doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Fiber wads

I am looking for commercial subgauge shells with fiber wads, as they appear to offer the benefit of slightly more open patterns ( AC Jones) for upland game and obviously avoid leaving plastic wads in the woods.

I have come across three commercial shell options:

Kent Gamebore - priced around $14/box, plus shipping
RST - doesn't offer a 16 ga. fiber wad shell and the 20 ga. only comes in paper and is $13/box, plus shipping
H&H shells sold by Classic Shooting - $11.50/box plus shipping.

Am I missing any other options (other than handloading)?

Thanks in advance, Doverham

Evidently you don't want to handload but really it is the best option when you consider that you can load a box for four dollars and have a much greater choice of loads. Don't write it off.

Have you looked at the Polywad offerings??

http://www.polywad.com/greenlite.html

Joe - handloading is a good option, just not for me right now, so for the time being I am limited to commercial offerings.

Those Greenlites look interesting. Polywad doesn't provide any pressure data. If I did my math correctly, those shells are ~ 1450 fps. Putting aside the chamber length issue, I am wondering if these could be shot safely out of a Mod choked 16 ga. Fox Sterlingworth.

Give them a call in the morning and ask what pressure.
Look like a lite load with moderate velocity and hopefully
pressure under 8000.

They do say IC should be the tightest choke used with the greenlite ammo

I read Doc Jones' conclusion closely and noted this ....

Additionally BASC in the UK did a comparison a couple of years ago of pattern densities in game shooting cartridges that showed absolutely no statistical difference between the results from fibre wads and plaswads. So the pattern advantage cannot be assumed; you'd need to evaluate each individual load and assess it.

Having said that I'm all for avoiding spreading plastic wads around especially near livestock' and more importantly, landowners feel the same way. When I was woodpigeon shooting big time I used a Gamebore fibre wad shell for just that reason and found them excellent.

Eug

I always use Gamebore 2 1/2" shells with fibre wads. Over the course of a season the extra cost is minimal in the overall scheme of things, particularly when you are shooting a gun worth a couple of thousand quid.

Back in the day (decades ago, now), when I was shooting competitive International Skeet, just about everyone shot Federal T122s (# 8 or 9) or T123s (#10), w fibre wads and paper hulls.

I have also used the Gamebore fiber wad ammo and it is excellent.

If you are looking to open up your patterns a spreader load will be much more effective than the small advantage gained by using a wad without a shot cup (fiber) which gains it's small advantage by creating barrel scrubbed flyer's.

Agree with that statement. Also agree with the above statements that it's mainly a shell to shell comparison, rather than those with fiber wads, in general, producing a more open pattern than those with plastic wads. I think, when we talk about the old guns shooting more open patterns because of the available ammo, it's probably at least as much a case of the pre-Super X loads--longer shot string, progressive burning powders not in use, etc--as it is the fiber vs plastic wads. Also maybe more loads with softer shot.

I have used the gamebore fiber loads and they work well. They solidly killed preserve birds. One thing I did notice with their 20ga loads was that they had a distinctive report. They sounded different from any other load I have ever used.

Thanks for the input. It looks like Gamebores and H&H are the best options to test drive.

One of the things Jones noted in his test was a larger spread in pattern size with the plastic wads than the fiber wads. He attributed this to a variation in how quickly the plastic shot cups opened after leaving the barrel. When this variation was averaged, the average pattern size was not that significantly different from fiber wads, but when the fiber wad patterns were compared to the tighter plastic wad patterns, there was a difference.

Put another way, one advantage of fiber wads is a more consistent pattern size (at least according to Jones' tests).