Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith Doty
I loaded a LOT of steel back in the day. You are correct, special hard wads (we had to split'em by hand with a tool) and no shot above the cup. I'm not sure what went down this set of barrels but it wasn't lead or bismuth!
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I also loaded a ton of steel shot after the lead ban came in for waterfowl; I used #7 steel for practice on skeet and trap, the smallest size shot available at the time. I got all my supplies from Ballistics Products and remember having to split the heavy-walled wads by hand as Keith says. I used Grex and later Motor Mica for buffering the shot.
The longest killing shot I ever actually measured was 57 yards on a big Canada goose honker that flew past our field pit in a straight line pass shot situation (think a station 4 skeet shot). He fell dead out and we used a surveyor's tape to measure the actual distance since so many others in the pit argued about the "real" distance of the shot. I was using Federal #BBB steel 3" magnum out of a Remington 870 30" gun with IM choke. (I had the choke opened up from FULL a few years earlier when I lived in KS and shot ducks over flooded milo fields in MO).
I had signed up for and taken a steel shot seminar workshop put on by the MD DNR conducted by ballistics guru Tom Roster. It was a 2-day course consisting of morning presentations/lectures and after-lunch shooting steel exercises including tower shots, springing teal, clays coming into decoys, and hard and fast pass shooting setups. Best $100 I ever spent!
After that experience there was no mystery; steel shot worked and worked well. It would never be lead, but at that point in time there was no non-tox alternative like bismuth, tungsten matrix and the like we have today. Like many others, I rejoiced when those substitutes came into play, but in the meantime, we killed ducks! (And geese!).
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