doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com RST Patterns

The "three dimensional cloud" in a 1 1/4 load of #4 shot (that is 169 pellets) is getting pretty thin at 35 yards or so out of an improved cylinder choke. I had lots of old timers around who were of the opinion of 1 1/4 oz of 4s being the end all load for pheasant and duck hunting. I was playing a game where a load of 6s (281 pellets in a 1 1/4oz load, quite impressive on paper at 30 yards) was the first one in the pipe of the A5, was followed by a number 4 load, thinking the 4 would hit harder down range than the 6s.

That is what the old timers thought would work best. They were full of poo. The time spent patterning, in a single dimension, proved it. I don't worship in the house of the golden pellet.

Maybe you don't like the thought of it being a "hole" in the pattern, but, that is just what it is, semantics aside, at the end of the day, after that shot was missed. Sorry.

Best,
Ted

Remington solved that very problem for us a few years back with their 'duplex' load.

Remember that farce?

Never mind the time of flight difference between the 4's and 6's.

After watching the video of George Digweed breaking clays at more than 100 yds I came to the personal decision that patterning was mostly irrelevant waste of ammo and time. I have never seen a pattern which would indicated such shots were regularly possible with lead shot. I have also experienced shots from skeet choked barrels which broke clays at 50 plus yards which reflects the central core of the patterns are pretty thick even with open chokes. So my theory is to see if the combination of gun and shell works and don't buy anymore of those which don't. I will shoot at a patterning plate for point of aim verification.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

The RST shells are their "2 1/2" load, 20 ga. 7/8 oz 7.5s at 1150fps with a plastic wad. I finally had a chance to pattern some of my reloads as a comparison. They threw 74% patterns (68-76% variation), which is significantly tighter than the RST shells. (The reloads were WinAA+Win209+15gr. Unique+CB1078+.875oz of Magnum 8s). I guess this is just another example of different guns liking different loads.

Patterning may not be a perfect science, but I would prefer to have some imperfect information than none, as long as you understand its limitations. I use the method that Oberfell&Thompson set out in their Mysteries of Shotgun Patterns (efficiency, distribution and "patchiness" based on the number of 5" gaps). In this case, I used 5 patterns because this gun is an upland game gun and I didn't need 10 patterns to figure out if the gun was close to what I had specified.

I played around with the Optimizer program Dr. A.C. Jones has on his website to determine the best pattern efficiency for what I wanted to do - in this case, the program determined that to get a 90% probability of at least 2 pellet strikes, the density had to be at least 80%. So I asked to have the chokes set at 80% for 20 and 30 yards, which should equate to something close to Cyl and Mod. Interestingly, the bottom barrel patterned at 74% with the RSTs at 20 yards, which is a bit more open than Cyl (?).

I also shot 5 POA patterns which were right on the money. I learned the hard way to NEVER shoot POI patterns if your gun shoots good POA patterns.