doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Low pressure loading manuals

Thanks guys! Lots of good info here! Yeah I was wondering about roll crimping to 2.5” length a 2 3/4” load.

Roll crimps work well. Also a Harkins crimp which is a shell cut down to 2 1/2" and has a shot card placed over the shot and then a regular crimp using the slightly shorter crimped area to seal the card over the shot. The card prevents an open center area on the crimp, the crimp seals the over the shot. In many loads I have enough room to simply shorten the shell and crimp in a normal fashion or substitute a slightly shorter wad to reduce stack height. Like a shorter red AA wad for the regular AA. I had one load tested and the pressure was just slightly higher that original load and it all fit perfectly in a 2 1/2" shell with a normal crimp.

I am not too picky about powders, but, in my opinion, a 7/8 ounce load at 1200 fps for any 12 gauge gun is not going to damage it, end of story. These guns have had a lifetime of 1 1/4 ounce loads without damage.

I am surprised no one has referenced the DGJ 2021 article "Taking the pressure off" by Ross Seyfried. He worked with Hodgdon Ballistic to develop updated loads to those by Bell and Armbrust earlier in the DGJ. Seyfried/Hodgdon provides lp loads for 10, 12 and 16 gauge. I called Hodgdon and they verified the components, details and accuracy for these loads.

A pressure-time curve stolen from Seyfried's article. Part of the application is that it is not hard to reproduce black powder pressure curves with today's smokeless powder options