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need help on shotgun turkey
- Thread starter trent
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paulvallandigham
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Reduce the powder charge in 5 grain increments, until the pattern tightens. Use FFg and not FFFg powder. At 90 grains, you are blowing your patterns, by trying to duplicate Modern shotgun shells.
All that extra velocity is used up in the first 20 yards, and you don't need more velocity shooting #4 shot inside 20 yards.
An Improved Cylinder gun is basically a 25 yard gun, and you can use #6 shot to put more pellets in the pattern. At 25-30 yards, #6 shot pellets will carry enough energy, even at lower MVs to kill a turkey. If you want to stretch the range to 35 yards, then use #5 shot instead.
You might try, in addition to reducing the powder charge, greasing the bore of the gun after the shot and OS Cards are loaded by using a well greased cleaning patch to run down the bore. This will help the shot pellets SLIDE over the barrel, rather than rub flats on the outside pellets, and leave lead streaks in your barrel.
Those lead streaks don't matter much to the FIRST pattern you shoot from a clean barrel, but they help ruin subsequent patterns shot from the barrel if you don't first take the time to use lead solvent, and a bore brush, to scrub the lead off the bore.
If you don't own it, By the most current version of the Lyman Shotshell Reloading Manual, and check the tables on MV, down range velocity, pellet energy, time of flight, and drop in flight. The tables give data for loads from the muzzle out to 60 yards, for modern guns. But you will learn a lot about shotgun ballistics, by comparing the fastest loads, to the slowest loads at the various distances. Since all lead shot is round, and has the same drag factor( ballistic's Coefficient), it doesn't matter if you shoot pellets out of a modern shotgun shell, or a BP ML shotgun. Velocity will be lower, because BP is not going to generate the kind of velocities you can get from Smokeless powders. But the affect that air has on the pellets is the same.
Keep the velocity of your load below the speed of sound to improve patterns, too. SOS is 1135 fps, but the transonic zone ranges from about 1080 fps, to 1200 fps. In that zone, air is buffetting the round pellets from all sides, and any imperfection in the surface of the pellet will cause it to veer away from the line of fire.( ie. Blowing the pattern!)
All that extra velocity is used up in the first 20 yards, and you don't need more velocity shooting #4 shot inside 20 yards.
An Improved Cylinder gun is basically a 25 yard gun, and you can use #6 shot to put more pellets in the pattern. At 25-30 yards, #6 shot pellets will carry enough energy, even at lower MVs to kill a turkey. If you want to stretch the range to 35 yards, then use #5 shot instead.
You might try, in addition to reducing the powder charge, greasing the bore of the gun after the shot and OS Cards are loaded by using a well greased cleaning patch to run down the bore. This will help the shot pellets SLIDE over the barrel, rather than rub flats on the outside pellets, and leave lead streaks in your barrel.
Those lead streaks don't matter much to the FIRST pattern you shoot from a clean barrel, but they help ruin subsequent patterns shot from the barrel if you don't first take the time to use lead solvent, and a bore brush, to scrub the lead off the bore.
If you don't own it, By the most current version of the Lyman Shotshell Reloading Manual, and check the tables on MV, down range velocity, pellet energy, time of flight, and drop in flight. The tables give data for loads from the muzzle out to 60 yards, for modern guns. But you will learn a lot about shotgun ballistics, by comparing the fastest loads, to the slowest loads at the various distances. Since all lead shot is round, and has the same drag factor( ballistic's Coefficient), it doesn't matter if you shoot pellets out of a modern shotgun shell, or a BP ML shotgun. Velocity will be lower, because BP is not going to generate the kind of velocities you can get from Smokeless powders. But the affect that air has on the pellets is the same.
Keep the velocity of your load below the speed of sound to improve patterns, too. SOS is 1135 fps, but the transonic zone ranges from about 1080 fps, to 1200 fps. In that zone, air is buffetting the round pellets from all sides, and any imperfection in the surface of the pellet will cause it to veer away from the line of fire.( ie. Blowing the pattern!)
paulvallandigham
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Trent: Try reducing just the powder charge, by 5 grain increments, so you can find the charge that gives the best pattern for your gun. Start at 85, then go to 80, then 75, then 70, etc. Depending on a lot of factors I could only guess at here, at some point, you will see a much better pattern at 25 or 30 yards. You have to clean the barrel after each shot so you get an honest pattern for each powder charge you try. Everything else has to be the same, as far as wads, lube, shot charge, etc.
Whenever you are working on a load, CHANGE only ONE THING at a time. Here you are trying to find a powder charge that won't open up the pattern so much. That means testing lower powder charges than what you are now shooting.
Whenever you are working on a load, CHANGE only ONE THING at a time. Here you are trying to find a powder charge that won't open up the pattern so much. That means testing lower powder charges than what you are now shooting.
You'll never get an acceptable turkey head size pattern with #4's at any reasonable hunting distance...suggest you use hard magnum #6's and they'll get it done.trent said:
Remember, the reason that turkey patterning targets are so detailed is so you can actually see if the pattern is dense enough to make a killing shot.
Don't be mislead by what appears to be a lot of holes in paper...you need to literally, physically, average 3-4 pellets into the skull and/or neck vertebrae every time you pull the trigger.
If not, move the target 5 yards closer and try again until you find you max distance that you KNOW you'll kill him clean every time...don't just wish & hope...you want him dead in front of you, not dead in a thicket out of sight 100yds away.
PS:
If lubing the bore after you've loaded the smoothbore makes you feel good, continue doing it...but the OS card will simply scrape the lube right back off the walls of the bore as the tight fitting OS card is pushed up and out of the muzzle taking the lube with it.
If lubing the bore after you've loaded the smoothbore makes you feel good, continue doing it...but the OS card will simply scrape the lube right back off the walls of the bore as the tight fitting OS card is pushed up and out of the muzzle taking the lube with it.
paulvallandigham
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Roundball: The OS card doesn't remove All the grease from the bore as it leaves the barrel. There is grease left in the pores of the steel, just like lube put in the cushion wad, is NOT all removed by the OP Wad. There is enough to keep the residue soft, and to keep the lead pellets from leaving as much lead in the bore as they do when the bore is not greased.
Because I don't have a bore scope, to examine the bore in detail after shooting lead down a greased bore, I don't claim that the grease prevents all leading.
I just don't know.
But, In shooting my fowler, I was pleasantly surprised to find that NL1000 lube seemed to make the bore " slick", and the slickness seemed to improve with each successive shot.
This is an observation YOU made in a post some time ago, and is why you recommended using Wonderlube. I just thought about what you described about the " slickness", and put that information to a slightly different test, and use. If the bore is " slicker", it should offer less friction to the pellets as they pass down the barrel.
When I do clean the fowler, after shooting "bare" shot loads( no shot cups), I am not getting much, if any, lead out of the barrels on my cleaning patches soaked in lead solvent.
Finally, lubing the barrel has shown a slight increase in velocity, and a lower SDV when shooting PRB out of the barrel. I still need to wrap some shot loads in paper, and shoot them over my chronograph to determine if the same thing holds true shooting shot loads, instead of PRBs.
Because I don't have a bore scope, to examine the bore in detail after shooting lead down a greased bore, I don't claim that the grease prevents all leading.
I just don't know.
But, In shooting my fowler, I was pleasantly surprised to find that NL1000 lube seemed to make the bore " slick", and the slickness seemed to improve with each successive shot.
This is an observation YOU made in a post some time ago, and is why you recommended using Wonderlube. I just thought about what you described about the " slickness", and put that information to a slightly different test, and use. If the bore is " slicker", it should offer less friction to the pellets as they pass down the barrel.
When I do clean the fowler, after shooting "bare" shot loads( no shot cups), I am not getting much, if any, lead out of the barrels on my cleaning patches soaked in lead solvent.
Finally, lubing the barrel has shown a slight increase in velocity, and a lower SDV when shooting PRB out of the barrel. I still need to wrap some shot loads in paper, and shoot them over my chronograph to determine if the same thing holds true shooting shot loads, instead of PRBs.
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