ago.

What I did find was my choke tube was starting to back out. I dont see any danage but did clean some plastic out from between the choke and barrel. Nate

be carefull of the choke backing out, this can lead to "stuff" getting between it and the gun, leading to it eventually getting stuck, sometimes very very stuck......

Nope, I used to shoot 25,000 clay targets a year and used to clean my barrel about 3 or 4 times per year. Some people say guns recoil more when they are dirty. I usually tell them they're full of crap. As to your choke backing out, keep an eye on it, there have been some choke tubes that have been shot out the end of the barrel, usually causing the threads to get screwed up (poor pun, I know).

I've seen shooters check their choke tubes either before or after each station on a sporting clays course.

Maybe tightening it with the appropriate wrench instead of hand tight might be the solution.

I would think that if you had considerable build up of plastic from the wads at the choke, then you could have some pattern degradation. How much I cant say.

I dont think it has ever happened to me as I clean the guns every 500 rounds or so and many times after just a day hunting or shooting with much less shots. I have regularly shot three different hundred (100 shots) round courses in the same day and just cleaned it afterward - or not sometimes.

I have shot a couple of thousand in a day, then the gun was cleaned at night, without noticing anything but torn up thumbs, sore shoulders, and all of that.

But I still think there are, or could be, some guns more prone to plastic fouling build ups with some shells.

You will find more plastic in your bore, even after cleaning with Hoppes etc, with the Shooters Choice. I use a bit of it in mine and it really does work. Was the fouling causing problems, no not really. But it is nice to know it is out too.

quote:

Originally posted by BigNate:
How many rounds can you shoot before the pattern starts going screwy?
Do you clean between trap or clays rounds? Nate

You didn't say what shells your using if they're reloads try upping the powder charge some and see if that helps. as far as cleaning I used to shoot registered trap and rarely ever cleaned just wiped down the outside and made sure the hinge pin and moving parts were lube with a quality grease.
Stepchild