HOW THE CHINESE MIDDLE CLASS AFFECTS THE PRICE OF YOUR CARTRIDGES

Rumour has it the chattering classes in China are buying 38000 cars a day. Cars need batteries, and batteries need lead. That is one of the reasons the price of lead on the London metal exchanges shows no sign of returning to earth. Cartridges are getting more expensive but it should not be an excuse to cut corners with your ammunition. A box of any old rubbish shows no respect towards your quarry – fine for busting clays, but we are dealing with a living being here and you are trying to be as efficient as possible.

Cartridges kill cleanly (rupturing the major blood vessel and organs, see previous post) by a combination of 2 factors.

Pattern and penetration (P&P). Many things affect these two overriding factors and there are trade offs with different combinations. To start with we should define some terms.

• Pattern – the collection of individual pellets that make up the shot weight (oz or grams) and act in a similar way to a spurt of water from a hosepipe
• Penetration – the depth to which those pellets travel within the carcass having gone through atmosphere, feathers, skin, tissue, and bone to reach vital organs and vessels
• Shot size – the diameter of the individual pellets that make up the shot weight
• Choke – the constriction at the muzzle of the shotgun that regulates the spread of the pattern at any given distance
• Wad – the part of the cartridge that provides a gas seal for the burning gunpowder moving the pattern up the barrel in a uniform manner – falls away quickly after leaving the barrel.

Moving away from dictionary corner we will start with pattern.

The law of averages says that the more pellets you have in your pattern the greater the chance of damaging one of the vital areas and killing cleanly. This is true – up to a point. The more pellets, the heavier the shot weight and the more the recoil (push a heavy weight forward at high speed and a greater force comes back into your shoulder – Newton 1^st Law once more). That’s why I only ever had one customer who bought 36gm 6’s for decoying pigeons. That cartridge is simply not comfortable to shoot all day. The usual choice is no less than 28gm and no heavier than 32gm. I could not shoot 32gm all day – I don’t have my dentist on speed dial. (George Digweed I know shoots 35gm 5’s all day long, but then George is a more substantial chap than I am, uses a heavier gun and is the finest shot of his or any other generation. He alone has the talent to shoot at the ranges he specializes in, and he does it well. He has spent years perfecting the setup he uses, practicing the art, and it is not for us to try the same.) 28gm of 5’s will contain fewer pellets than 28gm of 7’s because of the diameter of the pellets. So here is our first trade off – 28gm is a very comfortable load to shoot but does it have the required pattern at a further distance?

More has been written about choke (and I bet W.R. Pape and W.W. Greener are still slugging it out in the afterlife as to who invented it) than we have room for here and most of it is boring, analytical, impractical guff so read around if you want to. What choke you use affects the pattern a shotgun throws. Different barrels will behave differently with different cartridges. It is up to you to test your barrel, choke, cartridge combination by pattering it (subject of a future post). Essentially the tighter the choke the more constricted the pattern down range and the higher the odds of a clean kill. The trade off is that very tight choke can alter the pattern in unforeseen ways. Put your spray nozzle on the end of a hosepipe to see what I mean – main jet goes further but drops of water split off more than an open end – the uniformity changes. Also bear in mind that a pattern plate isn’t what actually happens when you shoot a moving target – try hitting a wasp with the jet from your hose to see what I mean.

Shot size and penetration are intertwined – the larger the shot size the greater the mass. The greater the mass, the greater the retained energy at distance. Bigger pellets punch through the surface layers better than smaller ones to reach the vital areas. This also feeds into the trade off as I said – bigger pellets, fewer of them, fewer pellets less chance of damaging the vital organs.

The type of wad can also have a (smaller) bearing. Fibre wads are more environmentally sound but throw slightly more open patterns than plastic (or photodegradeable). Plastic wads according to some commentators throw less uniform patterns. There were rumours around a few years ago of someone developing a vegetable starch wad but I have heard little progress and nothing has yet come to market.

My own preference is for Rio (Spanish made) 28gm 7.5’s (actually 2.37mm - an English 7+) in my more open barrel (1/4 choke) and Rio 30gm 6’s (which are actually 2.75mm - an English 5) in a tighter barrel (5/8ths) – this gives me the best of both worlds. This way I fire a greater number of the more comfortable cartridge, but still have the ability to deal with the very testing second bird of any potential right and left.