Foiled

I had intended to spend this week testing and writing up the report for the Eley “Extralong” #6 cartridge (the supersonic version) but unfortunately, I was taken ill on Tuesday evening and am only now starting to recover, hence the title of this post.

I plan to go out to the fields early tomorrow morning – hopefully before the wind picks up – in the hope of getting the required testing completed.

The other task I had hoped to complete this week, but for which the time requires continues to elude me, is writing up the many notes, anecdotes and other information I’ve been able to collect regarding the garden gun and 9mm bore shotguns in general. I’ll aim to get that done in the next week or so, but other projects are stacking up and even if I hadn’t been under the weather, I think I’d be struggling to keep on top of everything.

One Year On

As we approach September, we head towards this website’s first birthday. I’m not sure if we’re even officially “open for business” yet, but we have made a lot of progress and we have done a lot of – what will hopefully prove to be useful to others – pattern testing.

Having, in the past, worked hard to reduce my stocks of cartridges to a single brand per gun, I’m afraid that things are going the other way again. Even if I don’t intend to actually use most of the odds and ends left over from the patterning I’ve already done with the Yildiz .410 in the field, I’m holding onto them in case anyone ever asks us to do further testing (for instance, with chokes or ranges we haven’t yet attempted).

So, this morning, when I finally admitted to myself that my cartridge shelf was operating well over capacity, I found a box and packed them all away, but not without taking this photograph, representing our first year’s efforts:

A “cartridge mountain”, including most of the .410 (and 9mm) cartridges tested by the SmallBoreShotguns team in our first year of existence.

I think that’s a pretty respectable mountain of shells!