Category: The Small Bores

Today was the first time since I acquired the little Yildiz that I’ve wished for my usual cartridge containing 28 grams of number 6 shot. I’ve mentioned my tightly-choked 16 gauge gun in previous posts and today’s pass-shooting at small groups of jittery wood pigeons would have suited that gun and cartridge very well.

This morning, however, in the interests of continuing to learn to shoot the new gun (and in the absence of a supply of perforable material for further patterning work), I persisted with the .410 and can report some success, finishing with three birds for six shots from my hour-long walk around one of the quieter bits of the Cambridgeshire countryside.

It was a qualified success, however.

Settling Down

I’ve been unwell this week and have felt rather unsettled with it. Medications for the colds / influenza have come on remarkably in the last twenty years and one can now acquire formulations that knock viruses for six and make all of the symptoms disappear. This is wonderful, in so far as one can maintain one’s usual routine, go to work, live life and so on, but the anti-histamines they include tend to make me drowsy whilst they’re working and leave me feeling somewhat disjointed afterwards until I’ve had a good night’s sleep.

This morning was the first morning this week that I’ve felt well enough to get up and not immediately take the medication for relief from those symptoms. On that basis, I decided to push myself to go out for a wander in the cold, to blow away the cobwebs, so to speak. It was the right decision – glorious, blazing winter sunshine, beautiful clear skies and some good opportunities were my reward.

I arrived at the farm just as the driven shoot next door had started their first drive. I wasn’t in a hurry to get out of the car, since I wasn’t there to act as impromptu “back gun” – until I saw a low-flying flock of 100 wood pigeons displaced from the wood through which the beaters were presumably making their way, at which point I got out, fumbled two cartridges into the gun and – flustered – missed two attempts before I’d gone 20 yards from the car. This was not the beginning to the morning for which I’d been hoping.

Once again, my excitement – the same excitement that makes me shoot that aforementioned 16 gauge at 60-yard birds I haven’t a hope of hitting – got the better of me and two wasted cartridges were the result. Now – one could argue that unless I’d fired those two shots, the opportunities that followed, of which I “converted” three of four, wouldn’t have happened, but I’d still rather have come home with four empty cases than six.

I tried to compose myself and carried on.

Driven Wood Pigeon!

I hadn’t walked much more 20 yards further before I had my first real chance. Having discharged both barrels in the manner described above, I moved into the treeline along which I was walking to await any birds which circled round to return to their original roost. I moved up slowly through the wood, thinking that it was worth staying concealed for a while and kept an eye on the field. My instincts were rewarded when a pair of birds circled back a few minutes later and I was able to take a bird perhaps 20-22 yards up, flying into the wood, just higher than the top of the tree line.

Unfortunately, in spite of having the luxury of a second or two to line up the shot and take it (and in spite of the pigeon bouncing hard off a tree trunk on the way down) when I retrieved the bird, it needed a blow from a priest to complete the job.

I suppose it makes sense that, as someone who does not usually shoot driven birds, that one of the presentations I find most troublesome is the “straight towards you, constant height” bird, not least because, face on, one has to block out the bird with the muzzles of the gun and trust one’s instincts about where and when to pull the trigger. Ordinarily, I’d try to turn sideways and take it as a high crosser, but in this case there wasn’t time and I ended up putting the shot up the right side of the bird and winging it.

Although my shooting was, in this case, less than perfect, I believe that this was the only one of the three birds I bagged today that I missed, in the traditional shooter-points-gun-in-wrong-direction sense. Unfortunately, it transpired that I also had a hard lesson to learn about exactly what this little .410 is and isn’t capable of.

Pulling the Envelope

I don’t want anyone to think that I’m mistaking a clear failure to point the gun in the right direction with cartridge inadequacy, which – apart from generally wanting this blog to be a true record of my experiences with the .410 – is why I’ve been honest about wounding the bird in the way I described above. I fired a bad shot and wounded a bird. It’s not great and I don’t feel good about it, but it happens to everyone who hunts, from time to time (and no doubt a lot more than people will admit !- Ed.). That said, the fact that it’s unavoidable doesn’t (and shouldn’t) make any of us feel comfortable about failing to cleanly kill our quarry.

That’s why, in case you were wondering, I’m not more triumphant about achieving a 1-for-2 ratio with a .410 I’ve only owned for a month or two. Don’t get me wrong – I’m pleased – to a degree. The gun appears to fit and when I shoot it, I am actually hitting and bagging some birds with it. I am starting to learn the lessons of appropriate (.410) range and – doubtless – if I’d been shooting a 16 gauge today, I’d have still wounded that first bird by taking a bad shot.

Unfortunately, if I had had my 16 gauge with me, I suspect I wouldn’t have wounded the second and third birds also.

I said earlier that I find the “driven” presentation difficult and that’s true. One that I don’t tend to struggle with however, is the crossing bird, so when I later saw a small group of wood pigeons flying above the wood, 30-40 yards in, only a few feet above the tops of the trees, it seemed entirely natural to raise the gun to them and take a shot.

The shot connected, as expected, and the bird barreled down into the wood. When I got to it to pick it up, I learnt my first hard lesson about the limitations of using #7½ shot on live quarry. The pigeon had both wings broken and wounds in its neck (crop) and side where pellets had entered but failed to penetrate through to the vitals. When I later breasted it, I counted six obvious pellet strikes, but none of them had been immediately lethal. I could, of course, have “missed”, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Although testing has shown that the Eley “Trap” cartridges will produce an adequate pattern at 40 yards, I suspect that when folk say that #7½ runs out of steam at around 35 yards – at least in small loads like these – they may be right.

If one “pushes” the envelope to work outside the normal boundaries and limitations of a situation, then I very much need to “pull the envelope” and bring the ranges I’m shooting at down even further than I have already.

Curbing One’s Instincts

I hope that whoever it is out there that is tasked with “keeping score” is at least chalking up a mark in my column for being frank about my failings, even as they delete them for my sins.

After bird number two had been dispatched and put into the bag, I switched over to the Eley “Extra Long” Subsonic cartridge to see what their performance would be like in the field. Although they’re 400fps slower than the “Trap” cartridges I’d been using, I’m afraid I can report no significant differences with any other cartridge in terms of muzzle blast or noise levels (though I always wear ear defenders to shoot, so perhaps two versions of really, really loud are hard to tell apart).

When I heard a bird departing the tree line behind me, whirled round to see it and instinctively took a shot at it, I’m afraid that it did not occur to me that this gun, loaded with #6 shot would have no pattern to speak of at 45 yards range and what, once again, would have been a cleanly killed bird, had there been 280 pellets in the pattern, came down flapping because, in the event, there were only 170.

The shot was, basically, good. It was an easy-ish quartering bird by the time I was on it, felt good as I pulled the trigger and followed through and – even by my mediocre standards, was a pretty straightforward shot.

Unfortunately, despite the best piece of advice for good shooting basically being “don’t think about it”, hunting with this gun does require thought: one must curb one’s instincts and remember that the quantity of lead thrown into the air by a .410 is extremely limited and that this alone – without considering all of the other complications of small bore shotgun internal ballistics – brings its maximum range down into the ranges attempted regularly by the “ordinary” (or mediocre) shooter.

A Stand Against Prejudice

I’m sure that the events I have just described will serve only to cement in the minds of some readers the idea that the .410 is a wounder of game. The way I used it today – instinctively and to take the some of the same shots as I would have a 16-, 12- or 10-gauge – certainly goes a long way to making that belief true. I am not proud of this.

However, it is my belief (and my wish to prove to myself) that, used within it’s limitations, the .410 is still a perfectly adequate small-to-medium game gun. I know from others’ experience that it is possible to tune a .410 to give 40 yards of usable range and that, with appropriate self-restraint, one can use it as well as any other shotgun out to that kind of distance.

I have learnt already with this gun, to ignore the 50-yard-plus birds and to some degree, even birds which are much closer but which have presentations too difficult for a shooter of my standard. The very fact that I can record three birds bagged for six shots fired (and not, for example, 30) is testament to that improvement. It will serve me well if and when I return to shooting my larger-gauge guns.

That said, I must train myself better to ignore not just the out-of-range birds, but the borderline ones too. The challenge with this gun (which I am finding remarkably easy to get on with), is now not what I can hit, but what I can leave.

I was able to get out into the fields for a few hours this morning as planned and was able to continue testing the range of .410 cartridges I have now acquired. After taking 20 minutes or so to measure out a 40-yard range and set up some bamboo canes to support the pattern “plates”, I was ready to go, but pondered for a few minutes more what might be the best direction to explore with the very limited supply of cardboard I had available.

In the event, I chose to finish testing the Eley “Trap” cartridges and shot the patterns which the results of last weekend’s testing suggested might produce dividends, rather than start on a new brand of shells. I’m pleased to report that my hunch was correct: the Yildiz’s ½ and ¾ chokes do indeed give significantly better performance with the Eley cartridges which strongly supports my feeling that the full choke is over-tight (.025″ constriction) and that the full choke patterns shot with both cartridges tested last week were blown.

There was little to choose between the ½ and ¾ chokes. The former averaged 116 (42%) pellets in the standard circle at 40 yards, which isn’t far short of the 120 pellets I’d consider to be the absolute minimum for hunting, whilst the latter managed an average of 133 (49%) in the circle: somewhat above that bare minimum density and approaching the 140-pellet mark, which I consider to be preferable for small winged game (i.e. wood pigeons, jackdaws).

As you may have guessed from the picture above, I was also presented with the opportunity to test the cartridge on live quarry today. As I was setting up the equipment for the photograph of the patterning equipment to be taken, the jackdaw pictured therein arrived over the tree line squawking noisily, drawing too much attention to itself to be ignored. I managed to load the gun in time and it was taken cleanly at a distance of between 25 and 30 yards with the ½-choke barrel of the gun. To my utter disbelief, it folded perfectly.

A Question of Confidence

It’s a sign of how maligned the .410 is in some quarters that – even in spite of my consistent and long-running refusal to accept shooters’ opinions and prejudices as valuable, unless I have first-hand evidence of their validity – I still doubt both my ability to effectively shoot a small bore gun and the gun’s ability to do what is required of it.

As it is, that is precisely what I achieved with the jackdaw (which the landowner has given standing orders to shoot on sight) this morning: a clean kill at sensible range with a good, instinctive shot. Along with that, I’m happy to report, I successfully resisted the urge to “push the envelope” and take pot shots at distant birds, though the opportunity to do so occurred regularly. My self-restraint is, as I hoped it would, developing with the regular use of the Yildiz.

However, I have an admission to make here and a serious point to derive from it:

Although the aforementioned jackdaw folded nicely and was obviously dead in the air, I was so surprised by what I’d just witnessed that the bird received the contents of the other barrel on the way down, quite unnecessarily. Unavoidably present in that moment of raising, swinging and firing the gun was the expectation that it wouldn’t be enough – that some insufficiency was present which meant the bird wouldn’t come down cleanly; an expectation that a second attempt would naturally be required.

Clearly, this expectation shows an unjustified lack of confidence in gun and cartridge which needs to be overcome. No doubt it is the result of “conditioning” over the years that I have been shooting, perhaps by those who hold that the .410 is a gun for sitting quarry at short range, or those others who claim that #7½ is too small to be effective on game.

For my part, I have never believed the .410 to be unsuitable for wing shooting, though it has many characteristics which make its use for that purpose challenging. I have some sympathy with the argument that #7½ is on the small side for live quarry, if only because many of us prefer to take (or attempt) birds at far longer ranges than those for which #7½ is suitable.

That said, the kinetic energy of an average #7½ pellet (and therefore it’s ability to penetrate through to the quarry’s vitals) is the same at 25 yards as that of a #6 pellet at 40 yards. On this basis, there is no reason that one should not use #7½ shot for short range birds, if one is happy to employ #6 for all reasonable ranges. Killing the bird or not is a function of hitting it with enough pellets of sufficient energy to damage its internal organs such that it cannot live. There is no rule about how big the pellets must be, provided they are energetic enough.

However, given that the subtlety required to understand that point is beyond (or outside of the interest) of many shooters, I can understand why the voice of experience argues “nothing smaller than #6” for live quarry shooting: if people will not investigate for themselves the finer points of cartridge behaviour, then it is better that they are taught to use something which will always be sufficient, rather than risk wounding unnecessarily with a cartridge for which better alternatives are available.

As it is, the second shot hit the jackdaw too, but had no effect beyond slightly altering the direction in which it was falling. As I’ve written here previously, I have never before shot birds with shot as small as #7½, but given that I am now apparently in possession of a gun and cartridge which meet the pattern density requirement I have set for them, my focus must, to some extent, turn to answering the question of energetic sufficiency I have explored a little above. I have the 40-yard pattern, but will the pellets kill a pigeon cleanly at that range, if I do my bit? My gut feeling is that killing birds out to about 35 yards should be perfectly possible. Whether the cartridges will really be effective for those end-of-range shots, only experience will tell.

Next Steps

As I mentioned above, I had a limited supply of cardboard to shoot at today. I did pattern two of the Fiocchi “Magnum” 19g/#7½ (Italian) carridges, although the initial results do not look as promising as I hoped they might. I will do a proper test of those cartridges next (when my wife has had long enough to order more expensive things and, in so doing, acquire a new supply of boxes for me to cut up!) and then follow on with the other three brands currently sitting on the shelf. For hunting, I will continue with the Eley loading until I find (or do not find) something better.

So what was unexpected about all that?

If you’re still with me at this point, I can imagine the question you might be asking yourself, having read all of the above and heard me say that everything had pretty much been as I thought it might. You’ll want to know why I gave this post the title I did.

The answer, dear reader, is a slightly sad one, but I note it here in brief, not least so that I can recollect it later and acknowledge it to myself.

When I had finished doing the pattern tests this morning and had finished the pellet counts, I realized I had found a cartridge which met the requirements I had set for it. Although in doing the tests, I’d scared away all of the birds on the farm I was shooting, I had hopes that there might be some birds roosting in a particular treeline on one of the other farms to which I have access, so I packed everything into the car and drove over to look for an opportunity to bag a wood pigeon or two.

I began my walk and, other than taking a third shot at a departing wood pigeon – a miss – there was very little going on, but I decided, for the sake of exercise, to walk the hedgerows anyway and continued on my way.

As I approached the far boundary of the farm, I watched, from some distance away, a large muntjac buck charging across the field in front of me, perhaps escaping from some unseen danger or perhaps not wishing to stay around to discover the owner of the unpleasant smell of human that he had caught on the wind. Nonetheless, he covered all of the 300-400 yards to the boundary at top speed and it was a pleasure to watch his athleticism.

Unfortunately, the buck did not think to change direction when he reached the boundary and charged straight through the hedgerow onto an A-road the other side. Initially, I thought he had escaped across the road, unscathed, but as I carried on, it became clear that a small car and a white van had stopped at the side of the road close to the gap in the hedgerow and, having decided to investigate, it became apparent that the buck had been struck a glancing blow by the small car, which had not killed it outright.

There will no doubt be some readers who will take what I have written above and what follows and conclude that I ought to feel guilt for the turn of events which occurred today. I can only reassure them, I feel none. A scared animal will run from many things and I have no idea whether the deer ran from me, or from some other predator, or simply because he had detected the scent of a female in heat. There were other “exits” in the field which did not lead to a road, which he could have chosen – he did not. I cannot feel responsible for what was, essentially, a deer’s mistake.

When I reached the side of the road, having left my gun securely within the boundaries of the farm, the buck was clearly seriously wounded, but by no means dead. As far as I could detect (my DSC1 course two years ago did not prepare me for this situation) he had a broken spine, broken front leg and was paralyzed from the middle of the back down. There was no prospect of recovery.

The driver of the small car, meanwhile, was somewhat in shock and was being calmed by the gentleman who had stopped his van in front of her car to see what had happened. After assessing the situation, I asked her to telephone the police to report the collision and then to pass the phone to me. This she did and I subsequently spoke to the call handler to confirm the situation, that I was out for my morning walk, was a certificate holder and had my gun with me and that I proposed that the deer should be shot immediately so as to prevent its further suffering. The call handler – kudos to her – took all this in her stride, said that officers in the area would be notified in case any reports of “a man with a gun on the roadside” were made, took my details in case they needed to contact me again and then left me to get on with it.

I suggested to the lady in question that she should continue her journey and that I would deal with the deer and clear up the mess. This she did, willingly enough, after which I dispatched the deer with the .410, waited a few minutes, checked for a blink response (there was none) and dragged it back onto the farm out of the carriageway and examined it. It seemed, given it’s condition and previous athletic performance, to have been a healthy, large animal.

I suppose I find it slightly heartbreaking when animals die on the roads. Disease, predation, starvation – these are all natural ends for a wild animal, but incapacitation by moving vehicle, followed by shooting most certainly is not. Ultimately, although it was certainly not the intended purpose of the .410, I believe I acted compassionately today and I am glad that I was there to do what was necessary – the idea of the deer struggling on for another 20 minutes until a police firearms team arrived to dispatch it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Today I visited several of my local RFDs in the hope of acquiring some new brands of .410 cartridge to test. Happily, I was successful and came home with four new cartridges to pattern. Although a planned brief trip out tomorrow morning will give some time for patterning work, it’s unlikely to be long enough to finish testing the Bornaghi and Eley cartridges and complete reasonable tests on all four of the new cartridges as well, so what I’ve brought home today should keep me busy for the next few weekends, if not longer.

As it happens, I’m currently in the process of designing a portable, collapsible pattern plate which will take 40″ square pieces of cardboard or paper and hold them securely for the purposes of shooting patterns. The idea behind it is to speed up the patterning process with the use of pre-cut squares of cardboard that can be slotted into a frame and to overcome the issues we had last weekend with wind and – to some extent – the driving rain. I’ll post again on this subject at some future point when a little more progress has been made.

The Cartridges

I could post a picture of four boxes of cartridges and leave it at that until I come back with the test results, but those of you who know me will look at it and think “hang on – this chap has been banging on about not using over-sized shot in a .410 for as long as I’ve know him and now he’s gone out and bought cartridges loaded with exactly that!?” With that in mind, I thought it might be worth briefly explaining the rationale behind my decision to buy these particular brands and leave the other kinds in the shop.

But first, here’s the picture:

Lyalvale Express Supreme Game 16g / #6

My purchase of the Lyalvale cartridge is probably the most irrational of the four cartridges I’ve acquired today. On paper, it is unlikely to produce the usable 40-yard pattern I seek (presumably containing only around 150, over-large pellets to start with) and I would be extremely surprised if the reality is any different. A fibre wad is also likely to prove detrimental.

The cartridge therefore holds only one point of interest for me: it is the one of the two lightest 3″ loadings commercially available (along with the still-elusive Gamebore 16g load) and I will pattern it purely to see whether a reduction in shot charge produces any noticeable improvement in performance (obviously remembering that there are many other factors that will also influence the pattern test results).

Fiocchi Magnum 19g / #7½ (Italian) & 18g / #6 (Italian)

My research into the extraction of best possible performance from my new .410 is not, of course, done in isolation. Opinion on the major UK shooting forums, both past and present, has always been that the Fiocchi “Magnum” loading is the “go-to” loading for people serious about hunting with a .410.

Although I had never attempted wingshooting with a .410 until the arrival of the Yildiz, I found the 19g/#7½ load to be an excellent clay-buster with my previous .410 – back in the days where I still could afford to spend £50 on a morning’s entertainment! I always recall, however, that it was a little sharper on the shoulder than I’d generally prefer in a small gauge gun.

It’s not so much that I mind recoil – my 12 gauge doesn’t come out of the cabinet for less than a 39g cartridge, which I find surprisingly manageable – but more that if one is going to use a lighter load, one expects consummately less recoil with it. In defense of the cartridge, however, the sharpness of the kick may have something to do with the facts that the gun fitted poorly and – if memory serves – weighed less than 5lbs.

I digress. The #7½ (an English #7) version of the Fiocchi cartridge should give in the region of 225 pellets to play with and, whilst I haven’t had the chance to open one to look at the contents yet, I’m told has a full-length plastic wad, which should be a boon to performance as it’ll protect the shot from deformation against the barrel wall to some extent. I am greatly hopeful that this will be “the one”.

The #6 version of the Fiocchi cartridge is also labelled “2.7mm”, which is an English #5½ – a somewhat unusual shot size by anyone’s standard – which should give in the region of 155-160 pellets in the cartridge. It is just as unlikely as the Lyalvale cartridge, I would expect, to produce the 40-yard pattern I am looking for. However, it is widely employed for bird hunting by of serious .410 hunters and comes highly recommended by several persons whose experience I trust enough to make it worth testing.

Apart from anything else, larger pellets (i.e. #5½) should fly truer, all other things being equal, since they are proportionately less deformed by impacts with barrel, other pellets and choke. Although I believe my understanding of the behaviour of shotguns to be deep and broadly correct, I am concerned that my belief that the use of larger shot (i.e. size #6 and larger) in the smaller bores damages performance does not become a prejudice and in so doing, arbitrarily exclude a range of potentially useful cartridges. I must therefore take measurements and prove that an obvious dearth of pellets in the cartridge will lead to insufficient pattern density at range – hence, buying the #5½s on the basis of others’ recommendations.

Eley Extra Long (Subsonic) 18g / #6

Why, oh why, I hear you ask, would I apparently ignore the experience I have already gained with the Eley Extra Long cartridge in its supersonic #7 flavour and buy another box of cartridges of the same construction which contain fewer pellets and expect them to produce better patterns?

Well, dear reader, I’ll admit it: I don’t really expect this version of the Eley cartridge to offer better performance than the previously tested loading, but there is a method in my apparent madness – or at least a handful of things that make me think that this is a cartridge worth testing.

You’ll note from the subtitle that this is the subsonic version of the “Extra Long” cartridge. Yes, it’ll have a rolled turnover rather than a crimp. Yes, it will contain a thin fibre wad that offers barely any cushioning of the pellets under acceleration. Yes, most of the pellets will get scraped up the barrel as the cartridge is fired.

What’s also true, however, is that those pellets will be accelerated more slowly, to a velocity 400fps lower than the supersonic version of the cartridge. Yes, fewer of them will be cold-welded and damaged under that acceleration. Yes, they’ll scrub the barrel walls 25% less quickly. Yes, they’ll hit the choke 25% less hard. Yes, they won’t experience the turbulence of acceleration through the trans-sonic region and back again.

It is for these reasons that, by all accounts, subsonic cartridges tend to produce far superior pattern performance to an identical load accelerated to supersonic velocity. There is little concrete information to go on, but the best source I have suggests that in most cases, improvements of 10-20% pattern density can be achieved simply by lowering the muzzle velocity of a cartridge to below the speed of sound. Twice that degree of improvement is apparently not unheard of.

Now it may be the case that even a 20% improvement in performance will not get these Eley cartridges to produce a usable 40-yard pattern. Given that the shot size is #6, I’d need them to produce a genuine full-choke performance of 68-70% to achieve what I’d consider to be the minimum acceptable pattern density (120 pellets in the standard circle) at 40 yards. No cartridge I’ve tested thus far has even approached that kind of performance.

Furthermore, on the basis of my own experience, I’d prefer at least 140 pellets in the standard circle, which represents an 80% performance for this cartridge: I’m not convinced that kind of performance is achievable on a consistent basis in a .410, even with a subsonic loading. However, I am interested enough in the possibility that I will test these cartridges, if only to have some real-world data to fall back on when I next need to argue for or against (as the case may be) the use of subsonics.

I took a trip to North Cambridgeshire yesterday to see a friend who had agreed to assist me with patterning the .410. The weather was foul for the duration – driving rain made it too difficult and uncomfortable to shoot all of the patterns I had hoped to “bag” and by the time we’d finished, the (cardboard) plates were coming back to the car soaked, in spite of the fact that they’d been out less than a minute each. Nonetheless, with some degree of exercise running the 30 or 40 yards from firing point to target, we were able to get some useful information about how the gun was performing, although the exercise may have raised more questions than it answered.

In the event, we had two new cartridges to test, the Bornaghi “Extreme” containing 14g of what was labelled as #7½ shot – in English currency, a #7 – and the 3″ version of the Eley “Trap” cartridge which has been released to market relatively recently and continues to receive generally good reviews from those who are able to get hold of them.

Bornaghi Extreme 14g / #7½ (Italian)

I crossed my fingers in the hope of seeing good things from the Bornaghi cartridge. The Italian makers, and Bornaghi in particular, have a reputation amongst the folk whose opinions I respect as being the best designers / manufacturers of small bore shotgun ammunition and this raises expectations. Furthermore, as the first 2½” cartridge I’ve tested in the gun, it represents what I might call my romantic ideal of what the perfect .410 cartridge should be.

In comparison to the modern “magnum” 3″ loads commonly employed, most of which contain 18g, 19g or even 21g of shot, the Bornaghi cartridge has a charge of only 14g, which seems a rather more sensible quantity, given that the traditional 28 gauge load is 21g and – let’s face it – there’s little point in stuffing a 28-gauge load into a .410 case if one already has a 28-gauge available for use. This is one of the major reasons I continue to hope to be able to get hold of the 3″/16g load that Gamebore produce: technical considerations notwithstanding, the lighter payload just seems to be slightly more suited to the bore size.

The Bornaghi cartridges contained an average of 171 pellets. They contained a short plastic wad with long skirt, but a short cup. The wad was essentially the same shape as a child’s diabolo toy and the skirt / cup apparently equal in length. This suggests that the vast majority of the pellets are in contact with the bore as the shot column proceeds up the barrel. They are crimped with a 6-point star closure.

The results of the pattern tests, though they were few, seem to suggest that a full choke does not give the best performance with this cartridge. In fact no single test produced a pattern which would even meet the standard of an idealized cylinder choke – the best pattern in absolute terms, of 51% (91 pellets in the circle) at 30 yards with the ¾ choke is probably not effective at 25 yards (and may not be so at 20 yd.). Arguably, what was theoretically the best pattern of 35% (60 pellets in the circle) at 40 yards, (which implies a performance of perhaps 55% at 30 yards) is still both insufficient, and – coming from the half choke rather than the full – suggests that excessive constriction may be an issue here.

Although some of the patterns shot here looked promising at the time they were shot, subsequent analysis gives little to hope for – the cartridges are, in short, a disappointment.

Eley Trap 19g / #7½

I begin by observing that it is not my usual practice to employ shot as small as #7½ (2.3mm) on live quarry. However, in the .410, where ranges are ordinarily constrained by the gun and cartridge rather than the shooter, it appears from anecdotal evidence to be possible to successfully hunt small to medium game with this shot size. As yet, I have never attempted it myself, but if the Eley cartridge under test (or any other loaded with #7½) shows significant promise, pattern-wise, I may attempt it.

The Eley cartridges contain an average of 274 pellets. They are loaded with a plastic wad with a long skirt, the fins of which reach approximately half way up the shot column, which suggests that although obturation should be excellent, many of the pellets will be in contact with the barrel wall during their journey down the bore. They are crimped with a 6-point star closure.

Since it had become quickly apparent during the testing of the Bornaghi cartridge that the ½ (3 notches) and looser (4 & 5 notches) chokes were unlikely to give the performance desired and the rainfall was becoming heavier and more insistent, we the gun was left with the ¾ and Full chokes in it to test the Eley cartridge. In the event, we employed the full-choke barrel exclusively, before the weather forced us to abandon the experiment.

The results of the pattern tests are somewhat curious. At 30 yards, the Eleys put 175 and 179 pellets into the 30″ circle, which represent percentage performances of 64% and 65%, respectively. This is roughly equivalent to an idealized skeet choke performance – not the behavior one might expect from a full-choked gun – although it still represents a very usable pattern with plenty of pellets to spare above the 120-140 pellet minimum requirement. So far, so reasonable.

At 40 yards, however, the pellet counts dropped to 72 and 88 respectively, representing 26% and 32% performance respectively or, in simple terms, worse than you’d expect from a cylinder choking. I am tempted to test the cylinder choke, to see if the performance is any better, or still worse! Either way, these patterns are obviously insufficiently dense for hunting purposes.

Clearly, the gun is producing a lot of “fliers”, which suggests either that the pellets are suffering significant deformation from being in contact with the barrel wall or possibly that the choke is too tight. At this point, there is not enough breadth of evidence available to make a determination either way, although the relationship of the ¾-choke result to the others shown during testing of the Bornaghi cartridge does hint that this may be a blown pattern.

If we interpolate linearly those figures for a distance of 35 yards (an approximation not quite appropriate, but given other uncontrollable factors, near enough for our purposes), we end up with an estimated average pellet count of 137 in the 30″ circle, which would again be usable. This appears to be an improvement on the Eley “Extralong” cartridge, which became unusable before the shot had reached 30 yards.

Analysis

Although I have not quoted every pattern test result obtained, the above represents a faithful summary of the significant results and, I believe, paints a picture of the overall behavior of the gun with the cartridges under test.

Initially, the Bornaghi cartridge appears to show particularly poor performance and offer no hope as a hunting cartridge. Whilst this may be the case, I believe that testing it may have demonstrated that my initial suspicion that the best pattern performance would not be achieved with the tightest choke in the .410. Of course – the absence of ¾ choke pattern test result with the Eley cartridge prevents me from stating this as a firm conclusion, but there is a clear improvement in performance with the Bornaghi as constriction increases to the ¾ choke, followed by a degradation with the full choke. For this reason, I believe the next test I should attempt is to pattern the Eley cartridge with the ¾ choke and see if the patterns are superior to the performance demonstrated with the full choke during these tests.

Apart from its poor performance and possible demonstration of a blown pattern effect, the Bornaghi cartridge appears to indicate that there may be a genuine utility in the use of a 2½” cartridge loaded with English #7½ shot and – unlike the English manufacturers – offers the possibility of testing that performance. It appears to be possible to obtain the cartridge in an Italian #8 shot – equivalent to an English #7½ – and this would, if the figures above are repeated, give a usable range of around 30 yards. This obviously does not satisfy the aim of finding a 40-yard cartridge, but with notably light recoil and acceptable performance it may be a way of carving out a niche for the .410 (as opposed to the 28 gauge) and constraining my shooting sufficiently to stop me taking the silly 60+ yard shots to which I’ve been prone.

The Eley cartridge shows more promise. I am keen to experiment further to see if the ½ and ¾ chokes give inferior performance as the constrictions / labeling would suggest or whether maybe – just maybe – the full choke was “blowing” the patterns of this cartridge too and the looser chokes will actually provide the 35-40 yard performance I seek. If this turned out to be the case, I suspect I could live with the smaller-than-desirable shot size and heavier-than-desirable payload, at least until the cartridge proved itself on live game a poorer balance of shot size and pattern density than anecdotal evidence suggests.

The general conclusions to be drawn from the pattern testing appear to be twofold. First, the pattern of a cartridge is significantly improved by keeping the pellets out of contact with the barrel wall. To date, the only cartridge with “wings” in the wad to protect the shot from contact with the barrel has provided significantly better performance (at 30 yards) than any other cartridge tested. It seems desirable therefore to find a cartridge which has a full-length wad, which can protect the whole column from scraping against the barrel wall. Perhaps such a cartridge may yet make itself apparent.

Whilst my intention is still to obtain a box of the Gamebore 16g cartridge and pattern them, I recall the Fiocchi F410 cartridge I used with my last .410 and remember that this is a 19g cartridge loaded with Italian #7½ shot (an English #7) with a wad that covered most of the length of the shot column. This may be a cartridge worth testing if I can obtain a box.

The second conclusion which can be drawn appears to be that the .410 is much more sensitive to what I’ve described as “secondary effects” elsewhere than I had remembered. It is looking increasingly likely that I will be unable to find any cartridge loaded with #7 shot that will put enough pellets in the circle to make it usable at 40 yards, and that #7½ shot may be the only reasonable option. It seems that the standard performances of Cylinder, Improved Cylinder, Modified, etc. equating to 40%, 50%, 60% performance simply do not apply in this gun and possibly do not apply in the .410 bore size at all.

Further patterns will be shot at a date to be determined and you, dear reader, will be the first to hear about them when it happens.

I was able to get out to the fields for a couple of hours this afternoon. I took the Yildiz with me and a pocket full of cartridges and went to see what was about. In short, not much. I shot a wood pigeon just before the end of the afternoon and found it’s crop full of what looked like peas – but I thought that probably they were probably some kind of seed or berry from a hedgerow, given the time of year. I couldn’t identify where it would have been feeding, at any rate.

The Yildiz performed well enough, although the chap behind wasn’t necessarily up to standard. I had four attempts on other birds earlier in the afternoon but found that the lightness of the gun was making my swing through difficult to control. I missed three of them in front! I sometimes have the same problem with my (equally light) 28 gauge – so this is a familiar problem on which I need to keep working.

The bird that I downed needed a little help on its way as I didn’t place the pattern on it properly and winged it, but it went in the bag pretty quickly after it came down, so I’m not too ashamed of that. It was well within 30 yards, so it was a bad shot rather than an out-of-range shot; some of the others I took may have been a little optimistic, but as I’ve said, I’ll keep working on that too.

I didn’t have a chance to do any patterning work today, but helpfully a friend has offered to pick up a box of everything he can get when he visits a major cartridge dealer next week, so once Christmas is out of the way, he and I will be doing some pattern tests and finding out what this .410 likes best to eat!