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I came across this article by Jon Hollinger awhile back on his Aspen Outfitting Company website; he talks about balanced shotgun loads. Seems to make sense with the lighter game guns. Any comments?

Hollinger's balanced shotgun loads

Thanks.

Tim

Good advertising, because it is right in part, but like any salesmen he is over selling. Many do shot light guns better without rattling their teeth with heavy loads. Further reduced recoil over a good many shells can help too.

The traditional balanced loads were not as light as he described. By my recollection it was 1 1/8 for 12 ga, not 1 oz and 1 oz fo 16 ga and not 15/16.

I believe he is right that many overfill their guns with more shot and faster loads than needed, but while his lightened loads may be great in many situations they are not universal.

Against wild pheasant they would be foolish other than over a pointing dog's good solid point.

With my 16ga Sometimes on wild birds I shoot 1oz in the first barrel and 1 1/8oz in the second

While I favor light loads on preserve birds, and some pointed wild birds, when I go after pheasant and pass shooting prairie chicken I bring the full loads 1 1/4 in 12 and 1 1/8 in 16 (I no longer own a 20). Not because a lighter load won't work, but because the full load works better at greater ranges.

You can look at Bob Brister's Art and Science of Shotgunning for a better pitch on balanced loads and how they work in shortening shot strings

First I don't recall Ever hearing of a shot string as long as 25-30 feet at 30 yds nor one as short as 2 feet at that same range. To Summarize Burrard's work in which he reported on some of the most extensive work probably ever done on shot stringing his general conclusion was unless you are shooting beyond 40 yds, treat it as if it didn't exist. Don't lay your misses on shot string. This also was all accomplished with bare lead shot fired from a shell loaded with card & felt wadding.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people start Shoutng about the "Square Load" & then totally fail to follow it in their load recommendations. The exact area occupied by a given weight of shot will of course very depending upon both exact alloy & shot
size. The weight of a bore fitting lead ball is of course readily obtained by simply dividing 16 by the gauge number. A very close approximation then of the weight to make a Square load can be found by multiplying that weight by 79%.
To the nearest 1/16oz then square loads are 10ga = 1 1/4oz; 12ga = 1 1/16pz; 16ga =13/16oz; 20ga = 5/8oz, 28ga = 7/16oz & the great Big .410 (67.49gauge) = 3/16oz.
Would someone now explain very carefully (Please Write Slow, I don't Read Fast) why if a .775 long shot column is OK, even ideal, in a 10 ga it is necessary to drop the length of column to .550" in a 28ga. Did you ever notice how the different gauges tend to have shells of near identical lengths. hat's because the shells were built & designed around loads having near identical lengths of shot columns. Thus the smaller the gauge the more "Out of Square" the load tends to become but performance is not really adversely affected. 1oz of shot has a lesser extreme range than does 1 1/4oz assuming same choking for both, whether fired from the same gauge or a smaller gauge.

The standard English 12 bore game load was for years the 2 1/2" cased 1 1/16 Oz load. (Typically Eley Grand Prix, though there were many brands).
One ounce was available (Eley Impax) - as was 1 1/8", though for that you needed 2 3/4" chambers - which are rarely found in older standard English 'game' guns, being normally found on so called 'live pigeon guns' and wildfowling guns, for which 1 1/4 Oz loads were also used.

Most UK game shoots today you see a mix of 28g, 30g and 32g used (1 oz, 1 1/16 oz and 1 1/8oz). Most people shootiong English s/s guns will use 28g or 30g. 32 are usually used in the heavier o/u guns such as Beretta and Browning etc.

I was always brought up that should you wish to shoot more lead, then you used a 10 bore - or 8 bore - or even 4 bore.

For smaller gauges, e.g. 0.410, the standard cartridge was the Eley 'Fourten' which was a 2" case with 5/16 oz shot (still available today) and the Eley Fourlong in 2 1/2" cases carrying 7/16 Oz (also still available) provided your 0.410 had 2 1/2" chambers. There are also 3" 0.410 cartridges, but English guns are not chambered normally at 3" in 0.410.

I agree Col. 1 1/8 oz for 12ga and 1 oz for 16ga is consistant with the rule of 96.

There is (or was) also the Eley Maximum for 2 1/2" chamber with 1 3/16oz shot load. This was my standard duck or goose shell for years until an old time gunsmith finally persuaded me that the "zx&*%%" thing was not built to use that load etc. Over the past few years I have never used anything other than Eley Impax 1oz loads for game shooting, irrespective of chamber length or proof load.

From the article: "English pheasant shooters, who have shot more pheasants atfurther distances than we�ll ever know..."

Not to nitpick, but I would be very surprised to find out that the annual English pheasant harvest is anywhere close to the annual American harvest, or that more pheasants have been harvested in England in the past hundred years than there have been in America. No offense to our friends across the pond, but the author seems to be playing a bit fast and loose with the facts.

I cannot comment on the American numbers (as I know nothing about the American scene), but what I think the author was saying is that English driven pheasant shooting involves individual guns shooting a lot of cartridges and bagging a lot of pheasants in a relatively short time.

For those who don't know, a day driven shooting might involve a team of 8 'guns' who may possibly have pairs of guns and loaders shooting perhaps between 200 and 600 head of game in probably 5 'drives' lasting about 45 - 60 minutes each. In the day each 'gun' might fire 200 cartridges.
Traditionally, these would have been fired from light to medium weight s/s guns, though nowadays heavier o/us would be in the majority.

The typical 2 1/2" British game gun, until 1954 when the rules of proof changed, was marked for a 1 1/8 oz shot charge. When using Brit game guns for wild American ringnecks over dogs, I usually shoot British 1 1/16 oz loads (Kent Gamebore Pure Gold; previously Eley when they were more readily available). However, I also worked up a reload of 1 1/8 oz at about 1200 fps, pressure around 7,000 psi, that I'd use in my tight barrel. I did not shoot a steady diet of those, but I didn't find recoil to be an issue in 6 1/4# guns. Of course you're not shooting a lot either when the limit is 3 birds a day.

While the British pheasant harvest likely wouldn't approach American numbers--especially going back to the years when we were regularly killing from 2 to 2 1/2 million birds annually in just two states (SD and IA)--it's undoubtedly true that some shooters in the UK rack up annual totals that no American is going to approach. One of my regular fellow "guns" in Scotland shoots 50-60 driven days a year. I don't know that he keeps track, but that's easily going to run over 1,000 birds a year.

As far as distance is concerned: those who participate in those shoots offering truly tall birds (note: these are NOT the norm in British shooting, by any stretch) almost certainly kill more long-range birds than anyone shooting pheasants in this country.

All of that being said, it's apples and oranges. Driven birds are mostly shot as incomers or crossers, with their vitals significantly more exposed than they are when we put them up over dogs. An ounce to 1 1/16 oz of Brit 6's (slightly larger than our 7's) through something around a quarter choke (.010) is quite effective on TYPICAL driven birds, where a 40 yard shot is really long. Those seeking out the tall birds use guns more like what we see in the hands of sporting clays shooters: heavier and with longer barrels. And throwing heavier loads of larger shot. There were good articles by Chris Batha and Vic Venters on these "high bird" guns and loads in a recent issue of Shooting Sportsman.

But North America is a bit bigger than England, right?
franc