Lyman round balls.

[MBTcustom]

I wonder is it nessisary to cast my .662 roundballs out of pure lead, or will my normal boolit alloy work just fine?
I also wonder about this plug that is left on the ball from the sprue can it be removed by tumbling or other methods?
Should it be removed?
Should it be loaded up or down in the shotcup?

[TRG3]

I cast roundballs for my 12 gauge USH, using lead that's come from old sewer connections that I get from a local plumber. It seems very soft for my .690 roundballs. I remove as much of the sprue as possible, then roll the balls individually on a steel plate using a hunk of 2X4 to do the rolling. The sprue is greatly reduced in size. I mark the remaining sprue with a magic marker and load it in the up position. I found my best accuracy (1" at 50 yards) with a roundball vs. Lee Key Drive and Lyman 525 (about 3" at 50 yards). This past season, I took deer with the .690 roundball and got complete pass throughs at 50 yards with the entrance and exit holes about the same size. The roundball proved to be much less destructive than the Lee or Lyman slugs with which I also had success. I plan to only load roundballs come next deer season.

[longbow]

I use range scrap or wheelweights, air cooled, in my smoothbore.

I don't worry about the sprue or position especially with such an undersize ball.

If for rifled gun then sprue position my be more critical as it is for a muzzleloader. Either up or down should be fine.

I can expect 3" to 4" groups at 50 yards from the smoothbore. Rifled gun should do better with a good fitting ball/shotcup.

Something to consider, which I haven't yet, tried is to load the 0.662" balls into thick petal steel shot wads. A friend told me he read an article many years ago about 0.662" RB's loaded into steel shot wads producing good accuracy from rifled gun at velocities of around 1600 FPS.

You would have to check wad petal/ball combo to get the right fit. I have loaded slugs of a little smaller diameter from a home made mould into steel shot wads and those were a good fit in my smoothbore. Haven't got around to trying the balls though.

Longbow

[MBTcustom]

I used WW clear white wads, and the .662RB. L Ross was good enough to let me borrow four of his RB molds. The .662 was the smallest.
I also have .678, .690, and .735. Each one will get a chance, but I wanted to go through them one at a time.
How does this look?


I'm not sure if I should throw down a bed of COW to boost the ball up higher or leave it as is. I loaded it sprue-up.
The charge was a mild 16.5 grains of Hodgdon Clays. The shotcup and the ball together weighed 1.09oz.
What do you think?

[longbow]

Do you have any support under the ball?

In my experience the shotcop will try tr wrap itself around the ball unless there is a nitro card wad or two under it. The unsupported wad tends to tear under the ball and/or the gas seal fails due to distortion.

That crimp wouldn't bother me but it wouldn't hurt to raise the ball a bit.

How are you centering the undersize ball?

I will be interested in your 0.678" RB results. I think it is about the perfect diameter for standard shotcups. I have lots of RB moulds bit not that one. RCBS was making a two cavity 0.678" RB mould I would really like. One day.

I you support the shotcup and center the ball in the barrel you should be good to go. You should be able to get groups under 6" at 50 yards with any decent loads and down to about 3" or maybe better with good loads.

Longbow

[MBTcustom]

The ball fit into the cup with no wiggle so it wasn't hard to get it centered. I wouldn't say it was a tight fit, it wasn't, but it was centered. I dont know what a nitro card wad is. I have a 12 guage wad cutter tool and a bunch of factory cards, but they are all too small to get into the shotcup.
I tried cutting a disc out of thin vegitable tanned leather (tooling leather) That was too big for the cup but it was flexable enough to be pressed in there by the wad pusher. once I placed the ball on top, I got a perfect crimp. I wonder if that would do better.
I tried patching the ball with a cotton cleaning patch but it bulged the hull on the outside slightly. Even with the bulge it would cycle in the gun, but I didn't like the looks of it much.
If there are no objections to the leather card in the shotcup, I think I will load up 20 of them and give 'em a try.

[longbow]

I use either 16 ga. or 20 ga. nitro card wads inside the shotcup to help support things better. As mentioned, recovered wads were showing damage at the bottom of the shotcup or gas seal and accuracy was poor. Adding the nitro card wads gives support to the wad column and adjusts ball height for good crimp.

Nitro card wads are just a hard card wad available in a variety of thicknesses and gauges:

http://www.ballisticproducts.com/Nit.../products/118/

20 ga. is probably the best to fit into most shotcups.

A scoop of COW or cornmeal under the ball doesn't hurt either. If the ball is undersize like 0.662" then put a scoop of COW or cornmeal under the nitro card wad. This makes for easy height adjustment to get good crimp and can make a nice seat for the ball.

Yes, if you want to punch leather or thin cardboard disks that "cup" when you seat them, those will help center the ball. I would still use a nitro card wad on the bottom of the shotcup though for support.

You must have pretty thick petal shoptcups if the 0.662" ball doesn't have any wiggle room. I usually use cloth "patch" or paper strips to shim the undersize ball to fit. That 0.678" ball should fit Winchester/Claybusters or other typical trap shotcups perfectly.

The fit I find gives best results with round ball is a barely dragging push fit through the barrel ~ no looseness or "rattle" but not much resistance to the push.

I have had very poor results using 0.690" RB with any shotcups I have tried but some people are getting good results and BPI lists a 0.690" RB load in one of their shotcups so they must have thin petals. Mine are all too tight and the petals shear.

There's a good point too ~ take a look for recovered shotcups, they can tell you a lot. If gas seals are blown or petals shredded, there is a problem and accuracy is probably not good.

Longbow

[TRG3]

In my USH 12 gauge roundball loads, I utilized a .125 20 gauge hard card under the .690 roundball (1 1/8th oz.) as it rested in a Federal S3 wad. I was going to add COW, but the 1" group at 50 yards without it made it difficult to improve on. The Federal S3 wads retained all of their petals with obvious rifling marks on them. The shells were roll crimped. I'm not sure of the velocity of my 27.0 grain load of Herco with the roundball, but the recoil was very tolerable and much less than with the Lee or Lyman slugs where I used more powder.

As a muzzleloader, I've used flintlocks for several years in hunting whitetails. In my experience, I've come to accept that the roundball's damage does not cause nearly as much of a blood trail as shotgun slugs. Just because the deer fails to react to the the roundball does not mean a miss. On several occasions, I've not gotten a blood trail and the first blood I saw was when I rolled the deer over some 70-200 yards away. Of course, YMMV.

[longbow]

TRG3:

That is a pretty impressive group! Best I have done is about 2" at 50 yards with 0.735" RB in a borrowed Rem 870 with rifled barrel.

I had the impression the load and gun could do better but the shooter (me) had been pounded silly from recoil by that time so wasn't up to it. Too many slugs shot in too short a time.

The RB in shotcup is much easier to load than making up custom wad columns though. I got to say that if you are able to get consistent good accuracy using the 0.690" RB that would be a tough load to beat. That has got to be better than any hollow base slug load. I do like the RB loads!

I think Goodsteel is loading for smoothbore but that combo of 0.690" RB and the Federal shotcup should still be good.

I will have to pick some up myself.

Longbow

[MBTcustom]

I just cast up a bunch of the .678s and I will load up some of those in a similar fashion as the first ones and we'll just see.
My wife is going to the store to pick up some things and I asked her to grab me some COW.
I would go out this evening and try these out, and I am very tempted to do so, but I just had the biggest skeet shoot of my life yesterday, and my shoulder is black and blue. It hurts to even shoulder a gun right now, so I doubt I could get any accuracy at all.
Thats OK, I need to scrub the gunk out of my shotgun anyway. You know you've done some shooting when the thing barely slides any more! I think I put almost 200 shells through it yesterday and it was dirty when I started.

[missionary5155]

Good morning
If you do a search here in Shotguns for ROUNDBALL you will see years of trials by many experimenters with all sorts of combinations of bases under RB´s to get them well supported in the wad.
COW is the simplest. Best results I got were using a below the ball inner edge beveled spacer made from a short piece of plastic pipe. Time consuming though so went with a simple scoop of COW. If I was to get a 1" repeateble group from my smoothbore Mossy down here or my FoxB up in the state of ILL. I would never change anything. That is great !
Mike in Peru

[Milsurp Junkie]

It looks like I need to get a .690 round ball mold. Would anyone be willing to cast up some .690 balls for me? Maybe 50 or so? Does it need to be soft lead, or would WWs be okay?

[TRG3]

I'd suggest that you go to the Track of the Wolf website, click on ammunition, and order whatever roundball size you want to try. They list their .690s at $11.90/25 plus shipping. Should these not work, they have others on either side of the .690 that you could try.

[jmsj]

goodsteel,
There has been a lot of good advice given here, by guys more experienced than me. Here's my .02 cents on the .662 RB.
I have read your posts and was wondering what type of barrel you are shooting these roundball loads out of?
If it is a smoothbore, what does the choke measure?
I have a Remington 11/87 w/ an IC choke that measures .717". Using Fed. 12S3 wads, a .662" ball (cast from WW's and I point the sprue upwards), hard cards to adjust crimp height and protect the wad, and COW (to help keep the ball centered and keep the hard cards from deforming) in STS hulls and Fiocchi hulls. I use the Fiocchi hulls for the faster loads and the STS loads for my plinking loads for me and my wife (different powders for the different hulls). This wad/ball/hard card and COW make for a decent fit in my choke on this gun. Accuracy has been 2"-3" @ 35 yds. in both type of loads using only a bead sight.
For larger chokes I use different slugs that I can size to make the slug/wad combo fit the choke. This has seemed to help with accuracy. I am not sure how far you were wanting to shoot these but I usually only shoot @ 35 yds. becuse this is distance of the range behind the house and I only developed these loads for problem bears. If dealing with a nuisance bear around the house, I don't think I would be shooting farther than 35yds.
Good luck, jmsj

[MBTcustom]

Thanks for the advice buddy. I was under the impression that I needed to be shooting a cylinder choke with all of these, even though it is possible to shoot them through a modified choke. I decided to be on the safe side and I haven't actually shot any of them yet. (By the way, my gun is a S&W 916 with a 22" barrel and an aftermarket screw in choke.) I wanted to get a cylinder choke for this baby just to be on the safe side, so I drove 30 miles into Little Rock and hit all the big stores. Nobody carried this choke. It has no markings on it except (MOD) thankyouverymuch. I called up my buddy and asked him if he remembers what choke he had installed on this baby before he gave it to me, He said that it was a Tru-choke from Trulock chokes company. I looked them up on the web and decided that it would be best to just order strait from the factory instead of trying to find a dealer/distributor in this area. I ordered a cylinder choke and a turkey choke, not bad for $50!
Anyway, I'm going to wait for them to get here and try it out next weekend I hope.

[longbow]

I am going to hazard a guess that a 0.662" ball would fit through about any choke constriction safely if loaded in a shotcup except maybe a full turkey choke. I have not done it with 0.662" but I have seen the plastic petals extrude and shred to about nothing when a 0.690" round ball hits a modified choke in my Browning BPS slug barrel. I think in general the rule is that the slug/wad combo should be no more than about 0.003" over the tightest bore constriction... but a round ball has very little contact area and a 0.662" ball is so much under full choke size that even if loaded into a thick petal shotcup like a steel shotcup I doubt it would be a problem. Just my opinion.

On the other hand, I would not try to squeeze a 0.715" ball through a full choke by any stretch of the imagination.

Cylinder bore is the safe way to go for sure but any undersize ball centered in a shotcup should not be a hazard if it will fit through the choke. The shotcups and wads will compress with no problem.

So far, I favour the 0.662" ball because it is so undersize it will fit through any normal choke, it weighs 1 oz. and there are about a zillion 1 oz. slug load recipes out there and round balls are sooooo easy to cast and load. I think the only thing that would make it better is a multi cavity mould! RCBS does make a two cavity 0.678" RB mould... drool! One day.

Can't remember but I think I mentioned that with good loads I can depend on 3" to 4" groups at 50 yards with 0.662" RB's from smoothbore. Not bad in my book.

Longbow

[MBTcustom]

Indeed you did mention it. Thats what got me hooked on this little experiment. After I got my jaw back to where it was supposed to be, It hit me that 50 yards is about the farthest shot I am likely to take on a normal hunt. That would make my shotgun the ultimate all-around gun.
I just got done casting up about fifty of the .735 diameter balls. I realy hope these work. They are huge. It would be a bad day to get hit with one of these launched out of a wrist rocket, let alone fired at 1200 fps! The only problem is that they weigh 1 1/3 oz, so I'm going to have to guesse a little at the powder charge, but hey, even at 900fps these would be deadly.

[excess650]

Has anyone shot these through a rifled choke tube?

I'm following this thread with thoughts of my 7# Remington 870(fully rifled) in mind. Too, I was thinking these might be useful at close range in a 20" cyl bore double.

I've shot full diameter slugs through the 870, but the recoil was brutal. Because of this thread, I started reading more threads, and BPI sabots for 50cal sound interesting. The lighter weight slugs should be more shoulder friendly.

[MBTcustom]

OK I need help. I am getting awful confused by all the load options out there and its getting hard to try to make them into a load 1 3/8oz ball.
I have remington STS low brass hulls
old remington (97) 209 primers
a steel can of SR-4756 with several pounds left in it.
a pound of bullseye
2.5 lb of clays (I hope this could work because I use it for my pistols also)
a little over 1 pound of Unique
and 1 pound of Green Dot
I have winchester wads (red and clear)
brown Federal wads
.125 nitro card wads
and a Lyman wad cutter and a bunch of leather
I also have COW and Lee's powder dipper set.
Does anybody use a combination of any of these components?
The gun is a 3" S&W 916 so I assume it can safely take full house 2 3/4 loads.
I have lubed my .735 RB's with 45/45/10 and they are ready to go.

I did find a load for 1 3/8oz shot that used the STS hulls, remington 209 primer, WWA 12 R wad?, and 30.5 grains of 4756.
There is no data on hodgdons web site for card wads or similar old style technology. Its tickin me off because I feel like I am being forced to use combinations that I dont have one component for, or they dont have commonly used components in their data. This is realy difficult compared to cartridge loads.
Can any body throw me a line on how to develop shotgun loads out of published data? I need rules of thumb, tricks of the trade, etc etc.
Thanks!

[longbow]

goodsteel:

I am not sure what I will be able to find but I will look for data later. I have to get a gas tank reinstalled in my truck today so will be a bit busy for a while.

This is one of the common problems I run into reloading for shotgun and especially slugs. I live in a reloading supply desert with very limited local "stuff" and now that I can't shop in the States for gun stuff I often find myself missing a component or two from a recipe. It can be frustrating!

Some substitutions are safe and some are not so unless you have experience or other good info it is best not deviate much from a load recipe.

A primer change alone can affect pressure by around 3000 PSI so just any old primer is not good enough if loads are near max.

It is safe to substitute an equal weight of slug for shot and add card wads under to adjust column height. If you have a 1 3/8 oz shot, slug or buckshot load recipe using the components you have then the substitution of the ball is okay. Also, you can cut the petals of a shotcup to allow the bore diameter ball to fit.

My solution was to collect as much shotgun load data as I could for cross reference and variety of load recipes. The more info you can get, the better.

You are taking the right approach in asking before loading.

I will dig through my info later this afternoon to see what I can find. Maybe someone else will have info handy and respond sooner. Turbo1889 is a good guy to ask. he has done lots of slug loading and development. Ajay is another good source of info but I think he is still away.

Longbow