More on vintage spread-shot pellets

[ccdjg]

In a previous thread ( https://www.airgunbbs.com/showthread...d-shot-pellets) there was a discussion about vintage spread-shot airgun ammo’, and since then I have received much useful information from John Atkins and I have also been experimenting with my homemade spread-shot pellets. Interestingly John tells me that he also experimented with making reproduction chalk shot pellets several years ago, in collaboration with the late Arthur Pickford, but unfortunately the test results seems to have got lost in the mists of time.

John says that the Star spread-shot pellets that I originally asked the question about in the previous thread, labelled ‘MODARCOM LONDON’were most probably made by Lanes Limited or Slugs Ltd (which was also part of the Lane group of companies) specifically for the Modern Arms Company (MODARCOM, later to become MARCO).





John is confident that the Modarcom spread-shot pellets were actually made at Widmore, Bromley. His reasoning behind this is based firstly on the fact that the Modern Arms Company Ltd., which was founded in 1923 at 133 Fenchurch Street. London, later opened another facility in Widmore, Bromley in Kent. Secondly, it is known that the later ‘Star' brand lead ball shot that came later onto the market (pictured below) were actually Lanes of Widmore Eagle slug boxes with wrap-around ‘Star’ brand labels stuck on them, obviously resurrecting the name from the old Modarcom Spread Shot boxes. Thirdly, Lane’s Ltd. of Bermondsey's registered a 'Star of David’ Trademark on 19th September, 1932 from their 45a New Church Street, London S.E.address. The Bromley area of WIDMORE connects both the Modern Arms Company and Lanes Slugs Ltd.





The original Lanes embedded chalk spread-shot pellets were sold in cardboard boxes, and then in square green tins. John informs me that tins of the pellets he has seen contained only chalk dust and lead shot when opened, and no complete pellets survived. It seems that they do not store well, and so we are not likely to find any surviving examples, and we have to rely on speculation and experimentation to get some idea of how these performed in practice. This is one the extremely rare surviving tins (photo courtesy of John Atkins).




For my homemade pellets, I found by trial and error that a good formulation for the carrier was a mixture of fine chalk powder (70%) and Plaster of Paris (30%) by weight. I mixed this dry and added it in portions with 12 lead shot into a mold (a hole drilled through a 3/8” thick brass plate), and tamped it down firmly with a metal rod. The top and bottom of the mold was then moistened with a drop of water, and after 5 minutes the damp pellet was pushed out of the mold and dried over a few hours in a warm place. Once dry, these could be handled without breaking and, equally important, they were a very snug fit in a .177 barrel.



The only problem was that making them was a very slow process. Making a decent quantity of the pellets would need some sort of a multi-cavity mold.


The weight of each lead shot and the number in each pellet needed to be decided. In the end I used No 9 lead shot (diameter 1.8mm, weight 0.05gm). The chalk pellets could be loaded with 12 of these, and the net weight, including chalk binder, was then very similar to that of a typical waisted .177 lead pellet. ( Joe Gilbart in his Guns Review article mentions that the vintage chalk pellets could contain 6 or 12 shot. I felt that 12 would be a better number for producing a decent spread.)


I tested the pellets in two of my rifles (yes, I do have air rifles!), namely an FLZ Original III (Millita), and a 1906 BSA. The BSA had slightly more power than the Millita (3.9 ft lb and 3.2 ft lb respectively), and also had a longer barrel, so the effect of these parameters on the performance of the shot pellets could be examined. The BSA is a tap-loader, but the pellets were short enough to fit into the loading port without compromising the tap. Both guns were rifled, which was not ideal, but was the best I could do.


Shooting the spread-shot pellets was great fun. When fired from either rifle, the pellets disintegrated completely and produced a cloud of fine dust, with what seemed an unusually loud report. No residual fragments of the chalk binder could be detected.


The most surprising observation was that the Millita, despite its lower power and shorter barrel, gave a significantly tighter spread than the BSA. I can’t easily explain this, unless it has something to do with the tap loading system of the BSA, or differences in the rifling. The following shows the difference in spread at a distance of 8 feet from the muzzle.






The spread of the shot with increasing distance, using the Millita rifle, can be seen from the following.






It is obvious that these spread-shot pellets are only going to be effective at very short range, probably no more than 20-30 feet depending on the power of the rifle.

The next question I wanted to answer was if the chalk carrier had any special advantages over simply firing the lead shot through the barrel with a tight-fitting wad. The following comparison, made at 16 feet with the Millita, is typical. The “wadded” test firing involved inserting a tight wad of oiled tissue paper into the breech, pouring twelve of the lead shot down the barrel, then pushing down a loose fitting plug of paper to hold the shot in place.





As can be seen, the spread of the shot is more or less identical in both cases. However, there was a tendency for the shot in the wadded case to congregate more around the edge of the spread circle, with very few shot at the centre . This would mean that you are less likely to hit what you are actually aiming at than if you used a single airgun pellet! Another obvious advantage of the chalk pellets is convenience – you can fire off half a dozen of these in the time it takes you to charge the barrel with shot and wadding. And you get the experience of the noise and dust cloud.


As far as penetration goes, each small lead shot does not have much momentum, but even so they could penetrate one side of an aluminium coke tin, or two sheets of 5mm corrugated cardboard at 16 feet.




Apart from the moral objections, this would make the spread-shot pellets inhumane to use on small birds, which had been suggested in the early adverts, but it could make them usable in a trap-shooting game of some sort.

A former member of this forum, well known to us old-timers as Norman, kindly sent me samples of modern shot cartridges and shot, among which were some tubular 0.22 shot cartridges of uncertain origin that were ideal for comparison with my chalk pellets. These consisted of a short green plastic tube, closed at the base with eight small perforations to allow air flow through them. The tubes contained 20 small lead shot of the same size as mine, and were sealed at the top with a card plug. Thanks to Elanmac in the previous thread we now know a bit more about these shot cartridges, and they were sold for a short while online, presumably as a small private venture that never took off.









Presumably the plastic casing was supposed to be retained in the breech after firing, and one or two of the cartridges did have a small burr around their base which would have helped keep them in place, but the majority lacked this and I found that when fired, the casing moved up the barrel and had to be removed between each shot. Very tedious when using a tap-loader. Occasionally the whole ensemble, casing and shot, left the barrel and hit the target as one, making a large hole in the target. Because of the increased weight of lead shot in these cartridges, I tested them in the highest powered air rifle I had, namely a .22 Webley Mark III, which was producing about 7.5 ft lbs. Being a tap loader, the cartridges had to be muzzle loaded using a long ram rod. The following shows the typical spread pattern produced from these cartridges. A comparison is made with simply charging the rifle with the same number of lead shot and a wad.





The wadded shot actually gave a smaller spread circle than the plastic cartridge, but the cartridge gave a more even distribution of the shot over the spread circle. Just as found with the .177 BSA and Millita trials, the wadded firing gave a pattern with the shot concentrated around the perimeter of the spread circle.


So we can conclude that confining the spread shot in either a chalk matrix or in a casing helps to give a more uniform distribution of the shot compared to muzzle loading with wads. This is an effect that John Atkins and Arthur Pickford also noted and discussed several years ago. So why does the wadding process always produce such a pronounced ring-shaped spread pattern? Anyone any ideas?