Foster Slugs in smoothbore?

[45man]

We shot BP silhouette and my friends had repro Minie' ball rifles. They could not hit a 4'X4' cardboard at 50 yards. I said the Minie' does not fit so I lapped the molds. I got the guns to hit the 200 meter gong. The skirt is not enough. There are Minie' balls made with thick skirts for more powder but they still have a limit. Almost all top at about 50 gr.

 

[Rat]

I think that the Foster (Forster?) Probably works best in a plastic shot cup, as in modern loads. But again, the projectile is a very poor design, to my mind. You are basically shooting a backwards "cup". Think about it. Terminal performance can't be great. All things considered, I believe getting a round ball to shoot well, and accepting range limitations is more reasonable. With the forster/foster, at best you might get a reasonably accurate target load, or perhaps something that might stay on a paper plate at 100, but I would not want to hunt with it.

On minie' balls, I have turned down the base plugs for a very heavy skirt, and have been able to shoot them with up to 90 grains. However, for me, it's a whole lot easier to get a solid slug, such as a minie' with the base plug almost entirely eliminated, or the REAL, to shoot well with a minimum of endless experimentation.

 

[Britsmoothy]

I have never succeeded with shotgun slugs in modern or BP guns. It is a thorn in my side. The most accurate was the WW foster for me and teacup groups at 50 was common. Brenneke did not work with one shot on paper and the rest gone somewhere. I have Lyman and Lee molds but all fail. I duplicated the WW and still had wads driven into the hollow bases so I can't figure how WW does it. Slugs made to fit shot cups also fail with the wads destroyed.
I even bought a rifled barrel for the shotgun and still can't make it work, even a RB. I have filled the hollow bases to no avail. Long ago in Ohio I killed deer to 100 yards with the WW factory slugs but handloads are a 10' proposition. Once I bought a kit called the Hammer Heads, shells primed so just add powder and crimp. WOW, tiny 100 yard groups with the sabot slug but expensive and I am cheap. I have drawers filled with components that never worked.
I was sent some full size bullets and a load of a prodigious amount of SR 4759 that I fear to shoot. Modern or BP, it is hard so if anyone works it out, please help me.

I disassembled an old WW slug load recently and it had three hard paper based wads, dense in nature.
In my muzzleloader I used the same wads to get a result.
Using a wad of some kind bonded to a slug to aid flight control via drag is good but in a muzzleloaders the flight control still must be shielded from all that gas and flame.
In all honesty it's a futile exercise when a ball is all that is needed. All the fuss is going to give little gain over a ball in a smoothbore.

 

[Stantheman86]

My "go to" will continue to be .648 round balls with 3M masking paper cartridges, and a very small amount of Lanolin on the paper on the bottom 1/2 of the ball.

 

[SDSmlf]

Shooting Foster style slugs out of a smooth bore shotgun is the primary reason many of my friends and I started hunting with patched round balls out of muzzleloaders back in the day.

Grew up in UpState NY and by law had to hunt big game with a 20 gauge or larger shotgun shooting a single projectile, or a muzzloading rifle larger than 45 caliber shooting a patched round ball or a CF pistol (with some minimum requirements). You had two options with a shotgun, Foster style slugs, or the ‘premium’ German made Brenneke.

With our smoothbore shotguns we could keep most of our shots with Foster style slugs on a paper plate at 50 yards. At a 100 yards, consistently hitting a 5 gallon pail wasn’t possible, even with the rifle sights on some of our slug barrels.

With rifle sights on shotgun barrels the Brenneke slugs shot much better, however, there were frequent fliers. Testing on paper at short range revealed that some of the slugs were keyholing after they lost the fiber wad that was attached to the lead with a wood screw. Now this was back in the day when the Brennekes came with paper hulls..... still have some laying around, guess as souvenirs. May have been improvements over the years, but don’t know.
We had some open fields we hunted and wanted all the ‘extended range’ we could get. Inside of 50 yards, Foster style slugs were deadly, but at 75 yards you were pushing it. Could miss completely, or worse, be in for a long day of tracking. We were knocking deer down consistently out to 125 yards or so with our 50 and 54 caliber TCs, Dixons CVAs shooting patched round balls.

 

[SDSmlf]

What does a Foster weigh compared to the same size ball? They seem to be mostly "tube" with some lead for a nose, or mostly hollow base, with the base extending to the nose, which seems to me would shed velocity rapidly, and really have little sectional density as we think of it with projectiles. (yes, a ball also has little sectional density) For target use I suppose that does not matter. For hunting I think I'd rather use a ball. ??

20 gauge Foster style slugs are typically 5/8 oz, or 273 grains, while a .610 roundball is 342 grains. 12 gauge Fosters are usually 1 oz or 437 grains, while .715 roundball weighs in at 550 grains. Foster style slugs are typically lighter than roundballs of the same caliber, with less sectional density and slightly poorer ballistic performance as far as trajectory is concerned. But boy do they expand when they hit something, if that’s what you are looking for.

 

[Rat]

Thank you. Being an "upside down" cup, of light construction, I bet they would indeed expand, but it would be more like being smashed flat, have little penetration...not what I'd be looking for.