anyone make a cubic shot mold?

[John in WI]

I'm wondering if anyone made a mold for cubic shot? Maybe pellets .25" on a side? I've been "making" them one at a time, squishing buckshot between vice grips to get them square-ish!

[theperfessor]

Square is hard to make a mold for and hard to cast. The old way to make "cut shot" was to slice a sheet into square sticks and then cut again at right angles. Have you thought about any other way beside casting in a mold individually to make it? Maybe pour lead into a small cake pan and cut it with a broad bladed chisel? Just another approach.

[MT Gianni]

I can see a mold with square corners being real tough to release boolits.

[dominicfortune00]

If the part line was across diagonal corners, it might not be so bad.

[Chicken Thief]

Nah it's easy to do!

Turn the cube 90 degrees and just let the sprue plate be the 6'th side:
http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/mm153/Chickenthief/Skydning/Til%20andre/R0010775.jpg

Crappy drawing but you get the picture.

[Chicken Thief]

But why not make a stamping tool?

2 pieces of 1/4" square solid rod and a piece of square tubing that fits tightly over den rod.
Clamp a piece of rod in the wise and slide over the tubing. Drop a blop of lead down the tube and incert the second rod. Whack it with a hammer and a square pellet has seen light of day.

[KCSO]

Out of soft sheet lead like they use to use for roofs you can just use a big paper cutter to cut the lead to squares. They will be about #4 buck shot size.

[Wayne Smith]

Out of soft sheet lead like they use to use for roofs you can just use a big paper cutter to cut the lead to squares. They will be about #4 buck shot size.

This is the way shot was made before they learned to drop it from towers.

[warf73]

If we can do this, then a mold is do able. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USQFI9IQ2jo

[375RUGER]

I'm wondering if anyone made a mold for cubic shot? Maybe pellets .25" on a side? I've been "making" them one at a time, squishing buckshot between vice grips to get them square-ish!

So, how's the performance compared to round buckshot? How many can you fit inside a 12 ga hull? Is there a lot of dead space between the shot? What does the recovered shot look like?

[Chicken Thief]

I would think quart circles is the perfect size: 4 to a layer, 100% fit and max devastation?

[375RUGER]

You did do your homework. .25" is a near perfect fit. You can for sure get 16 in a 2-3/4" shell, possibly 20.
What kind of testing have you done?
You can make a crude mold with a couple pieces of 1/4" flat bar and weld some spacers inbetween. Lay it on a piece of marble and fill the voids with lead. It would be good enough for proof of concept.

[John in WI]

Chicken Thief--I love that idea! Kind of like that "Defense disc" in the .410 ammo they make for the judge.

Ruger, I'm trying to optimize a load for my home defense shotgun. The idea is to use a layer of #1 buck (0.30"), and a layer 20 of my squarish (from .22 round balls) pellets on top of that. The patterns aren't too bad--a pretty tight group in the middle from the big-stuff, with a scatter of smaller pellets.

So it's this kind of half-baked idea of using a tight group (devastating IF you hit your target) combined with some "scatter shot", just so you have a better chance of hitting SOMETHING.

My other idea is to use the #1 buckshot layer, a cardboard spacer, then regular shot in those cardboard "X" shape spreader wads.

Maybe it's a solution in search of a problem?!

[375RUGER]

I wouldn't use regular shot in a home defense load. There is a saying "Birdshot is for birds, Buckshot is for bad guys". For home defense I wouldn't use anything less than #F buck. But I wouldn't want to get hit with bird shot at 15 feet either. In house you're not going to have much spread anyway.
I only use 00 myself because it stacks so nicely in a 12ga.
I think you should cast some of the cubes instead of mashing. Your idea is devastation I believe and you will want those edges. I'm actually thinking of making that mold just to see what those cubes will do.
Those cubes will layer nicely alternating with #4 or #F buck. Or 2 layers of the cube and fill the shell up with the smaller.

[Forrest r]

20 dimes works for me in a standard 12ga 1 1/8oz skeet load. Just use dimes instead of lead, the loads are down right mid-evel on anything that they hit. Some stay flat & will leave the impression of a dime in plywood/bowling pins, others will turn sideways & slice/stab into anything just like a knife would.

They have a very distint sound to them, you can here a ZZZZZZZZZ sound from the ones that turn sideways.

[nanuk]

at $2.00 per shot, PLUS the primer/powder etc....

pretty expensive.

can't you find popout slugs from some electrician? it would be softer on the barrel as well.

[Forrest r]

Those loads for HD not shooting skeet or trap. If you’re cheap you could always find washers that will fit the 12ga bore or shoot pennies in a 10ga. With my life on the line I’d rather spend the $2.

For shear devastation, I've never saw anything that would even come close to what these loads can and will do. The other thing about these loads is the recoil or lack thereof. In traditional shotgun loads the pellets will bunch up (compact) when their fired in the bore causing resistance or felt recoil. The dime are smaller than the 12ga bore & will just slide down/out the barrel, it’s like shooting a 410.

I use a standard 1 1/8oz skeet load (AA hulls & AA12 wads) to make them in a standard 2 ¾ shell. Cut the plastic fingers off the wads. All that is needed is the powder cup portion of the wad, a dime is the same size (dia) as the wad. I use 20 dimes because the wad will compress & it takes that many to fill the case.

http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t242/forrestr-photo/dimewad.jpg

Back when I wore a younger mans clothes my weapons of choice was a sawed off side by side pistol gripped shotgun (511) and a 1911 with a bulldog in 44spl for a backup. Like the man said “I’m coming after you & hells coming with me”.

[Ready on the Right]

Hate to disagree with ya Forrest, but it seems to me that a dime is awfully light in weight to give much penetration, and if hitting flat on heavy clothing it may cause a nasty bruise, but I'd rather rely on heavy buckshot, with square buckshot possibly having some merit. The Box-O-Truth did a test on dimes in a 12 gauge see it at http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot35_4.htm

[Forrest r]

No problem ready on the right (nice handle), opinions & ideas are what makes the world go round. Thank you for the link, that’s an excellent example of a bubba job on a shotgun shell, the only thing that was missing is the duck tape.

Good of you to compare different result without looking at the basic reloading components. Let’s see short wad & 16 dimes, tall wad & 20 dimes, big difference. The only reason they got away with their load doing anything at all is in true bubba fashion, they used a bigger hammer (more gunpowder).

Any idea why they shouldn’t of cut the top off of the shotgun shells? Why they used the wrong wads? Or why they only filled the cases ¾ the way full?

The results they are getting at 15ft I was getting at 30ft with the same penetration, 3”. The 3”’s of penetration was what sold me on using these loads. And 30ft was perfect, that was the longest shot I could possibly take in the apartment that I was living in. 20 dimes hitting someone in a 6” circle in their chest penetrating 3” deep is good enough for me.

[BAGTIC]

What does 20 dimes weigh?

What is the chronographed velocity?

Most probable explanation for low apparent recoil is light weight combined with low velocities.

Doubtfull those dimes will penetrate very far if they hit flat. The Sectional density must be 0.0000X. If they hit edge on They would do better if they didn't veer off. I once shot a oak trr stump at close range with an old fashioned load using cards and felt wad column. Surpised me that at about 15 feet the cardboard cards had penetrated almost an inch but edgewise.

Personally I think cylindrical shot would be better. Its higher SD should give better penetration, It should stack better, and it should have less dispersion.

[Forrest r]

The 20 dimes weigh .7oz, I shot several rounds over a chronograph & only managed to get 1 reading, and it was right around 1200 fps from what I remember. Yes, lighter load & less resistance = less recoil which was a good thing when both bbl’s were fired at the same time.

I keep reading statements about penetration or more precisely lack thereof. That the beauty of these loads & what sold me on them. The neighbor had a freezer die & I took some of the rancid meat & put it in a potato sacks, hung it up & shot it with a load of dimes. The results were just like what the bag of truth guys found/said. They hit with a 6” spread & went 3” deep; I could put my fist in the hole. It looked like someone put an M-80 in there & lit it. The main thrust of the load stayed together & made the hole; other dimes hit flat & went in 1” or so & shattered any bones that they hit. The dimes that turned sideways sliced thru the meat bouncing off bones & going out the sides of the sack when they hit them. It was just pure carnage, those dimes hit hard & either penetrated, sliced or punched/smashed holes in those test sacks of meat.

Why would anyone want an extremely hard hitting home defense load that doesn’t have the ability for any major penetration?

Because of where I was living at the time, I didn’t want to use buck shot, deer slugs or any other load that could go thru tables, doors, walls or thru tall building in a single shot, ECT. I was living in a railroad train style apartment that had 3 apartments joined together. These were 1 floor apartments & I lived in the middle apartment. Living in the middle apartment meant that 2 of my walls were outside wall & 2 of them were inside walls. Those 2 inside walls were also my neighbors inside walls. The neighbor on 1 side had 2 adults & 2 young children, the neighbor on the other side had 2 adults & 3 children (2 of them were 3 & under. And I had my Misses & 2 young children living with me. So, “God forbid” I didn’t want anyone including the most precious things in my life become collateral damage because I used buckshot or slugs in a shotgun & they went thru the walls killing the young children on the other side.

Sometimes using a load that will go thru 3 cars, 5 cement blocks, 2 walls & still hit their mark isn’t the best option. Especially when innocent children are no more than 2 pieces of ½” drywall away.

I not going to tell anyone how to make these loads to try/test, but I will tell you how I made them. The box of truth guys were close on what they were trying, they just didn’t know enough about reloading shotgun shells to realize they could of easily improved what they were doing. And the best way would have been to use a shotgun shell reloader. When they cut the tops off of those shells, they ruined them, shotgun shells like any other load/bullet needs pressure & confinement to work. The old way of reloading shotgun shells was to put a wad over the powder, add the shot & put more wads on top of the shot to fill the case. Then the case was crimped, the crimp did 2 things, it folded the cover/lid down over everything stopping it from falling out. The crimp also gave the powder the resistance it needed when it started to burn to explode in the case, pushing the projectiles out of the shotgun shell. Modern shotgun shells use plastic wads, they work better that the old style of using wads & filler wads. The plastic wad get compressed during loading & expand afterwards pressing against the powder on the bottom of the case & the crimp on the top of the case creating pressure/resistance for the gunpowder to work properly. That’s why the guys from the truth of guns got poor results; they used an extremely light load (16 dimes) & had no pressure on the powder. They had a plastic wad lying on top of the powder & 16 dimes sitting on top of that for resistance along with 3 dabs of wax to keep everything from falling out.

I used a Lee Loadall to load my shotgun shells, their cheap but they work. When I first tried loads with dimes I found that I had to cut the fingers off the wads also. So after I modified the wad I used the loadall to set the wad in an empty case & let the wad spring back up to its full height. Then I put dimes in the case until they came up even with the top of the case (the top fingers of the case that get folded over to hold everything in & create a crimp that allows the wad to but up against creating pressure that they cut off). I can’t remember how many dime I started out with but it filled the case. My thinking was that the dimes will get pushed down to the crimp line of the case causing the wad to compress. I tried these loads & they were on the wimpy side just like the loads from the box of truth guys. So I went back to the reloader & tried again. This time I filled the case full of dimes & used the stage that pushes everything down just like before. But this time I added 2 more dimes now that I had room from compressing everything, then crimped them. I went out & shot them, it was better but still not there. I kept testing loads by compressing them & adding more until I ended up with 20 dimes in a Winchester AA 12ga case with a Winchester WAA12 wad. I used the data for a standard 12ga 1 1/8oz 2 ¾ dram skeet load.

Years later & living in a house with neighbors a lot farther away, I can use different loads for HD in a shotgun. Back when penetration was a huge issue I couldn’t find anything that would hit as hard as the dimes did, caused as much carnage but still had the ability to stop when going thru relatively thin wall to keep from harming innocent bystanders, namely young children.

Instead of all the armchair quarterbacking, guessing & keyboard commanding going on. Why doesn’t someone actually do some test loads instead of theorizing & watching bubba hack some shells up with a knife & glue them back together with wax?[smilie=2:

To the OP, another load that I used to do was a poor man’s cut shot/buckshot load. I’d pick up 22’s at the range that people would toss out when they had duds, ftf’s & bad bullets. I’d take them home & put the soft lead bullets in a vise & smash them flat using a drill bit as a gage to get the flattened bullets a uniform size. I never took long to get a pile of them & they made a good free HD load.

[375RUGER]

Since I'm waiting on stuff to come in to finish my hollow point mould, I decided to make a real simple mould for this cubic shot.
I set the mould to cast a 1/4" square bar, then used pruning shears to dice the cubes off. They are not perfectly 1/4"x1/4"x1/4" but they are close enough to do some patterning with.
I think before I get to the range with them I will cast up one more batch and "dice" them on a 45* bias so they have 2 nice chisel edges, a rhombohedron I think.
Anyway, these cubes weighed in at 44g. 9 of them are roughly 20g less than a 9 ball 00 Buck load.
Since they were not perfectly 1/4" these will stack in a shell same as 00Buck, 3 to a layer.
I will pattern a 9 ball 00Buck side by side with these so we will know just how much different they fly.

[429421Cowboy]

I am curious as to the results of your test. In my totally off beat and biased opinion, i have never thought buckshot actually was as deadly as many people think. Don't get me wrong, at it's intended ranges it kills well, but the poor profile of the projectile combined with their light weight doesn't make for alot of stopping power under a marginal hit or if the patten has widened. I think edges are a great idea, especially if they could increase the packing efficency of a standard load. We have had limited success with body shots on whitetails with OOB, and totally gave up on it for coyotes in favor of the much greater pattern of #4B instead.
I also am not sold on dimes as a projectile, i saw something on the History channel awhile back that included testing of the dimes in shotgun shell theory on a pork leg if i remember correctly, and the results were not impressive. In an effort to reduce over penetration in our older, thin sheetrock house, i keep large birdshot in my HD shotgun, i know it's limitations but am prepared to work around them.
In my lifetime i have seen two cows dropped with birdshot at close range and can tell you it will do the job at the ranges that could be encountered in my home. It's only to get me to the safe anyways with my rifle in it ready to go.

[troy_mclure]

Well if you want to use dimes why cheap out on modern dimes, why not use silver mercury dimes?

A modern dime is only 2.26g(35.5gr), a mercury dime is 2.5g(38.5gr), and it's silver so it's good for werewolfs too!

[singleshot]

Wow! I've been thinking about exactly this project...cube shot, then I run across this thread. I'm interested to see how this turns out. Before I'd shoot dimes, I'd cut pennies into halves, thirds, or even quarters. But using standard BB-gun BB's is pretty darn effective at close ranges. I have a #4 buck mould that I can mix in with the BB's for even greater effect. Was very impressed with some of the penetration testing I'd done.

Still, I think the cube shot is the way to go. Maybe swaging the cubes is the route to go...big hammer anyone?

[Sonnypie]

Well if you want to use dimes why cheap out on modern dimes, why not use silver mercury dimes?

A modern dime is only 2.26g(35.5gr), a mercury dime is 2.5g(38.5gr), and it's silver so it's good for werewolfs too!

:lol::lol::lol::lol:

But I can get 10 rounds out of $20 worth of dimes! :veryconfu

What about washers? I bet you could get a butt load of washers for $20.
Pea Gravel is FREE!

:lol::lol:;-)

Truth is, if you ever go out and pattern your scatter gun at house distances you will find it is very, to extremely, tight at indoor type distances.
That's because of the plastic wads in use today. And the reason the wads are used is to prevent the shot from being damaged sliding down Old Betsey's smooth bore.
My sawed off 12 gauge doesn't blossom well before 20-25 yards. I'd be hard pressed to find 20 feet of range inside my house.
I know what ever is loaded is going to hit like a solid mass.
And what ever it hits is going to be a sorry mess. ;)

[singleshot]

Anyone try flechettes? You could make those with nails and squish the head down flat. (Or buy the surplus ones.)

What size cube would you need for a 20 gauge? Let's see, calculating....

[singleshot]

Anyone try flechettes? You could make those with nails and squish the head down flat. (Or buy the surplus ones.)

What size cube would you need for a 20 gauge? Let's see, calculating....

It looks like just under .22 for the 20 gauge to fit cube shot in at max density...anyone want to check me on that?

[trk]

Anyone try flechettes? You could make those with nails and squish the head down flat. (Or buy the surplus ones.)

....

Only with 105mm Howitzer. They went through a 2x4 at 35 to 50 paces.

[WRideout]

In my lifetime i have seen two cows dropped with birdshot at close range and can tell you it will do the job at the ranges that could be encountered in my home. It's only to get me to the safe anyways with my rifle in it ready to go.

As a former Army medic, and hospital orderly, I have actually seen some gunshot wounds. One in particular I remember was an older gentleman, a tiny little man, who had surprised an intruder in his home. He was shot at close range with a shotgun; it appeared to have been birdshot. At close range, the pattern does not open up much at all, and he had a LARGE hole in his side that took off the top of his hip bone. By the time I saw him, he was mostly recovered, but walked with crutches. He was tough as nails. The fact that he lived is proof of the existence of a supreme being.

Wayne

[375RUGER]

loaded up a 2-3/4" AA hull with a T-42 wad and 9 of these cubes. Loaded the same in another hull with 9 00Buck. Identical loads except for the payload.
28" full choke barrel.

I shot at 12 yards. Why? Because in my house the longest shot I can take is 15 yds, and I would only take that shot if the target was retreating. The path is a deadend so the target would have to be engaged again.

On the paper you can see I have identified the cubes with a square and the 00 with a circle.
The cubes yielded a pattern that measured 8"x9.75".
The 00 countered with a 5.5"x6".