Making your own black powder shotgun shells

[scrat]

i have loaded up a boat load of black powder shells. Sometime i might post a video and instruction on how i do it.

Same time i do use plastic hulls. they do stick inside the gun. HOWEVER

When i am done reloading the shells i pour some Talc powder on the hulls. then when you shoot them they will most likely not stick and come out easier

 

[J-Bar]

i was wondering how these would operate in a modern pump shotgun. i can imagine they would probably gum it up pretty bad, it just made me chuckle reading all this shotshell reloading stuff and imagining my mossberg 500 cruiser belching out black powder smoke clouds lol (not my most ideal shotgun as i have discovered, anyone wanna trade? )

Your pump gun's barrel will get dirty, but you should not get much if any blowback into the action. I have shot blackpowder loads through my original Winchester '97 with no difficulty. Even the breech of my side by side stays clean using BP shells.

I would prep the action with a liberal spraying of Ballistol aerosol, or an organic lube like Pam cooking spray before shooting, or even a coat of grease, then you should be able to wipe out anything that comes back into the action pretty easily.

If you are really serious, try one or two shots and see what happens. If it is crudding up the action more than expected, stop the experiment, clean it up, and go back to smokeless.

Now I would never consider using a BP shell in an autoloader of course.

 

[JBlk]

Black powder loads

Back in the 70s I hunted quite a bit with black powder loads in my old hammer guns.I had the advantage of having felt wads of the gague and paper cases to load.Because black powder uses more space than smokeless your average load in the 12 ga is going to be about three drams and about an ounce of shot.The case contained one overpowder card and one felt wad.Large bores should use 2 F powder.The casings that I used had been star crimped, but probably would have been better space wise by using a roll crimp.I shot alot of bobwhites and a occasional phesant or rabbits.I now have a old 12 ga muzzleloader with steel barrels that I proofed with five drams of pyrodex and 2.5 ounces of shot.I did this twice in each barrel and the only thing that I managed to do was crack the stock.The beauty of the ML is the variety of powder charges and loads that can be used.Now that the majority of the small game has fallen prey to the herbicides and pesticides most of my guns seldom see daylight, not to mention that they have made the new miles much longer.