doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Ross Seyfried

It was Ross' articles which led me to purchase a small amount of 7625 to try. He had proclaimed it as the answer to a Damascus lovers dream powder. I did not load an extremely low pressure load but one at about 7K according to the then DuPont load data. After it completely let me down in a duck swamp with temps in the 20�F range I abandoned 7625 forever more.
I still to this say wonder how Ross was able to use those low pressure loads he spoke of in 10 ga for waterfowling. I've never had a lot of warm balmy weather while waterfowl hunting.
Although I always did a good bit of squirrel hunting, though with a .22 LR, I did take some of these loads in the early season just to try them out & they were pure murder on the Bushytails, but just did not endure the cold.
I will say the vast majority of things I ever read in Ross' articles all appeared to be good info, but I do have to take exception to using any "Slow Burn" smokeless powder at very low pressures. I was loading in Rem plastic hulls with recommended power piston wad & recommended mild primer.
I did notice that when the next edition of DuPont's handloaders guide came out this load along with several other lower pressure loads using 7625 had been dropped. Probably I wasn't the only one who encountered problems.

No probably there Miller, happened to me too. I thought those Kansas roosters had developed armor plate one January until I figured it out.....

It isn't just low pressure reloads that cold weather is detrimental to. Performance goes down for everything, once you hit 0 degrees.

I try to keep it in mind when I'm out in those conditions. It doesn't seem like I have the urge I once did, and more of those days slide by with me at home.

Miller, I burned a lot of .22 shorts at squirrels. Long Rifle, even standard velocity, went right through, and left them laying on a limb 50 feet up in the tree. Shorts almost always knocked them off for me.

Best,
Ted

Ted;
I tried shorts but the gun I was hunting with, even though it would feed them OK threw a pattern rather than a group. I very quickly went to standard velocity LR's. My reasoning for this was the lack of the sonic crack didn't clear a tree where several squirrels were cutting. They would stop for just a few seconds & then go right back to work. The High Speeds would virtually always clear the tree with the first "SONIC CRACK".
Never had a problem with it leaving them laying on the limp, if properly hit they always fell. Had a few over the years lodge in a fork on the way down, but that is totally irrelevant & could happen with any load one might use.
Totally agreed that very cold weather lowers the performance of any load. However when one is skirting the edge as when using slow burn rate powders at a low pressure it doesn't take as much "Lowering" to produce a total failure. I never had that happen to me when using appropriate powders for the load at reasonable pressures. By "Reasonable" my opinion is no less than 7�K, black of course being an exception. It would seem to virtually temperature insensitive & burns at essentially the same rate regardless of other conditions.
The load I was using that day I mentioned actually had 1� oz of #5. It was loaded to about 1150 fps @ 7K according to the manual. Case & primer were "Soft" to reach the lower pressure.
It got the shot out the barrel, but with a rather hollow sound & I had to shoot the mallard twice to get him on the water, still swimming. My son finished him off with a 1oz load of 6's from a 20. When we dressed it the #5's were found stuck in the skin, while the 6's had well penetrated. Obviously this was a matter of velocities so low with the 5's they didn't have enough oomph to penetrate. Temps were not below Zero, but just below freezing, in the mid to high 20's. This was in the late 1970's prior to total lead ban. I quit using slow powders at pressures lower than normal & never looked back nave had reason to regret it.

If a gun won't take 8K psi then depending on exactly what it is & what it's other values are, either hang it on the wall, throw it in the dump or resign it strictly to light loads of Black.