Game cartridges

[Penelope]

Bought some Fiocchi F3 Game recently 'cause they were cheap. They do the job perfectly.

[al4x]

I've been on some RC 32gram 6's for a while now and if your gun is ever picky what it will eject these seem great.  My SP3 can have the top barrel cartridge stick with most makes but these are straight out.  Couple that with very consistent on the killing front I will keep using these for most things

[Wilksy II]

I’ve shot about four boxes of eley hi flyers, I bought them as they are 67mm to use in my old guns, I used them roost shooting this feb and driven pheasants last Friday and they killed really well, I only managed 5 pheasants but they were all dead in the air so thumbs up from me!

[welshwarrior]

On 23/11/2017 at 22:17, marsh man said:

On one of the shoots I go on , the most consistent shot by far use clear pigeon 30 grms plastic wad , whatever cartridge is used it still have to be put in the right place, and is there really that much difference for a standard price cartridge, to one in the top of the price range bracket ?

I wonder how many people could tell what there favourite cartridge is if it was mixed with half a dozen different ones that were all put in the same case with no names on them ,,, I know I couldn't .

 

 

We did a blind testing on a game day and you could tell the quality of the kills between copper coated shot and diamond shot.   The only difference between the two batches was the shot and the text on the case. 

[marsh man]

1 hour ago, welshwarrior said:

We did a blind testing on a game day and you could tell the quality of the kills between copper coated shot and diamond shot.   The only difference between the two batches was the shot and the text on the case. 

THANKS welshwarrior , very interesting , I wouldn't have known that .

[figgy]

I think I’d be able to tell my favourite game cart in a blind test. 

I like a smooth heave in my shoulder, not the usual fast slap of most modern game carts,so can usually tell. 

Interesting that copper coated shot seems to be getting good reviews and better kills.  Is the shot or better patterns as coated shot holds tighter that’s giving the kills.

[welshwarrior]

1 hour ago, figgy said:

I think I’d be able to tell my favourite game cart in a blind test. 

I like a smooth heave in my shoulder, not the usual fast slap of most modern game carts,so can usually tell. 

Interesting that copper coated shot seems to be getting good reviews and better kills.  Is the shot or better patterns as coated shot holds tighter that’s giving the kills.

The harder coating keeps a more even pattern all across the pattern the shot also penetrates better before distorting to dump the energy 

[neutron619]

15 hours ago, welshwarrior said:

The harder coating keeps a more even pattern all across the pattern the shot also penetrates better before distorting to dump the energy 

My understanding and my best interpretation of the "science" behind it is that the first part of what you've said is broadly true but not for the reasons implied and that the second is a bit of a nonsense.

The copper coating on the pellets is only a fraction of a millimetre thick. The best analogy I can think of is that it's a bit like spray-painting a baloon. It'll be a different colour, but it's not going to materially affect the strength of the thing and it certainly isn't going to stop a pin going through and bursting it.

Likewise, copper coating is not going to make a lead pellet any easier or harder to crush because it's not thick enough to add anything to the hardness of the pellet. When you apply pressure to the pellets, you might not break the surface layer of copper as you deform the lead underneath, but the overall hardness is that of the lead and anything it's alloyed with.

If the copper layer were thick enough to contribute to the overall strength of the pellet, then we'd be looking at using larger-than-usual shot in much the same way as we do with steel, because the density of copper is much lower than that of lead and the pellet mass would be substantially reduced. We do not, to my knowledge, receive this advice when paying out a stonking bill on our super funky copper cartridges.

What copper coating could theoretically do is lubricate the pellets inside the barrel and particularly at the choke. Copper is, to use a somewhat appalling term, slightly "shinier" than lead and two copper surfaces rubbed together will have a lower friction coefficient than two lead surfaces. This is because, on a microscopic level, a plain lead pellet will tend to have a much rougher surface than one which has been coated (with anything).

Whilst this won't improve the material strength of the copper-coated pellet, it will allow collisions and crushing that occur inside the barrel to be resolved more elastically. (There are no truly elastic collisions in the macroscopic world, but collisions can occur more or less elasticaly whilst always being inelastic.) This will usually result in a reduction in pellet deformation and, theoretically, in better patterns - though I strongly suspect that ordinary shot-to-shot variation is far more significant than any overall improvement in pattern percentage or quality created by copper coating.

On the point about distortion or deformation inside the quarry: well, it doesn't happen to any significant degree and it isn't important as far as the overall effect goes, but believe it if you want. Either way, as I said above, the copper has no real effect on pellet hardness because it's too thin to make any difference, which means what happens inside the game - whatever that is - is whatever normally happens with your bog-standard 2% antimony-lead pellet.

In short, coated shot is the new "thing" for cartridge manufacturers to sell when enough people discover that chasing "speed" is counterproductive and the bottom falls out of that market.

If you don't believe me, ask King Edward VII. He and most of his peers shot most of their driven game with lightweight side by sides, loaded with 36g of pure lead #6, leaving the muzzle at around 1050fps. None of this 1500fps copper-coated marketing ******** for their 900-bird days and judging by the pictures, they did ok.

Edited November 30, 2017 by neutron619
Clarity.

[matone]

it used to be Nickel plated shot...............

[wymberley]

A reasonably fair bottom line is the fact that no one plates(washes) rubbish shot. With regard to penetration, although I've not shot sufficient yet to form an opinion, I am tending towards the idea that the copper coating does improve this - talking penetration here, not energy transfer by distortion - which I'm thinking might be down to the boundary layer effect.

[neutron619]

21 minutes ago, wymberley said:

I'm thinking might be down to the boundary layer effect.

Could well be true. Identical mass (or as near as damnit) and lower coefficient of friction could result in better penetration, though again, I'd suspect the effect would be marginal. We could even talk about the possibility of copper coated pellets retaining velocity ever-so-slightly longer because they'll experience laminar flow ever so slightly earlier than rough lead, but again, I'd suspect a marginal effect.

The other thing worth mentioning here is the old lethality study referred to in Gough-Thomas's Shotguns & Cartridges. I can't remember the parameters of the experiment, but somebody shot a hell of a lot of ducks to see how reliably a shotgun would kill under controlled conditions and I seem to recall that they found that even with direct hits from aimed shots at relatively moderate ranges (30 yards?), something like 36g of #5 - a good, old school duck load if ever there was one - only killed the duck 74% of the time, with some of them having to be put down 2 weeks later because they weren't wounded badly enough to die faster.

My point is that we can add 5% here and 2% there to our patterns and shoot bigger and harder and faster shot and there's still no guarantee that even a good, direct hit will kill the bird. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to reduce the margin for error as much as possible - we should - but you could shoot lead, copper, solid gold, osmium and there would still be no guarantee that the handful of pellets required would end up where you needed them to - and that's with aimed, lab-controlled shooting. Copper shot is not going to improve anything for someone who doesn't hit - dead on - almost everything they shoot at in the first place - and that's most of us.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Or you could shoot more, get proficient and gain in confidence!

[matone]

Seen excellent performance by Churchill Hellfires since they came out 10 ? years ago but there was a common factor ....the people using them were top shots !!!!

[TIGHTCHOKE]

5 minutes ago, matone said:

Seen excellent performance by Churchill Hellfires since they came out 10 ? years ago but there was a common factor ....the people using them were top shots !!!!

I quite agree.

[wymberley]

20 minutes ago, neutron619 said:

Could well be true. Identical mass (or as near as damnit) and lower coefficient of friction could result in better penetration, though again, I'd suspect the effect would be marginal. We could even talk about the possibility of copper coated pellets retaining velocity ever-so-slightly longer because they'll experience laminar flow ever so slightly earlier than rough lead, but again, I'd suspect a marginal effect.

The other thing worth mentioning here is the old lethality study referred to in Gough-Thomas's Shotguns & Cartridges. I can't remember the parameters of the experiment, but somebody shot a hell of a lot of ducks to see how reliably a shotgun would kill under controlled conditions and I seem to recall that they found that even with direct hits from aimed shots at relatively moderate ranges (30 yards?), something like 36g of #5 - a good, old school duck load if ever there was one - only killed the duck 74% of the time, with some of them having to be put down 2 weeks later because they weren't wounded badly enough to die faster.

My point is that we can add 5% here and 2% there to our patterns and shoot bigger and harder and faster shot and there's still no guarantee that even a good, direct hit will kill the bird. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to reduce the margin for error as much as possible - we should - but you could shoot lead, copper, solid gold, osmium and there would still be no guarantee that the handful of pellets required would end up where you needed them to - and that's with aimed, lab-controlled shooting. Copper shot is not going to improve anything for someone who doesn't hit - dead on - almost everything they shoot at in the first place - and that's most of us.

Valid in essence, but the actual figures for 30 yards are 95% for broadside and at 40 yards head on, 48%. The 2 weeks was 10 days. The gun  used was a Full choke 12 and at 60 yards the broadside figure is 24% and 8% for the head on at 50 yards. Interestingly, for the 60 yards broadside with No3 the figure was 18% and the 50 yard head on 20%. As this was not what was expected, the end result was a baggable bird was deemed to be one with a broken wing and dead within 5 minutes. No comment. 2010 birds were shot in total. This was one of the first trials to determine the actual capability of lead shot in order to then fairly compare the performance of the new fangled iron shot. Consequently, it will be realised that the introduction of NTS did us all a great favour in as much as it rectified the inaccuracies of the hitherto lead performance tables.

[neutron619]

1 hour ago, wymberley said:

Valid in essence, but the actual figures for 30 yards are 95% for broadside and at 40 yards head on, 48%. The 2 weeks was 10 days. The gun  used was a Full choke 12 and at 60 yards the broadside figure is 24% and 8% for the head on at 50 yards. Interestingly, for the 60 yards broadside with No3 the figure was 18% and the 50 yard head on 20%. As this was not what was expected, the end result was a baggable bird was deemed to be one with a broken wing and dead within 5 minutes. No comment. 2010 birds were shot in total. This was one of the first trials to determine the actual capability of lead shot in order to then fairly compare the performance of the new fangled iron shot. Consequently, it will be realised that the introduction of NTS did us all a great favour in as much as it rectified the inaccuracies of the hitherto lead performance tables.

Thanks

All I can add is that helps if you have a copy of the book to hand. I borrowed it, read it, and gave it back. Time to start hunting around for second-hand book shops me thinks...

[wymberley]

5 minutes ago, neutron619 said:

Thanks

All I can add is that helps if you have a copy of the book to hand. I borrowed it, read it, and gave it back. Time to start hunting around for second-hand book shops me thinks...

Well worth it. If you do, look out for the 4th or 5th edition - by the time of the latter GT had died (Nigel Brown was asked to step in and do the 5th). They're still out there and available. My post above bears it out and because of all the changes afoot, GT himself even back then says that he is beginning to have doubts about the validity of some aspects of shotgun ballistics that were historically deemed to be the case.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

You are welcome to borrow it and others again.

[figgy]

The book can be ordered from Amazon for £4.53 inc delivery. 

I have ordered it to peruse at leisure.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

But this is the book you ordered!

 

[Wilksy II]

I just like to add that hi flyers have cases that are lovely shade of pink!

[wymberley]

2 hours ago, TIGHTCHOKE said:

But this is the book you ordered!

 

You could have lent Figgy yours.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

No, I've coloured it now.

[wymberley]

5 minutes ago, TIGHTCHOKE said:

No, I've coloured it now.

Touche.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Good morning