I thought that many on this forum would be using brass hulls, but I’m wrong. Please allow me to share with you my shotgun brass hull experiences.
I have been loading and shooting all brass hulls for over 8 years and it has been a very enjoyable process. I do not know why, but brass hulls have given me the best patterning shotgun ammo that I have ever loaded.
I bought my hulls from Rocky Mountain Cartridge when they were in Cody WY. They have since changed owners and are in Worland WY.
RMC brass hulls are turned from bar stock and cost approximately $5 each. According to Dave Casey, the previous owner of RMC, Cowboy Action shooters have reloaded RMC brass hulls over 3,000 times. It should be obvious that pump, lever and semi-auto shotguns are not well suited for brass hull use.
It is important to note that if you shoot a double gun or a gun with multiple barrels, the bores must have identical dimensions or you run the risk of having some or all of your hulls expanding to the largest bore size and thus making them unsuitable for smaller bore size(s). RMC can make a full case resizing tool if your bores are not dimensionally the same.
According to RMC any published gauge appropriate load found in reloading manuals or powder manufactures web sites will work in their brass hulls because they have the “same inside diameter” as plastic hulls. In my search for the perfect load, I have loaded and patterned many published loads using 1-piece wads with success ranging from poor to outstanding. My 16 Ga. and 28 Ga.favorite loads and best patterns use card and fiber wads and 1-piece plastic work very well in 12 and 20 Ga.. When patterning shotgun loads, barrels often have a mind of their own.
Reloading brass hulls takes more time to load than plastic or paper because hand tools are necessary, not a press. I shoot clay targets using plastic and paper loads, but for hunting, its all brass for moi.
I have a wooden box that contains shotgun cleaning supplies, hand loading tools, primers, wads, cards, powder, powder dippers, shot and shot dippers. When I hunt away from home the box goes along and in the evening after shotgun maintenance, I reload the empty hulls from the days hunt using powder and shot dippers for my favorite loads. Each powder dipper has been verified by scale with each new powder purchase.
My initial problems with OS cards dislodging in cold weather has been fixed by using 1 gauge oversized OS cards.
When at home, my loading process may be more than most want to do. I put all of my fired hulls in a tumbler and let them shine up over night. I then de-prime and inspect hulls. I chuck up a bronze brush in my drill press and run the brush in and out a few times. Each hull mouth is then cleaned with carburetor cleaner.
If I choose to reload in the field I use a small piece of #40 sandpaper to rough up the inside of the case mouth and do not clean with carburetor cleaner, I just blow in the case and tap the base to remove any loose particles before reloading. Hulls are then loaded and oversized OSC’s are secured with Sodium Silicate aka Water Glass.
A note on osc fixing glues. I have used a variety of glues and settled on water Glass only because I had to buy a quart of the stuff as it does not come in small quantities. Glue does not appear to be as important as I once thought because the oversized OS cards seem to contain the shot effectively and the glue is just added security. There has not been an OSC failure in a long time.
To identify the different loads, each OSC has penciled data and the primers are color coded. A pencil is used because I have not found an ink that will not run regardless of the glue used.
Brass hulls look good going into or out of a double gun and I hope this inspires you to consider loading brass hulls.
