Originally Posted By: mike campbell
Originally Posted By: L. Brown
If you're doing what many of us do, and reloading 2 3/4" hulls and shooting them in guns with 2 1/2" chambers, a 10,000 psi reload per the published recipe can easily exceed 11,000 psi because of the extra hull length. It's safe enough to reload 2 3/4" hulls for 2 1/2" guns, but in that case you need to build in an extra safety cushion if you want to make sure you stay below the established service pressure for the gun in question.



Larry, it puzzles me that you and others so actively promote the practice of loading 2.75" shells and guesstimating pressures in 2.5" guns....ESPECIALLY the very people who are so concerned about pressure in the first place.

If you want to keep readers on the safe side, maybe you should advise them to use published data expressly for loading 2.5" shells. If people don't want to use that, they can simply pick any 2.75" recipe at any pressure level they like, trim 1/4" off the hull and either roll-crimp or use a Hartin crimp. Pressures changes will be virtually statistically insignificant.

Makes me wonder, what fudge factor should I use for loading 3" shells for 2.5" guns? Or has that article not been published yet?

Yours in candor, Mike


Mike--Sherman Bell pretty much took the "guesstimating" out of it--although he certainly did not invent the wheel when it comes to longer hulls in shorter chambers. Both Major Burrard and Gough Thomas have pointed out that it is not the length of the shell per se, but rather the pressure the load generates, that causes any danger from pressure. And the Brits themselves have been shooting longer hulls in shorter chambers for decades.

There's not much sense in loading 3" hulls for 2 1/2" guns. 2 3/4" hulls . . . well, that's what we have in this country, for the most part. There's a whole bunch of tinkering involved if you're going to reload 2 1/2" hulls. Meanwhile, all kinds of recipes for 2 3/4" hulls at pressure values well below the service pressure for the guns in question. Makes life much easier if you shoot short-chambered guns a lot and are looking for low pressure loads with light shot charges. And I always tell people that they can just go ahead and shoot RST's, Polywads, foreign 2 1/2" shells, etc. Of course if you're doing a lot of shooting, that very quickly makes the game a lot more expensive. So . . . reloading 2 3/4" hulls to appropriate pressures saves both money and a bunch of tinkering, which equals time. Win/win.