A while back, for craps and giggles, I loaded a couple 3.5" Dixie Tri-ball loads and got pretty decent groups of 6-8" at 30 yards. I meant to go back and revisited it, but I got swamped.
Anyway, I decided to load up a couple more using 34 grs of Steel (using what the late James Gates posted here a while back). The only thing I changed was I added an overshot card to ensure for a proper crimp with 3.5" hulls.
I should of started at 20 yards, but the range was packed, so I started at 50 yards.
It took about 5 shots to even hit the 72"x60" cardboard target. I had stapled a deer target to it. The balls shot all around the deer like it had a force field protecting it.
I was able to gather some of the wads and a few balls. The wads are all types of deformed and melted. The bases where blown.
I had a 20 ga nitro card in the bases and all wads and balls where mica coated with BPI #47 buffer added.
One of the issues to why these performed so poorly was the alloy of my balls. I got my first batch mixed in with my second batch which I alloyed with Linotype. I'll analyze those at work so I can tell which is which.
I used a CYC choke out of a Mossberg 835. Not sure if the barrel being over-bored made an issue as the last time I shot these, I was using a 935 with a MOD choke.
I'm pretty stumped as to why or how these wads got so tore up. Here's a couple pics of the recovered wads and balls.
What do y'all think?
Noticed the ball on the far right barely had any setback dents in it.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk