Interesting - Tom Roster tested wadless shotgun shells - powder, walnut media, shot - it works ! Joescout
even bp rifle/musket shooters knew you had to have at least paper or cloth to keep the powder from fouling in the shot. at the least id go with 'card over powder'. anything else would be.........why?
Saw the article in Shooting Sportsman - a guy named Jay Menefee Polywad Inc. In Macon Georgia is the inventory. Looks pretty cool. I think a guy could modify a couple of single stage MECs and do some reloading - Jay must have a patient on a reloader also because the shell look very well made. Bobski, I'm old enough to remember that the guys who invented the wheel at first got some push back. Joescout
I helped moses hold his staff up, for his people to safely cross the dead sea. I remember looking over and I saw some guys loading hulls w/o wads.
The wad seals the barrel gasses for max velocity. I wouldn't think anything else would do as good. If you shoot too big of a bore in a 12 ga. (Around .800) the wad won't seal and you get bloopers that just pop out the end of the barrel. The plastic wad does a good job.
Tom Roster, did the article - Tom's tested about everything that's shot down a shotgun barrel for years. There's dozens of his reloading articles on line, he has written articles for all the major sport shooting magazines. Ron everything thing you said meets today's conventional thinking. I found the article very interesting it was a little nostalgic because as a kid I grew up surrounded my walnut orchards my dad used to get truck loads walnut hulls to keep the dust down on our farm roads. There are dozens of different uses for walnut shells. Looks like Jay Memefee may have found another use for Walnut shells. As I recall lots of shooting facilities in Europe don't allow plastic wads. You might find the article interesting. Remember no links on AT but you can easily Google the article. Joescout
I just reread the article - buffered the pellets and the velocity was consistent, if you don't like ground up walnut shells, try ground corn cobs they worked just as well. There were lots of people who never thought the horse and buggy would be replaced by the automobile. Did you ever hear of shotgun wads that contained grass seed ? Look that one up also. Years ago myself and two buddies experimented with numerous different wads mostly small gauge, we shot a shell up in the air and recovered the wad and Mic-ed them - we were using sub gauge short tubes in 12 gauge barrels and some chamber inserts. Results with a 410 were horrible.
Thinking outside of the box -Remember, back in the sixty's, picking out the small soybeans for granddad could load shells for us to shoot pigeon in the barn.
Now that's a great idea soy beans in shotgun shells to shoot pigeons in the barn. I've got a couple of garden guns. Got two Remington Routledge 521 smooth bore .22 were also used to shoot pigeons in the barn - 22 bird shot would not put holes in the roof. I also have a complete Mo-Skeet Mossberg very rare if you have the Mo-Skeet target arm and both smooth bore and rifled screw on barrels, also have a couple of cases of the original Mo Skeet clay targets. Joescout
