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So I was bored, and sitting at the reloading bench. Never a good situation. I was looking at a jar of hand-cast lead single-ought (0) buckshot, and thinking about what I could do with it. They measured .320" in diameter, and were left over from an experiment I did a while back for research. Anyway, I found a couple of older boxes of Federal multi-puropose loads, the cheap ones they sell at Walmart, and pulled the 7 1/2 shot from them. They had a 1 1/8oz load and a 3 dram equivalent of powder. I put 6 pellets of 0 buck in each shell, in 2 layers of 3. They needed to be tamped down, but held themselves in place after they were wedged in. I reclosed the cases, and poof! I was done. The only tool I used was a small screw driver. I finally got out to the range today. Here are the results for 7, 12 and 20 yards:
7 yards
12 yards (approximately)
20 yards
What was interesting is that at all ranges, the pellets seemed to hit in a pattern. It isn't as visable in these pictures, but when I did multiple shots at the same distance, they would consistantly "cluster" pellets in the same areas of the target. (e.g. each one would put one pellet in at about 1 o'clock from the point of aim, 1 at about 4 o'clock, etc...) I don't know why the 12 yard target spread as much as it did, but the 20 yard shot seemed to be a tighter pattern. Maybe a bad loading on my part. The recoil was very, very low. Maybe about half that of the unmodified loads. That is to be expected with the lightened payload. I will have to chronograph these some time to see what they are moving at. But considering that the standard load with 7 1/2 shot has a muzzle velocity of about 1200 fps, I would guess that these are doing at least that. Another thing I found interesting is that even with the extra space in the shot cup, the pellets stayed in place even under multiple recoils. I don't know exactly how useful these loads are, but it was fun. And it is nice to know that I can always convert the cheap trap loads into something a bit more effective in a pinch.
-Mb
(edit) One additional note: These were fired through a shotgun that had the barrel chopped down to about 23" some time in the distant past. It has no choke at all.
7 yards
12 yards (approximately)
20 yards
What was interesting is that at all ranges, the pellets seemed to hit in a pattern. It isn't as visable in these pictures, but when I did multiple shots at the same distance, they would consistantly "cluster" pellets in the same areas of the target. (e.g. each one would put one pellet in at about 1 o'clock from the point of aim, 1 at about 4 o'clock, etc...) I don't know why the 12 yard target spread as much as it did, but the 20 yard shot seemed to be a tighter pattern. Maybe a bad loading on my part. The recoil was very, very low. Maybe about half that of the unmodified loads. That is to be expected with the lightened payload. I will have to chronograph these some time to see what they are moving at. But considering that the standard load with 7 1/2 shot has a muzzle velocity of about 1200 fps, I would guess that these are doing at least that. Another thing I found interesting is that even with the extra space in the shot cup, the pellets stayed in place even under multiple recoils. I don't know exactly how useful these loads are, but it was fun. And it is nice to know that I can always convert the cheap trap loads into something a bit more effective in a pinch.
-Mb
(edit) One additional note: These were fired through a shotgun that had the barrel chopped down to about 23" some time in the distant past. It has no choke at all.
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