Pushing faster
Dave Waters, a member of several wildfowling clubs in East Anglia and widely respected in the home-loading community, agrees that speed is key when it comes to steel shot performance.
“Steel can’t quite match lead ballistically as lead is more dense, so there are some provisos. We have to push steel faster than lead. At lead velocities (1,250fps) steel can’t perform, but if we push steel to the upper limit of UK CIP regulations then it can. If I could swap back to lead tomorrow, I wouldn’t. The ace card that steel has is its patterning — in that it can make lead look inferior. When you add speed and pattern together, steel can match lead.”
Home-loaders may not necessarily be ahead of the manufacturers — it’s a case of what is marketable for them. They can push the boundaries a little because many of them are using guns built for the US market. They will have their loads tested at the Birmingham Proof House and some of them fail CIP on momentum limits, which the Americans don’t use at all.
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