I'm sorry but I don't see that resultant conclusion. It is very possible that the original article may have instigated the SAMMI bulletin, but there is nothing I see in the articles that seems to say that they were promoting the concept of short chambers to improve performance. His own experiment, which apparently the ammo companies didn's do, was pretty statistically inconclusive. My take away from the articles was that they warned against shooting long shells in short chambers, and the ammo companies made ammo to be safe in the existing chambers. All liability driven.
The short chamber issue was just something that worked itself out on the side of safety with shorter shotshells to always be safe in the chamber. The performance increase he predicted was relatively small with variation in data large over each 8 shots.
Plastic shot cup wads certainly made loading easier I would guess, but I am old enough and was interested enough to read a lot early in life to remember the press and advertising about shotgun shell performance accompanying the development and introduction. There is no doubt that the ammo companies had performance improvement in mind when developing shot cup wads. It was an order of magnitude more than the sketchy data he obtained and is obvious to any shooter who loads both ways.s
|