Having exhausted most of the local (and less local) RFD’s in the search of new, as-yet-untested .410 cartridges to feed to the Yildiz, I have started to look in less orthodox places and much further afield.
I returned today, for the first time in 3 years, to the clay ground at which my shooting career began some years ago. The shop there, as readers might expect, stocked cartridges more suited to smashing clays than to hunting, but I returned home with two new brands of shells (including the first Gamebore cartridge we’ve managed to acquire), ready for pattern testing.
It’s unlikely that I’ll get round to testing these two tomorrow morning when I go out to the fields with the pattern plate, given the backlog, but between now and the end of the year, I’ll try to get them all patterned, analyzed and written up.
It’s worth nothing that the Fiocchi “Magnum” loading of a (generous) 18g of 2.3mm shot is identical to the 3″ Eley “Trap” cartridge which has demonstrated the best performance in the Yildiz to date. The cartridge also contains a very, very slow powder, which ought to limit the damage the pellets suffer under conditions of firing. Given that the other Fiocchi cartridges the SmallBoreShotguns team have tested have produced relatively poor performance, I don’t expect them to out-shoot the Eley loading, but the possibility is there and it will be interesting to find out.