Understanding Shotgun Ammo

so one of the things that's great about 12 gauge is there's such a wide variety of loads and types out there it really is versatile can also make it a little confusing when you're trying to pick out ammunition the way you read a shot shell box first of course you want to check for your gauge these are all 12 gauge that we have this is the approximate overall length of the shell typically shotguns are chambered for three inch or two and three quarter you can always shoot smaller shells in a bigger chamber but not bigger shells in a smaller chamber you want to check with your particular shotgun first it depends on how the shotgun is designed there's lots of variables that go into that then what you have here is shot size the weight of shot so how much of it and the velocity these two right here are how you can get a sense for how much recoil the load is going to have the heavier it is and the faster it is the more recoil it's going to have so this is ounce and an eighth at 11 45. [Applause] this winchester is ounce and an eighth right the same weight but it's moving faster this is going to have higher recoil typically bouncing 3 8 moving at 12.50 we're getting heavier and moving faster you're gonna feel that and as far as shot size like this six this is a five this is an eight well those are sizes for the pellets that are in it we've opened up one of these eights and you can see all those little pellets those are size eight shot if we move up to size six we're looking a little bit bigger but really not terribly bigger which is interesting because you will certainly feel more recoil with the sixes typically so what about buckshot so buckshot much bigger pellets you can see here they tell you exactly how many pellets only nine moving at 11.50 so about the same speed as that birdshot but look at those pellets that's all it's in there three or nine big pellets and then of course your slugs are a single projectile one big bullet type thing this one's a little mangled from the process of prying it out of the shell because that was not easy but that gives you an idea of what's in there now these all have different effects too on their target depending on your range and they have different usefulness depending on range and chokes that's a little more advanced than we're going to get today we're just going to show you the basics so not every shot load has enough energy to cycle all semi-auto shotguns for curiosity about that you can see some of our shotgun videos where we show you in our what's for dinner test what cycles and which of the guns we've tested to simplify the effects of a simplified demonstration of the effects of these different loads i've got a round of bird shot around a buck shot and a slug loaded in this magazine this is an sds imports mfpa mag fed pump action and we have three pumpkins why because it's october so i'm gonna shoot one router birdshot at one pumpkin the bucket another and the slug at the other and then we'll go up close and take a look at what the difference of having finer pallets versus larger shot does so let's take a look first up the bird shot this would be the softest recoiling of them [Music] now the buckshot this will be a little bit heavier on me that certainly blasted now the slug over the slug is a single piece of lead and that blue pumpkin all the way back here we'll dismount the camera from the tripod and take a close closer look at the damage from those totally unscientific this is meant simply to give you an idea of how the pellets impact things we would have loved to show you patterns on paper but as you may have picked up it's a little wet here in oregon today but we still wanted to get this content done so let's take a look at those pumpkins so first off is the bird shot we see we have lots of little tiny pellets that uh entered and exited the most damage we saw was from the grazing stuff that hit the side and kind of ripped along the side of it but lots of little pellets doing very little damage each is how the birdshot do next is our buckshot we've got significantly larger holes buckshot typically delivers about the same energy as a nine mil per pellet nine pellets it's like nine shots of nine mil hitting at once and this is about the damage you'd see from a nine mil shot per shot all at once we blew a chunk off didn't of course have the patterning down on this particular gun patterning is a whole other issue with shotguns in that each shell type by manufacturer weight velocity all that is going to favor maybe high left or high right or low right low left depending on the shotgun barrel so it's one thing you want to do if you're ever going to try to do very precise shooting without using a choke is shoot that load at some paper and see what it does first and this gaping hole which went through sideways is the slug that was a one ounce basically 50 caliber diameter giant piece of lead flying at a decent speed hits pretty damn hard i like slugs because they turn your shotgun effectively into a short range rifle for using in close in i mean if you can handle a rifle well and you can handle the recoil of slugs this is pretty convincing

Channel: Graham Baates

Views: 5,871

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: armslist, pistol, best, top, GBGuns, shooting, sport, defense, airsoft

Id: e8-nC9YfexY

Length: 6min 16sec (376 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020