THE TECHNOID RECOILS... The fact of the matter is that the Technoid is a softy. I mean, what would you expect from someone whose diet consists mainly of Twinkies and whose only exercise is fooling with a slide rule and cleaning his glasses. All of this means that your redoubtable T- Meister is not a big fan of recoil. While the Technoid does not mind recoil in an experimental sense, he certainly does not like it in a constant sense. However, in order to do something about recoil, one must first understand what recoil is and how it is measured and sensed. Pull on your boots, here we go again.

There are two types of recoil- the type you can measure and the type that you simply feel. Free Recoil is what you can measure and there is a fancy formula for it found in the SAAMI Technical Correspondent's Handbook Data Sheet #1.0401. Subjective or Felt Recoil is what you feel and may, or may not, have much to do with free recoil.

Example: The Free Recoil formula stirs up a bunch of numbers and tells you that your 8 pound 30" Clay Thumper Special O/U shooting 1 1/8 oz Rhino Rollers at 1300 feet per second muzzle velocity has 21 pounds of free recoil. Nice to know, but Free Recoil does not mean much until the numbers are connected to a certain level of pain and bodily abuse.

Felt Recoil brings it all home. Hold the gun properly against your shoulder, fire it and get the feel of that 21 pounds of Free Recoil. Now take the same gun and shell and turn one loose while the shotgun's butt is held directly against the end of your nose, instead of on your shoulder. Now THAT is Felt Recoil. Notice, that the Free Recoil remained the same for both shots, but the Felt Recoil certainly changed just by how the gun was held.

Free Recoil is easy to calculate. You just plug the numbers into the formula and stand back. Felt Recoil is very subjective and is a much vaguer term. Felt Recoil obviously depends to some extend on Free Recoil, but it also depends to a large part on gun fit, proper gun mount, gun action (fixed breech or auto), recoil pads plus any other recoil attenuating devices like recoil reducers or pneumatic strut stocks.

Without going into numbers that will make your eyes glaze over (more than they currently are), there are some general rules of thumb concerning mathematically calculated Free Recoil:

1) A certain percentage change in gun weight will produce an opposite equal percentage change in recoil. For example- If you increase the weight of your gun 10%, you will reduce Free Recoil by about 10%. This relation is not strictly linear, but is a relatively accurate rule for the guns and shells we normally use. Who ever said that mathematics was an exact science had no sense of humor.

2) A reduction in muzzle velocity or shot load will produce almost a two fold reduction in Free Recoil. For example: If you decrease your muzzle velocity from a 3 dram 1200 foot per second by 10% to a "lite" 1080 fps, you will decrease your Free Recoil, not by 10%, but by almost 20%. The same with shot load. If you decrease your shot load from 1 1/8 oz to 1 oz (about 11%), you will decrease your Free Recoil by 19%. Again, the relationship is not always 2:1, but it is close enough for gummint work.

Bottom line: Gun weight change alters free recoil on about a 1:1 ratio. Shot weight or shot velocity change alters free recoil on about a 2:1 ratio. Clearly, the easy way to reduce Free Recoil is to change shells.

Bet you are just dying to see some more Free Recoil numbers, aren't you? In all the examples, we are starting out with an 8 pound O/U shooting 3 dram (1200 fps) 1 1/8 oz target loads.

Raising the gun weight from 8# to 9# will lower Free Recoil from 17.63 foot pounds to 15.67 foot pounds.

Lowering only the shot charge from 1 1/8 oz to 1 oz will lower Free Recoil from 17.63 foot pounds to 14.33 foot pounds.

Lowering only the muzzle velocity from 1200 to 1150 (2 3/4 dram) will lower Free Recoil from 17.63 fp to 16.19 fp. Lowering it further to a "lite" load of 1080 fps will produce Free Recoil of 14.28 fp.

Putting it all together, adding a pound of weight to the gun, plus dropping down to one ounce of shot at a "lite" 1080 fps will reduce Free Recoil from 17.63 foot pounds to 10.32 foot pounds- a reduction of 41%!

The cynics would say that you now have a poorly balanced gun throwing a shot charge that wouldn't break a light bulb, but many people disagree and happily use one or all of the above recoil solutions to great advantage.

The one thing nice about reducing Free Recoil is that it is the one fix that always reduces Felt Recoil. It may not reduce Felt Recoil enough to make your gun pleasant to shoot if your stock is ill fitting (remember that nose experiment), but it will always help somewhat.

The proper solution to avoiding recoil is to minimize both your Free and Felt Recoil. Lowering one without the other is a help, but not a fix.

Reducing Free Recoil is pure mathematics. Reducing Felt Recoil is much more of an art than a science in that it all depends on how you personally interact with your shotgun. The Technoid will be sure to do a piece on Felt Recoil if he ever figures it out. Maybe next month. In the meantime, mount on your shoulder, not on your snooter, shooter.