A beam chopping system for a cyclotron is in operation at the JAERI cyclotron facility. A combination of a pulse voltage chopper in the injection line and a sinusoidal voltage chopper after the exit of the cyclotron is adopted to produce beam pulses spaced at 1 &mgr;s–1 ms intervals from natural cyclotron beams. The chopping system was designed according to a simple formulation of the chopping process in which the multiturn extraction was taken into account. Performance of the chopping system was experimentally proved to satisfy requirements of the design. In actual operation to produce beam pulses at long intervals, however, the number of the multiturn extraction is usually larger than the assumed value in the design because of a large phase acceptance of the cyclotron. Careful tuning of the acceleration phase width or the base magnetic field of the cyclotron is necessary to reduce it. It is essential to strictly define the acceleration phase of injected beams in the central region of the cyclotron to improve this situation. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.