doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Black Powder Slug Load

If it says "Not For Ball" it means it should not be used with a Bore Fitting Ball. this had been the common size balls used prior to choke boring. It is still OK to use it with a ball which is small enough to clear the choke. This has been being done ever since the development of Choke Boring. The confusion over this was the reason the "Not For Ball" was dropped from use & replaced by the simple word "Choke". Regardless of how the barrel is marked just make certain the ball will go through the choke without creating an obstruction & their will be no problem.
All this can be found in W W Greener's writings of well over a century ago. One would think it had surely been settled by now.Old reloading data from Ideal etc recommends using a 14 gauge ball in a 12 gauge gun with choke.

The gun is a Remington 1889, rather than an English one. It's very stout, one of the reasons I'm considering using slugs with it. That and the whole concept of using a Vintage double for deer. It wouldn't surprise me if I wasn't the first one to down a deer with it.

Regards
Ken

FWIW, Buchshot works great. And it's barrel friendly, and doesn't shred the meat.

Unfortunately it's illegal in my State.

Oh.
Well, then I guess plan b is mic the chokes, and look for a slug that fits your barrels best.
The rest isn't that tough to do.

FWIW, I match bullet/sabot thickness to the barrels on my muzzleloaders to get better accuracy with them.
Sabots are available in .001 increments, I don't know if slugs are. Somebody is probably molding some.

You can do as a friend of mine used to. He didn't want to bother casting slugs (or bullets in general). but wanted to hunt deer with BP slug loads in his SxS damascus.
So he simply bought a couple 5-packs of over the counter on sale Foster type slugs. Whatever was cheapest, and cut the shells open to get the slugs themselves out. Then loaded the lead into his own BP shells. Like he used to say, how many rounds do I need anyway,,10 ought to do it for the season.
I usually did and then some.
Saved a lot of time, effort and expense as he saw it.

(I think He used to reload the slug shells w/a light load of shot and use them up too but he never told anybody)

That's probably the best solution considering I shouldn't need more than ten rounds. Would a rifled slug work if I removed the plastic base and used fiber wads? As long as it was smaller than the choke?

Regards
Ken

As long as the naked lead slug will pass through the choke bored bbl, you're OK. Doesn't matter if the slug is smooth or rifled,,hollow base or solid, round nose or flat.

The card & fibre wads are supposed to be a tight fit in the bore and can easily compress even more to pass through a tight choke w/o a problem.

I wouldn't bother physically attaching the wad to the base of the slug like the Brenneke slug if you had that in mind.

Just powder, over-powder wad, filler wad to bring the slug up to proper height for a roll crimp.
Worked fine for many years that way. Simple too.

Ken, my offer still stands. A good friend who is quite knowledgeable claims SxS shotguns don't shoot round balls very good - no group. Now he's also a gunsmith and pistol/rifle shooter, so maybe he expects a little too much.

The problem with doubles is the barrels are converging not parallel so solid ball do cross over at some point. Question is when and how far do they drift apart down range. If they cross at 30 and are six inches apart at 60 you could use that type information to adjust your hold point to get decent accuracy. You are limited to simple bead sight and can not expect single hole grouping at 75 yards but you should get decent results to 50 yards. Your hunting to be with family not put meat on the table to feed your family so you can always be selective.

We use to use a paper plate as a target at 50 yards and knew if we could hit the paper plate it would be a fair substitute for a deers vitals. So as long as we could reliable hit the plate we were good because slug energy was never the issue just accuracy.