I do most of my deer hunting at the Fort Knox Military Reservation in Kentucky. The Fort Knox reservation is mostly wooded. They require us to use either a shotgun slug or muzzle loading rifle.
I had done some extensive looking at slugs last summer to pick the best one and finally settled on a Federal Barnes Expander. I wanted to be able to take shots out to 150 yards and that shell seemed to give me the best combination of low recoil, good trajectory, low velocity loss, and high energy impact. Unfortunately at the end of the season prices had gone up and I was paying about $3 per shell. That was too much for me to be able to afford to practice.
Also, during my one weekend at Fort Knox I was only able to take one shot at a deer and missed. So I certainly need to be able to practice if at the end I will only have one shot.
So after that weekend I started looking around again to see what I could get for less money that would still be a good slug. I have had bad experiences with the standard rifled slugs giving eratic performace so that at 50 yards a group had a 12" spread.
What I finally settled on was spending about $200 to buy a slug mold and equipment plus components to be able to assembly my own sabot slug shells at home. I bought the Lee 7/8 oz slug mold. So far it seems to work pretty good. I have not yet taken it to a range to see officially by at about a 30 yard distance it has about a 3" group. Also the cost is very affordable. I will be able to load about 230 shells with my initial investement of $200. Future shells will be reloaded at an average cost of thirty-four cents each including sales tax and shipping. I may be able to get that cost down further if I find a local source of cheap lead or buy lead on e-bay. To start I bought certified pure lead.
I was not sure how the drive key was going to work. The drive key is a solid bar cast across the bottom of the slug. The slug is loaded into a standard plastic trap wad. What happens upon firing is that the plastic wad is pushed up around either side of the drive key to lock the wad and slug together as they go through the rifling.
I'll do a later post after I see what the range results are.
I had done some extensive looking at slugs last summer to pick the best one and finally settled on a Federal Barnes Expander. I wanted to be able to take shots out to 150 yards and that shell seemed to give me the best combination of low recoil, good trajectory, low velocity loss, and high energy impact. Unfortunately at the end of the season prices had gone up and I was paying about $3 per shell. That was too much for me to be able to afford to practice.
Also, during my one weekend at Fort Knox I was only able to take one shot at a deer and missed. So I certainly need to be able to practice if at the end I will only have one shot.
So after that weekend I started looking around again to see what I could get for less money that would still be a good slug. I have had bad experiences with the standard rifled slugs giving eratic performace so that at 50 yards a group had a 12" spread.
What I finally settled on was spending about $200 to buy a slug mold and equipment plus components to be able to assembly my own sabot slug shells at home. I bought the Lee 7/8 oz slug mold. So far it seems to work pretty good. I have not yet taken it to a range to see officially by at about a 30 yard distance it has about a 3" group. Also the cost is very affordable. I will be able to load about 230 shells with my initial investement of $200. Future shells will be reloaded at an average cost of thirty-four cents each including sales tax and shipping. I may be able to get that cost down further if I find a local source of cheap lead or buy lead on e-bay. To start I bought certified pure lead.
I was not sure how the drive key was going to work. The drive key is a solid bar cast across the bottom of the slug. The slug is loaded into a standard plastic trap wad. What happens upon firing is that the plastic wad is pushed up around either side of the drive key to lock the wad and slug together as they go through the rifling.
I'll do a later post after I see what the range results are.
posted by Andrew Willis at 9:35 AM
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