Category: The Small Bores

I have been discussing yesterday’s pattern testing results with a friend and one of the first questions he asked me during that discussion was whether I would have to go down the road of reloading .410 to tune a cartridge to my requirements. It’s certainly a tempting possibility, as I tend to find reloading enjoyable in it’s own right, strange as that may sound.

I went on to say that my thinking on what ought to make the best-performing .410 cartridge hasn’t deviated very far from where it started back before the Yildiz arrived: something like 16-18g of #7 shot propelled at moderate velocity by a full-length plastic wad.

Rather gratifyingly, most of the tests I’ve done so far have acted as confirmatory data points around that particular idea rather than contradicting it, so the question becomes not what to choose, but whether or not there is a commercially-available cartridge that fits that specification. Most of those I’ve tested so far have one component wrong – perhaps the velocity is too high, or the shot size too large, or a rolled turnover and card have been used instead of a crimp, etc.

On the basis of the data and experience in the field, the Eley Trap load is the best choice so far, but I’ve wounded several birds at longer range with it and I’d prefer not to have to rely on #7½ to get sufficient pattern density unless I have to.

The subsonic tests yesterday did clearly show the advantage of dropping the muzzle velocity. 74% pattern density at 30 yards is – percentage-wise – way above anything else I’ve seen previously and especially impressive given that the cartridge is loaded with a fibre wad. That the performance was better at 40 yards too is equally pleasing. However, the price one pays for that performance is a substantially lower per-pellet kinetic energy (remember that the relationship between velocity and energy is quadratic, not linear). Let’s say a cartridge loaded with #7 gave similar performance (and I doubt it would, for various reasons): you’d get the pellet count required for 40 yards, but probably not the impact energy because you’re starting off 300-400fps slower than a normal supersonic load. Subsonic #6 are, on that measurement, a much safer bet, I’d think.

So reloading may come into it. If I could get hold of some very hard shot (5%+ Sb), in size #6½ with little variation between individual pellets, and put 17-18g of it atop a plastic wad and a slow powder giving 1050-1080fps at the muzzle with smooth acceleration, I might just have the perfect .410 load. But that’s really not so far from some of what’s already available, and whether the difference between that and the next best cartridge would actually be quantifiable… well, I’m sceptical.

On one level, it’s just easier to stick an ounce-and-a-quarter down a 12 gauge and forget about all these minutiae!

Ultimately, more testing is required. I’ve still got the two Fiocchi loads to test and the major deficiency in the data (i.e. that I’m only shooting 2 patterns per combination at the moment) needs to be corrected. I need to go back and shoot 5-6 more patterns – at least – with each cartridge and choke, to improve the reliability of the conclusions I’m drawing from what I’m seeing.

I also have one long-term question which I still want to answer, which is exactly how close in performance terms the 2½” and 3″ loads are. We know more lead makes for better killing patterns, but I remain interested in testing some of the 2½” shells to see if the percentage performance is better with a shorter shot column. Perhaps after I find the best-performing of the 3″ cartridges, I’ll have time to look into it.

Having picked up a roll of finest 42″ plotter paper from the post office yesterday, I was able to prevail upon my wife to help me prepare 16 pattern “plates”, just after lunch, with a view to getting some cartridge testing done this afternoon. Along with some neatly cut squares of paper – her skills as a seamstress translating nicely from cloth to a new medium – I was also able, with her help, to construct a measuring line, formed from 50 yards of garden twine and a few drilled pegs, which turned out – as expected – to be a vastly easier method of establishing a shooting range than the previous way involving the repeated use of an 8m builder’s measuring tape.

I headed out to the fields with gun, paper, cartridges and a set of pre-written labels for the patterns and looked forward to an hour or two of minding my own business and shooting for the sake of scientific study.

Damn You, Ye Gods!

I thought it wouldn’t hurt, before starting the business of patterning, to have a walk around for 10 minutes to see if any birds were moving on the farm. Ultimately, there turned out not to be – a couple of crows outside of range of the .410 were the only quarry I saw – and I returned to the car to get the bits and pieces required for patterning.

As I finished setting up, unpacking the paper and getting everything ready for the first shot, the heavens opened, the wind roared and my carefully laid plans pattern plates were blown into the sky by a howling storm that appeared, as from nowhere. Blazing sunshine in both literal and psychological terms gave way to thunderstorms and a few choice words on my part as I chased around the farm, trying to retrieve the sheets of paper which now acted as though sails or kites in the high wind and flew all over the place.

Thankfully, the wind was blowing in the direction of the wood and only one pattern “plate” was seriously damaged as the trees caught and impaled the white squares. (It looked afterwards as if I’d tried to pattern an elephant gun!)

After 20-30 minutes hanging around under the trees, trying to stop everything from blowing away again, the rain eased and I was finally able to step out of the tree line, re-errect the canes, clips and paper which would form the target and begin shooting.

Preparation => Efficiency

Patterning is always a slow business – from that there’s no real escape. I suppose one could, theoretically, line up pattern plates at all distances of interest and shoot a single cartridge through several sheets of paper, but realistically, the only way to achieve a set of pattern test results is to shoot each combination of choke and cartridge at the distance of interest, one by one. With that in mind, today’s 16 patterns in under two hours was not bad going, especially given than roughly an hour was taken up by walking around, setting up and waiting around for stormclouds to pass. I think I was probably managing about 1 pattern every 3 minutes at one point. Certainly, I managed to get home before the expected time and, after something to eat, set about counting pellet holes and analyzing the data I’d collected.

Child-Proof Floor Covering

My wife observed to me, on seeing the state of our lounge as she arrived home this evening, that if nothing else, covering the floor with paper would conceivably stop (or delay) a mischievous child armed with permanent marker from adding to the design of the carpet:

The results of today’s tests, which were performed with the Lyalvale “Extreme Game” 16g/#6 and Eley “Extralong” Subsonic 18g/#6 cartridges, have been added to their respective pages in the Extended Pattern Tests section of this website.

Full analysis of the data will require more thought and – I suspect – more testing. As the data stands, there are several features which are apparently contradictory. The key points are:

• Neither of the cartridges really contain enough pellets to make a usable 40-yard pattern a realistic possibility. This was confirmed by testing – neither cartridge threw a 40-yard pattern with even 100 pellets falling in the standard circle.
• As would be expected, the Eley subsonic cartridges patterned very well on a percentage basis, achieving maxima of 74% pattern density at 30 yards and 51% pattern density at 40 yards. However, the number of pellets available is low, at 184, meaning that only the 30-yard pattern (through 0.015″ choke) is usable. Extrapolation of the trend suggests that pattern density would fail at somewhere around the 33-yard mark with this combination.
• Confusingly, the Eley cartridges performed better at 30 yards with the choke having 0.015″ constriction, but better at 40 yards with the choke having 0.020″ constriction. Since pellets generally fly further apart with increasing range, one or other of the chokes should give consistently the best performance, even if not the tighter of the two. This suggests a wide variability in performance, bad shooting or some other factor for which I haven’t yet accounted. The only way to determine whether this is a statistical anomaly or a genuine “quirk” of these brands of cartridges will be to shoot more patterns.
• The Lyalvale cartridges failed to produce any usable pattern at 30 or 40 yards. Whilst they produced the lightest recoil of any of the cartridges thus far tested, #6 shot appears to be too large for a load as light as 16g (or, for that matter, 18g) unless one is in possession of a gun producing exceptional performance – something I do not appear to have. Perhaps the #7 version of the cartridge would offer a better balance of pattern and energy?
• The Lyalvale cartridge showed better performance at 30 yards with the 0.020″ choke than the 0.015″ choke as one would expect. However, the tighter choke showed somewhat inferior performance at 40 yards. My gut feeling is that this represents a blown pattern, holding together whilst the velocity is high but rapidly spreading as velocity (and therefore pellet momentum) falls due to significant pellet deformation. Since the Lyalvale cartridge is the lightest available load in a 3″ case, it is likely that it has the highest velocity and I would therefore expect this effect, if it is occurring, to be most pronounced in this case.

What a difficult thing it is to get hold of a roll of paper!

After some weeks’ wait, I have finally received notification that my patterning paper is to be delivered tomorrow. At last! The company from whom I’d ordered the paper have been very good about sorting out the fact that they’d advertised and sold me a discontinued item and I’m now going to receive a 50m roll of 42″ plotter paper instead of a 39″ roll, which should make very little difference to the overall result. Then again – as a bishop once observed to an actress – one should never underestimate the difference three inches can make.

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping myself busy with various projects and a little shooting. The 12 gauge saw the light of day once again after my previous unsuccessful trip: one of the new(-ish) members of the shooting association I help run joined me on a long but ultimately fruitless walk around six of our farms on Saturday. Three shots between us and a bird lost to the safety catch – bloody thing! – is all I can report from that particular outing. A friend of mine was concurrently busy shooting 116 elsewhere, the report of which I found mildly irritating, but I suppose if the pigeons are not in one place, they’re in another. Nice work if you can get it.

Now I merely have to find a date upon which to do the patterning required and construct a list of patterns worth shooting. I believe the paper will allow for about 45 patterns, so we will – as my intended accomplice has just suggested to me – begin with the half choke at 30 yards with all cartridges and see where the results take us from there.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog (or indeed, anything on this website), so I thought it would be worth putting a short post up to explain my absence, in case any regular readers – if I have any – were wondering where I’d disappeared to.

I’m awaiting the delivery of a number of rolls of plotter paper from a stationary company I’ve discovered online. These are more normally used for architect’s drawings on spectacularly expensive inkjet printers that usually occupy a small room by themselves, but in this case, they’ll do rather well for my purposes and – best of all – at relatively little expense. The paper size is 39″ by 50m (a lovely mix of metric and Imperial measurements), and I’m currently working on a “luggable” container with attachment to store the rolls and transport them, so as to make a portable pattern plate. Watch this space!

Since the patterning experiments cannot progress further and the limited number of cartridges I have available for testing means that I cannot afford to waste any on hunting (in case that brand turns out to be “the one”), I’ve been relying on my other shotguns for hunting.

A short trip out on Saturday with my 12 gauge – seeing the light of day for the first time in nearly 2 years – proved to be an enjoyable “mystery wildlife tour” but failed to provide any opportunities. Whilst the sight of five roe deer, flocks of seagulls, a solitary fox and 37,000,000 peewits made an otherwise quiet walk in the countryside more interesting, I was left wondering where all the wood pigeons had gone. They are, presumably, somewhere.

Whilst I await the paper for patterning, I will be turning my thoughts to what else I can produce for the website. I’ve taken a break from it to concentrate on other projects lately, but there’s a history for the 28 gauge that needs to be written – I may work on that.

Yesterday’s trip turned out much as expected. In the event, I nearly missed nine in a row, a fate happily prevented by my bagging one bird for the eight cartridges fired! Not a brilliant result by any estimation and my dissatisfaction with it has not yet departed. That said, the trip had its positive moments, in spite of the lessons which remain un-learnt.

Love Don’t Inconvenience Thy Neighbour

I may have mentioned in previous posts that there is an organized game shoot on one of the opposite some of the land over which I have permission to shoot. I arrived just as the beaters’ cart had dropped off the beaters for the drive situated across the road, so I unpacked quietly, not wishing to disturb them or the impending drive.

In fact, I ignored one straightforward bird which passed close to where my car was parked because, as you will have guessed, my plan was to await the birds displaced by the guns across the road. In return for not ruining their drive with an early shot or two, I hoped that the pigeons which would almost certainly be in the wood about to be driven, would loop back into the trees on my side of the road to take refuge, giving me the opportunity to bag two or three of them.

Alas, it was not to be. The drive went ahead, but the pigeons refused to take the “easy” option even though I was well-concealed in the trees, away from the road. The majority disappeared off into the distance, at a right-angle to the direction I imagined they would take; a handful of the remainder passed by at some distance, allowing me to take two speculative shots, but with hindsight, I shouldn’t have bothered: neither shot connected and they were probably too far out to come down cleanly even if I had been on target. You win some, you lose some.

Seeking Solitude

In the event, I skirted round the boundary of the wood to the bottom end and then walked back to the car through the trees, looking for movement. It’s not my usual practice to go into the wood, because of the difficulty in getting a clear shot on even nearby birds, unless of course it’s late in the day and the possibility of roost shooting obtains.

Yesterday, however, I was a little “peopled-out” for one reason or another and appreciated the solitude. I may never have been further than 30 yards from open fields and the boundary about which I’d usually walk, but ambling slowly amongst the trees, having always to watch my step for fear of turning an knee in a fox hole and all the while watching for birds felt genuinely like “hunting” in its purest sense. I had literally no idea what would happen and although the quietness and loneliness of the place was necessary and refreshing, I felt as aware and as “alive” as I have in a long while. I may repeat the exercise.

As I returned through the wood, a few birds scarpered in various directions, but only one was not so obscured by the dense cover that it presented a genuine opportunity. I took it and bagged the bird. By the time I reached my car, the drive on the other side of the road had long finished and I just caught a glance of the beaters’ wagon disappearing over the hill as I came out from the trees. I trust they weren’t too disturbed by my presence.

Subsonic? Sub-Par?

Feeling that I’d exhausted all useful possibilities on that farm, I moved on to my next “usual” stop about a mile down the road. Here, I unpacked quietly and – expecting that there might be some wood pigeons in the tree line very close to where it’s possible to park the car – put into my pocket a handful of the Eley “Extra Long” Subsonic cartridges that I have awaiting pattern testing.

The reason for abandoning the Eley “Trap” cartridges I’ve had good success with so far is simple – I’ve got almost none of them left and it’s a 70-mile round trip to the only shop I know of that can supply more of them. Until I finish testing all the cartridges I’ve identified as “possibilities”, I don’t want to invest time and money in driving to buy slabs of cartridges for which there might be a superior alternative.

Theoretically speaking, whilst the subsonic cartridges, with their 18g of #6 would need to be achieving a pattern density that I haven’t seen this gun approach, let alone achieve, to be on a par the the “Trap” load, I thought that they ought to pattern well enough for a couple of 20 yard snap shots at any birds that might emerge from the hedgerow I planned to walk. Wanting to save the cartridges I knew would be effective at what I consider to be maximum range for this gun, I took a chance that they’d work, if I did my bit.

As it happens, there were no birds at which to shoot, but it only now occurs to me, as I write this post, that I forgot to change back to the “Trap” load after I’d gone past the hedge, which makes me feel slightly better about missing two shots at a pair of reasonably “tall” birds a little further on, making the tally 1-for-5.

I certainly missed the birds, but if I’d known I’d had the subsonics in the gun, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to take them on. Until I’ve seen whether a cartridge patterns well on paper – these should and I don’t doubt they’ll kill pigeons if I do my bit – I never feel I can have complete confidence in it. In fact, I tend always to imagine the wilder possibilities of performance, not least because I’m all too aware of the breadth of variation in shotgun behaviour with what most folk would call identical or near-identical loadings. Evidence, for me, is key.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also often wondered what kind of difference in muzzle velocity a human can detect as “different”. Is it 200 feet per second? 300? 500? As someone who more often over-leads birds than misses behind (I told you I was weird, right?), I’d have thought a slower cartridge might even bag me one or two birds I’d otherwise have fractionally missed, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

Characterizing My Shooting

Moving on from my double miss (or trying to), I walked for about 1½ miles around the boundaries of the farm before I raised the gun to anything else. Subsequently failing to spot the slow-moving, crossing bird which emerged from the tree line at a little above head height, fifteen yards in front of me, and then – having done so – completely failing to respond to it by shooting it (or even attempting to do so) my confidence took another hit and I decided to turn back towards the car and head home. Sometimes it is better to just not to carry on rather than use up 20 cartridges in frustration, trying to hit anything and everything.

As readers will be becoming aware from these accounts, I’m an instinctive shooter who does best when I’m sure that I’m in good form and my gun and cartridge are well-matched and suitable for the job at hand. I am capable of shooting at a very good average, provided I don’t think too much about what I’m doing.

Unfortunately, I rather like thinking about shooting as it’s a colossally interesting and broad subject, worthy of much thought, which means that whilst I’ll sometimes be in very good form, I’m not capable of “forgetting” enough to ever be truly good at it. This is why I tend to go through cycles of shooting 1-for-2, then falling to bits with a couple of 1-for-9 days and then returning to 1-for-2 again. It’s a practical response to the amount of confidence I have in my shooting ability: I shoot well so I take on harder birds. I then miss the harder birds, drop my average and lose confidence. Then I shoot well again, because I don’t expect to hit anything and – without putting myself under pressure – everything falls into place again. It’s been like that for some years now.

Trigger Happy

Astute readers will recall that I mentioned firing eight shots yesterday and that, so far, the running count is five. The penultimate two blasts from the .410 were in the direction of an pigeon passing overhead, way out of range – at least for my shooting ability and certainly for the .410 – but to which I raised the gun anyway, in another example of my on-going battle with myself over shooting at distant, unmanageable birds. I’ve covered this bad habit several times in my previous posts and except to say that I often display it more when I’m tired and despairing of my shooting ability, I don’t intend to rehash the reasons for it here.

The final shot of the day was at a bolting rabbit. Unusually for me, I put the pattern well behind the bunny. I don’t often take a shot at rabbits, unless I’ve been specifically asked to try to control them as they aren’t my favourite quarry to eat. Other members of the association like to shoot them with air rifles and the farmer doesn’t mind us leaving them as it helps the foxes (which deal with most of them) survive, so overall the numbers tend to stay very low.

This time though, in my despondent, but apparently slightly trigger-happy mood, I thought it might be a nice change to bag one for the pot and had a go. Unfortunately, I suspect I only managed to put a pellet into one of its back legs or tail, as it squealed momentarily at me and continued to sprint towards its burrow, apparently unhurt. That made the bag one wood pigeon for eight shots.

All in all, it probably should have been 1-for-5 or 1-for-3 if I’d restricted myself to the straightforward opportunities and I’d like to think it could have been 2-for-4 at best, if I’d taken the easy crossing bird but, as usual, my keenness and over-confidence are my biggest handicap. Once again, I think it might be good to try to get to a clay ground, both for some practice and for the sake of simply letting off 100 cartridges at targets, to make pulling the trigger that little bit more boring – I’d probably waste fewer cartridges if it was.

As a final aside, I’ve recently discovered that Falco make a 24-gauge side-by-side and that Fiocchi still load ammunition for that gauge commercially. Brass cases are also available. I think it may turn out to be my next gun. You see them every now and again on the continent, but in England? A 24-gauge? Now that would be something special and quite an asset to a website like this one, I suspect…

On peut rêver.