Ok. Facts are facts. It plain penetrates better then lead hands down. Fact in point. Two years ago I decided instead of lugging some monster 12 gauge around to hunt turkey's I wanted to carry a very light 20 gauge Remington 870 with factory short barrel. I bought a ton of ammo of everything out there. You name it, I bought it. I also bought several different chokes tubes as well. Loads of investment dollars, but I wanted to do it right.
Lots of testing revealed for me (your results may vary of course) that the only good factory lead load out there was the Winchester XX number 5's. At 40 yards measured I could consistently place 90 hits in a 10" circle at 40 yards. That was pretty good, but I felt that pattern was still a big sketchy and had some holes. Thus I went to hevi-shot and tried the same thing, but went for size 6 (because they are supposed to hit like 5's). Pellet count went up to 130 (10" circle 40 yards) and I left it at that.
The following year, the rage was Nitro Ray had come out with a 3" 20 gauge load using hevi-shot pellets in size 7. Tried them out and my goodness. Pellet count went off the chart. The same rig was now providing over 200 hits at 40 yards using the Nitro Ray size 7's. Lastly, I decide how hard can them pellets be hitting as they are small. So I set up another test. I took a 1/4" sheet of new plywood, taped a turkey target to it and touched off a round of size 7's at the measured 40 yards. Without fail, the at least 75% of the pellets completely penetrated the plywood at 40 yards. Bingo, that's penetration. I then tried the same thing using Winchester size 6's XX load and none of them penetrated the plywood.
PS. Hevi-shot is indeed the real deal, or pro's wouldn't be using them.
Double PS. All the above said, I killed two turkey's last year. One was shot at 11 yards, the other at 10 yards. The year before I killed a bird at 9 yards. My day of experimenting with Hevi-shot are probably over, as I'd rather kill them close with a classic double then farther away with my tricked out SBE. Anyway, my 2 cents.
