In Range

Ralph Gates of Columbia, Missouri, is a serious skeet shooter and shotshell reloader. For convenience, he has a dedicated station for every type of shotshell he loads.

Serious trap and skeet shooters might go through a thousand rounds in a week or two and buying factory shells didn’t make sense unless one was independently wealthy. Shooters hoarded hulls, especially Winchester AAs, although others were equally good. Some guys got so intense about it – there are other words, but we’ll use that one – that they gave rise to many stories, some apocryphal, some not, about dumpster diving, sifting dirt for used shot and even, in one instance of my personal acquaintance, hands-and-knees among the smashed clays, gathering up powder-blackened plastic shot cups to reuse.

Through the 1990s, as imported shotshells became more common and the U.S. dollar went from strength to strength, the price of shotshells came down, and down, and down. Spanish Rio shotshells, I remember, could be picked up for $5 a box. At one point, the Canadian dollar dropped to $1.65 and you could find the excellent Challengers for around $4.

When it reaches the point where first-rate factory ammunition costs less than 20 cents a shell, it’s hard to justify rolling your own, especially if you place any value on your time. This is exactly the reason “home loading,” as they called it, died out in England: Too many good shells available at too low a price.

Of course, there were always other reasons for loading your own. If you had an English shotgun with 2½-inch chambers or a nice, old 16 gauge for which you couldn’t find decent ammunition, or if you happened to be a sensible sort who knew that 1 ounce of No. 7 at 1,150 feet per second (fps) was a perfectly good game load, but none was available amidst the plethora of magnums, then you rolled your own. There was no alternative.

Since the halcyon days of ultra-cheap target loads, however, things have changed. During the COVID-19 panic, all ammunition became hard to come by. That has now eased, and shotshells are once again available, but they aren’t cheap. At one club, I can buy a flat of Winchester club loads for $110 and that’s the member rate. There’s always something cheaper on the internet, but you have to figure on at least $20 for shipping, so you seldom save much. As a test, I checked for 250 rounds of 12 gauge and the shipping was $41!

During the recent shortage, shooters who had retired their loading equipment pulled it out and started scrounging components anywhere they could find them. They have kept right on doing it to save money.

Another reason is the ever-expanding web of regulations regarding the use of non-toxic (i.e., non-lead) shot. In addition to waterfowl and other migratory birds, some states now require it for upland birds on public wildlife preserves, and a few shooting clubs also demand it. The first substitute, back in the 1980s, was steel (iron) but today, there are several alternatives, including bismuth and various tungsten alloys.

These, alas, are not always available in the gauge you want to shoot, or at a power level you are willing to endure.

Again, as an experiment, I went looking for 28-gauge bismuth and found a 200-round box for $339.95 ($1.70/round). The shipping was free, but still. For that money, I can buy a 28-gauge MEC single-stage press and be on my way to loading my own and saving money forevermore.

Here we run into the bugbear of shotshell reloading compared to rifle or handgun metallic cartridges.

A shotshell is comprised of a half dozen components, all of which must fit together perfectly while delivering enough pellets, at the right velocity, within accepted pressure limits. These include the hull, primer, powder, shot cup, pellets, possibly a buffer and an over-shot card. A published load will specify the brand of hull and primer, and the exact wad and you cannot substitute willy-nilly.

Three favorite 12-gauge loads might call for different types of all of the above, and if you switch often enough, you’re going to end up with partial bags of this wad and that over-shot card of hulls you no longer like and partial boxes of primers that don’t fit your current preferences.

What’s more, you will likely find it more convenient to acquire a separate loading press for each gauge you load, rather than buying the dies and bits and pieces and trying to convert one press each time you want to change gauges.

If all of this seems vastly more complicated than reloading 308 Winchester or 9mm Luger, you’re right, it is – and there’s no way around it.

In a 308, you can use almost any brass with any brand of primer, packed with this powder or that, loose, compressed, or in between and seat the bullet to whatever depth suits. You can crimp or not. As long as you are working at or near a safe starting load, you’re good.

Not with a shotshell. Ideally, its components should fill the hull like the stuffing in a sausage, allowing a firm crimp to slightly compress the shot as it is pressed home. A solid crimp is essential, not just to keep the shot pellets from spilling out, but to provide enough resistance for pressure to build up to the right level to provide the desired velocity.

This was tricky enough when only lead shot was involved. Unfortunately, bismuth is less dense than lead, so 1 ounce takes up more room. Tungsten is denser than lead, so an ounce of tungsten takes up less. Bismuth, tungsten and iron – all the non-toxic substitutes – require their own loading data, which means matching hulls, primers, wads and shot to get a tight-fitting load without exceeding pressure limits.

As for primers, they may carry the standard designation “209,” but there are vast differences. Ballistic Products carried out tests that showed the range of both pressure and velocity, in the same load, using different primers. The differences ranged from thousands of pounds per square inch as well as hundreds of feet per second.

I started loading rifle and handgun cartridges long before I ever loaded a shotshell, and made the mistake of trying to approach it the same way, buying a bit of this and a few of those, figuring I’d try different combinations. Inevitably, I ended up with partial bags of wads that didn’t work out, hulls for which I had no use and partial trays of primers. Since I am genetically unable to throw such things away, the build-up of detritus became overwhelming.

When I recently moved, I found a new shotshell handloading enthusiast and he came in his pickup truck to take away all the boxes and bins of hulls and wads and more hulls and wads. He thought he was getting a deal. But so was I.

Now, if I set out to load for a different gauge, or develop a specialized load in a familiar one, I pick one recipe – one! – and gather the wherewithal to load it. Not in industrial quantities, but not skimping, either. Also, I don’t switch around – at least not until I’ve tried every wrinkle of a particular combination.

There are obsessives who insist on tweaking this and adjusting that, who seem to have no life other than loading shotshells, but I am not one of them. I want enough ammunition to go and discover new ways of missing easy targets, not spend my life slaving over a hot MEC.

The good news is that, once you’re set up with a particular combination of hull, wad and powder, you can start turning out perfect shotshells remarkably fast. It really is easier than it looks.