Old School Card Wad Shells
 

As a 9 year old one of my great joys was "helping" a grandfather reload shot shells down in the basement. The huge box of Alcan wads, the handful of spent primers that ended up in Mom's washer, and the wonder of spent hulls becoming a full box, ready to go. Not a plastic wad in sight.
Is anybody currently loading plastic or paper hulls with old style wads? Lately some wads, particularly 10 ga. have become few and far between. I just bought an assortment of card and fiber wads in 10 ga. and plan to work on some loads that are plastic free. Any sage advice would be welcome.

I remember well the Alcan Felton Blue Streak wads and Nitro Card wads but I haven't loaded a shell with them for many years. In high school and college I loaded a lot of Federal papers with them -- Federal primer, 22 grains of Red Dot, a nitro card, two Felton Blue Streaks and 1 1/8 ounce of shot. The next step was replacing the nitro card with the Alcan Plastic Gas Seal (PGS) wad and cutting the Red Dot to 18 or 19 grains. I've been using WAA12SL and Clays for 7/8 ounce loads lately in my Federal papers.

Pretty much all I load are fiber wads I use a wood dowel to seat them. I will post a picture later of how my wad column looks for the 10 ga.

Here's my 10 and 8 gauge wad columns though they can vary. With the 1 3/8oz load you can use 3 wads in the 2 7/8" hull but I've been going with 2 1/2 plus a mini nitro card .070. If you use BP you'd probably want to lube the wads to buy them already lubed.

Milton:

What is the advantage to using lubed fiber wads over dry fiber wads?

-Victor

According to the cas guys the lubed fiber wads help soften/cleaning/fouling etc of black powder residue but for smokeless it doesnt really serve a purpose. Although I will say the lubed wads are not as brittle as the dry ones but im not sure if it makes much of a difference. I have also been testing a hybrid wad its a fiber base with a plastic shotcup. In one of the fiber wads I was able to recover you can see it absorbing the impact from shot setback I thought that was pretty interesting.

When i first loaded the short 10 i used dry 16 ga. wads as a filler and got a confetti of pulverized wad with each shot, a celebration my trap squad called it. Crow hunting the blizzard of fiber would sometimes get behind the glasses and cause problems. Lubed wads and no more problem.

Ive witnessed the confetti before but doesnt seem to happen if I place a overshot card under the first fiber wad. I have read some claims that lube from wads will seep down into the powder, however I pulled apart a Winchester load that was probably 40 years old and the lube from the wad had not seeped into the powder. Then again Winchester used a nitro card that had a skirt around the edge of it sealing the powder charge.

Heres a piece of fiber wad I found where you can see the impressions of shot setback.

interesting thoughts....charlie

Contact Circlefly. Craig makes fiber wads for all gauges. I think he makes them for BPI and Precision Reloading, but not sure. The old reloading manuals back when plastic wads first came out recommended 10% more powder if going from fiber to plastic wads. And there was no mention of what kind of plastic wad. They just felt that plastic wads sealed 10% better than fiber wads. I usually go up 1.5grs. JMHO