Boz330
05-28-2018, 12:47 PM
I got a Shiloh in 40-50 a week before deer season last fall. I did manage to get a deer, apparently out of shear luck.
Since then I have been tearing my hair out trying to get this gun to shoot, and there isn't much to spare anymore. I started with cut down 30-40 Krag cases which when you stuff a .409 bullet in them they are too big for the chamber and really rough to get in the gun. No problem I got a .410 neck reamer and reamed the cases so the bullets would go in and started working on a mid-range/silhouette load. At first this looked promising but soon went south quick and I was lucky to keep the rounds on a 4' by 4' target cardboard at 300yd let alone on the paper. I tried different boolits and no luck. This was quickly getting frustrating to say the least. I like to see at least a 2MOA or better group at that distance to make up for my 4MOA eyes.
I clean my cases using stainless steel pins and like them to look like new which with black powder takes longer than the 2 hours they recommend for smokeless. Anyway I ran across a thread here where a guy talked about the pins peening his case mouths and I got to thinking, usually a bad thing, but in this case an epiphany. My cases were peened to the inside and out. I was belling the case mouths to get the boolit to go in and then taper crimping the case so it would fit in the gun. This was actually digging the case mouth into the boolit and tearing lead off of the boolit, which is why some of the holes were indicating an unstable boolit and others not. Some of the cases were worse than others and I would have some sort of group but then all of these flyers that didn't make any sense, (10 shot groups).
Over the weekend I de-burred all of these cases and some of them had an internal burr big enough that I could hold the case vertical and the internal chamfering tool would hang on it with no support.
Yesterday I went out and shot at 125yd with some loads I put together after cleaning the cases up. I used the shorter distance to verify instead of having to run back and forth at the longer distance. None of the groups were completely terrible but one was 1 3/4" tall, which was absolutely the best I have gotten from this gun. Unfortunately by the time I got the cases cleaned up they were .015 to .025 shorter than optimal. I don't find this to be too much of a problem with GG boolits but it looks like some new cases in the future and all of the hassle to form them and ream them to spec.
This experiment has sure been an education and slow one at that. I thought that I had done a pretty good job at searching out the pit falls but apparently not. My old man always said that I had to go to the school of hard knocks for my education although I thought that I had outgrown that. On the other hand the fruit didn't fall far from the tree.
Hopefully this might help someone else out.
Bob
Since then I have been tearing my hair out trying to get this gun to shoot, and there isn't much to spare anymore. I started with cut down 30-40 Krag cases which when you stuff a .409 bullet in them they are too big for the chamber and really rough to get in the gun. No problem I got a .410 neck reamer and reamed the cases so the bullets would go in and started working on a mid-range/silhouette load. At first this looked promising but soon went south quick and I was lucky to keep the rounds on a 4' by 4' target cardboard at 300yd let alone on the paper. I tried different boolits and no luck. This was quickly getting frustrating to say the least. I like to see at least a 2MOA or better group at that distance to make up for my 4MOA eyes.
I clean my cases using stainless steel pins and like them to look like new which with black powder takes longer than the 2 hours they recommend for smokeless. Anyway I ran across a thread here where a guy talked about the pins peening his case mouths and I got to thinking, usually a bad thing, but in this case an epiphany. My cases were peened to the inside and out. I was belling the case mouths to get the boolit to go in and then taper crimping the case so it would fit in the gun. This was actually digging the case mouth into the boolit and tearing lead off of the boolit, which is why some of the holes were indicating an unstable boolit and others not. Some of the cases were worse than others and I would have some sort of group but then all of these flyers that didn't make any sense, (10 shot groups).
Over the weekend I de-burred all of these cases and some of them had an internal burr big enough that I could hold the case vertical and the internal chamfering tool would hang on it with no support.
Yesterday I went out and shot at 125yd with some loads I put together after cleaning the cases up. I used the shorter distance to verify instead of having to run back and forth at the longer distance. None of the groups were completely terrible but one was 1 3/4" tall, which was absolutely the best I have gotten from this gun. Unfortunately by the time I got the cases cleaned up they were .015 to .025 shorter than optimal. I don't find this to be too much of a problem with GG boolits but it looks like some new cases in the future and all of the hassle to form them and ream them to spec.
This experiment has sure been an education and slow one at that. I thought that I had done a pretty good job at searching out the pit falls but apparently not. My old man always said that I had to go to the school of hard knocks for my education although I thought that I had outgrown that. On the other hand the fruit didn't fall far from the tree.
Hopefully this might help someone else out.
Bob