Was recently looking back through some old items I had saved for various reasons. One was a Handloader Mag from 1997. The late Don Zutz had an article in it on reloading the 16. The last load he gave was one he had used some years prior, didn't say how many.
It was late enough he used Federal plastic (paper base) hulls primed with the old Alcan 220 MaxFire primers. It was charged with 52.5 grains of DuPont IMR 4227 powder under 1 3/8 oz of lead shot. Wadding was a .135" Nitro Card plus Ľ" filler seated with 100 lbs pressure. He had this load tested in the DuPont ballistic's lab & it recorded 1216 FPZ muzzle velocity @ 6,900 LUP. The range which gave these averages was for LUP +600 to -800 & for FPS +23 to -32,
This load was fired from an L C Smith having 28" barrels bored Mod/Full & he reported 80% patterns at 40 yards. He did not state which barrel, but the way it was worded it would seem that either barrel would reach that percentage.
The thread on Fiber Wads brought this to mind but thought I would start a new thread rather than hijack that one.
PS, he made no mention of cracking the stock on that "Fine Old Elsie" (His description), while feeding it these loads. He was using this load on crows which had gotten "Street Savvy" (his words) & refused to come into range but would hang around just outside. He was searching for the densest pattern he could come up with using copper plated #5 & #4 shot. Stated he Hammered quite a few of them using this load form the Smith.
