sporting shells

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hobylicious
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sporting shells

Post by hobylicious » Sun Feb 24, 2013 12:36 am

im relatively new to buying shells for sport clays, i was curious to if anyone had any suggestions on brands, weights, shot size etc for sporting clays...anything not federal ammo that is...i had a really bad run in with their company and wont purchase from them anymore.
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Synchronizor
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Re: sporting shells

Post by Synchronizor » Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:29 am

I really like a 1 1/8 oz. load of #8 shot on a 3 DE charge as a single shell that'll work for any clay-shooting game. You can optimize a little more with #7.5 for trap and #9 for skeet, but a #8 shell is a good catch-all.

I tend to use Federals because they offer that load for pretty cheap, and it cycles well in my gun. Remington offers the same load, and I used to use them because they were a little cleaner than the Federals, but they stopped making them in bulk packs, so now the 3 DE shells are tougher to find for a good price. Pretty much every manufacturer offers that same load, so look around and see what you can find in your area.

All I'll say is to avoid the Winchester Universals and other budget Winchester target loads; the shells are poorly constructed, with dirty powder and very thin, weak steel bases that are notorious for hanging up in all kinds of shotguns.

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hobylicious
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Re: sporting shells

Post by hobylicious » Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:44 am

what does DE stand for? also i never fully understood the shot #'s...with #7 shot is it saying 7mm balls or 1/7th inch or what? i apologize for the most likely obvious answer questions but i am sort of new, i can shoot accurately but dont know much of whats in the shell im shooting
you can have my gun, bullets first!

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hobylicious
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Re: sporting shells

Post by hobylicious » Sun Feb 24, 2013 3:05 am

nvm on shot size..i found a nice chart for it

Shot number diameter (inches) diameter (mm) approx no. of
pellets in 1 oz.
_______________|_____________________|________________|_________________
| | |
000 BUCK | .36 | 9.14 | 6.2
| | |
00 BUCK | .33 | 8.38 | 8
| | |
0 BUCK | .32 | 8.13 | 9
| | |
1 BUCK | .30 | 7.62 | 11
| | |
2 BUCK | .27 | 6.86 | 15
| | |
3 BUCK | .25 | 6.35 | 19
| | |
4 BUCK | .24 | 6.10 | 21
| | |
BB | .18 | 4.57 | 50
| | |
2 | .148 | 3.76 | 90
| | |
4 | .129 | 3.28 | 135
| | |
5 | .120 | 3.05 | 170
| | |
6 | .109 | 2.77 | 225
| | |
7.5 | .094 | 2.39 | 350
| | |
8 | .089 | 2.26 | 410
| | |
8.5 | .085 | 2.16 | 470
| | |
9 | .079 | 2.01 | 585
| | |
12 | .05 | 1.3 | 2300
_______________|_____________________|________________|_________________
you can have my gun, bullets first!

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Synchronizor
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Re: sporting shells

Post by Synchronizor » Sun Feb 24, 2013 7:10 am

hobylicious wrote:what does DE stand for? also i never fully understood the shot #'s...with #7 shot is it saying 7mm balls or 1/7th inch or what? i apologize for the most likely obvious answer questions but i am sort of new, i can shoot accurately but dont know much of whats in the shell im shooting
Don't feel bad, shotshells are weird. They're kind of like sharks; they really haven't had to evolve much because they still work the same way they did back in the 1800s. Sure, the hulls are plastic and steel now instead of paper and brass, but the basic designs of the shells and their shot are the same as back then, low pressures propelling round balls from a cylindrical shell.

So, like any self-respecting old coot, shotshells and shot never got on board with that new-fangled business of millimeters and other such logical measurements. They're still described by a system of confusing, archaic metrics that somehow manage to get the job done, despite being a complete mess.

You may not know the name, but you should be familiar with the avoirdupois system of weights. Arising somewhere in Europe back around the 12th century or so, and for some wacky reason, still the common system of weights here in the USA; it is based on the pound unit, with a smaller ounce unit equal to 1/16 of a pound. Continuing the base-16 hijinks in turn, a dram is a unit of weight equal to 1/16 of an ounce. Now, shotshells were originally black-powder cartridges, and that powder was commonly measured in units of drams. Since shells and primers back then were all pretty much the same, and the densities of black powder didn't vary much either, powder measurements really didn't have to be too precise. Reloaders could just weigh out powder by the dram, drop it in, and be good to go.

As time went by, shotshell components became far more variegated, and modern smokeless powders, which were also being created with different performance characteristics, now required very precise measurement, and careful matching and testing had to be carried out to ensure the combination of powder, primer, hull, shot weight, crimp, and whatever other odds and ends went into the hull would all work together without causing unsafe pressure spikes. With this level of required precision, and the varying densities and pressures of the different types of smokeless powders that could be used in a shotshell, the old dram unit was no longer of any use for loading shells. However, it persists to this day in the form of the dram equivalent, AKA Dram Eq, Dr Eq, or just DE. The DE of a shotshell roughly describes the power of the powder charge in terms of the dram weight of a matching charge of black powder, kind of like the way nuclear blasts are described by how many tons of TNT it would take to get the same explosion. DE doesn't really offer much in the way of direct performance info, but it does give you a qualitative number that can be useful for comparing different loads.

Here's an example. Take two types of Remington Gun Club loads:
Image
They're both 2 3/4" shells loaded with 1 1/8 oz. of #8 shot. However, one is a 2 3/4 DE load, with a rated muzzle velocity of 1145 FPS, while the other is a 3 DE load with a rated velocity of 1200 FPS. Whether you're looking for a lighter-recoiling load for close-range shooting, or a faster load for trap shooting, you can look at these numbers and decide which shells you'd rather buy.

*******

As for shot size, that's a whole mess of at least a half-dozen different notation systems all crammed together. The one that actually has some sort of mathematical system behind it is birdshot. To get the size of birdshot, subtract the shot size number from 17, and the resulting number is the nominal pellet diameter in hundredths of an inch.

So for #8 birdshot, 17 - 8 = 9; making #8 birdshot 9 hundredths of an inch in diameter, or .09".
For #7.5 birdshot, 17 - 7.5 = 9.5, so #7.5 shot has a diameter of .095".

This system goes for all numbered birdshot sizes, from #12 to #1. Above #1, you have B shot, which is .17" in diameter. Pellet sizes get bigger from there in the same increments of .01" by adding "B"s for BB and BBB sizes, then you move into "F"s and "T"s for a handful of coyote shot sizes, and then you start over with a new system of numbers for buckshot sizes. Birdshot is the only type of shot with a consistent formula behind it; for the rest, you're best off doing just what you did, finding a chart.

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hobylicious
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Re: sporting shells

Post by hobylicious » Mon Feb 25, 2013 11:23 pm

thank you very much for that very informative reply, MUCH APPRECIATED!!!
you can have my gun, bullets first!

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