Reloading for Shotgunners. Rick SappЧитать онлайн книгу.
and shot to fill the cup and shell.
In addition, a specific load may or may not have additional internal spacers to help fill the hull and balance the load.
One of the important factors of handloading is that because these elements, at first glance, seem so similar, you must study them carefully. Small differences definitely exist and both manufacturers and other reloaders testify to this fact. Keeping your reloading components separate, labeled and identifiable is a matter of preservation of life and limb.
Experienced handloaders recommend that once you find recipes that suit your shooting, stick with known components. Otherwise, there is a significant chance of confusing the materials, and in handloading that can cause a drop in performance and very unfortunate results.
THE SHOTSHELL HULL
The hull’s duty seems obvious, but in fact the hull has quite a few functions and all of them must perform precisely as designed to deliver quality shooting.
Certainly, the primary function of the hull is to package the powder and shell in a neat, sweet and complete unit. Since relatively few shotgunners are black powder enthusiasts, most of us just want to shove a shell inside the chamber, or in the magazine of our semi-automatic, and pull the trigger. We do not want to assume that the shell is anything other than okay. Period. When we are in the field or at the range, we want to pull the trigger, a lot, and worrying about rain or spilling powder and shot and waiting while the smoke clears and our buddies pour and ram does not sound like a real good day. Today’s shell provides convenience, safety and, with a few exceptions, the ability to recycle.
All wads are not the same. Certainly, they vary by gauge, but they also vary by load. A WAA wad is different than a Windjammer is different than a BP STS. Until you have a lot of experience reloading, follow your recipe precisely and even then, switch components with extreme caution.
All hulls are not alike. In the discount marts, you will find numerous boxes of low priced shells, often called promotional loads. These lead-filled shells are excellent for one-time use, but should not be considered seriously for reloading – okay, maybe once or twice, but with caution! There has to be a reason these shells are cheap. First, they are usually constructed with paper inserts inside at the base of the hull, and these inserts will soon detach and they can lodge in the gun barrel. Anything lodged inside your barrel is going to be a problem. Moreover, although over/under and side-by-side shooters secretly think of themselves as a notch above gas gunners, it is still the rare double barrel operator who conscientiously checks his or her barrels before inserting another two rounds and snapping the breech shut.
Hulls evolved significantly during the last century. Originally, the self-contained shotshell hull was brass from top to bottom. All-brass shells were cumbersome and expensive, however, and except for the base (sometimes called the head), paper rather quickly replaced the all-brass hull. A rigid brass base was retained to seat the base wad, hold the primer, contain the shaped paper hull and to provide a solid grip for the gun’s extractors after firing.
During the ‘60s, a remarkable development in shotshells took place, the introduction of plastic cases. Today, almost all cases are plastic, which is much easier and less expensive to form into a shotshell case than paper. Plastic hulls offer greater water resistance than paper and they truly are more pliable. The synthetic material also maintains a superior memory for crimps without the fraying associated with the edges of layered paper hulls. Plastic used for hulls is more resistant to heat than paper hulls, too, and is stronger for the amount of material required.
You can easily measure the precision of hulls and reloaded shells with a shotshell checker. Precision machined holes, labeled GO and NO GO, in this stainless MEC plate test for size and roundness.
Nevertheless, there is considerable pressure from outside the industry to shoot biodegradable components. (In my hometown in Florida, a city known for its liberal politics, the new “Gainesville Target Range” requires that shotgunners pick up not only their hulls, but their wads as well.) This trend may eventually mean that our ballistics tables include data on tomato skin shotshells and distinguish between Red Delicious apple seed pellets (#6) and Autumn Gold pumpkin seed pellets (#00 buckshot).
Manufacturers are developing more eco-friendly products and you will increasingly find them available as reload components. Kent/Gamebore recently developed a “photodegradable” wad, for instance; it is still plastic, but it incorporates properties that cause “accelerated breakdown.” Their Gamebore line has a 2-3/4-inch biodegradable varnished paper shell and a fiber shotcup. Kent’s Impact non-toxic shot is a tungsten matrix, which Kent says, flies “just like lead, only it is non-toxic.” This movement may, sooner or later, affect handloading in a giant way (It changed home photo developing enormously. Chemicals we used to simply pour down the drain are now known to be highly toxic!), but for the present, many options are available in plastic wads and shotshells.
Proper shell resizing is important with today’s close gun tolerances. The Super Sizer from MEC is a heavy-duty shell-sizer that is built-in to all new generation MEC presses.
At the base of the shell is the brass cup that stabilizes the hull and other components. Curiously, this “brass” cup is often not brass at all, but a lightweight steel alloy that is colored to look like brass.
Shotgunners obviously prefer that their shell bases look like brass, though. Why this is so would involve some cultural analysis, but a few years ago, the now-defunct shotshell manufacturer Activ tried aggressively to market a no-brass plastic case. This case was entirely functional and suitable for reloading as well. It incorporated a small metal ring molded into the base to grip the primer. Nevertheless, sales results were not pretty. Perhaps Activ’s hulls were perceived to be as not as strong as shells with visible metal bases, but from all reports, they were, and they did not require resizing in a reloading press, either.
When I bought my first shotgun, about 25 years ago, I learned that there were two kinds of shells, high base and low base. This referred to the height of the brass base. It was generally understood that low base equated with low power and high base with high power. Consequently, my buddies and I purchased high base shells for pheasants and waterfowl, and low base for grouse and woodcock. What a surprise it was to learn that there is no essential relationship between the height of the base and the power of the load! But myths die hard, so today we still have high-brass magnum loads and low-brass dove loads.
The height of the brass base on a shotshell is not an indicator of its contents or power. A high base shell does not necessarily contain a heavier load or greater charge of powder than a low base shell.
The metal visible up the side of the hull is designed to stiffen the shell, to give the extractors a firm shelf to grip and, especially with paper hulls, to provide a firm base of support for the load’s components. During the first half of the twentieth century, the size of the brass on a shell varied as manufacturers experimented with new paper and plastic hulls, new base wad materials and heights, new progressive powders and various configurations for consolidating the elements of particular loads. A sneaky difficulty with new hull materials was finding combinations that would best contain gas pressure from the burning powder without leakage around the seal or the base wad.
Today’s hull makers vary the height of the brass for the same reason that they use differently colored hulls. Different sizes help them and their customers distinguish between different types and sizes of shells in their line.
A sturdier hull base, one wrapped in metal, albeit lightweight and relatively soft as metals go, may