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?

[ptdunk]

What a fantastic project! where can I order my box of Griffiths shot Lozenges? As you say you'd ideally want to be making 30 or so at a time.
Sounds like the procedure shouldn't be too difficult to replicate. How did you disperse the shot within the mould and binder powder?

I'd love to try these in a nice smoothbore 4.5mm Bugelspanner I've got. It would interesting to see if they group differently in a smoothbore...
It would also be fun to try them on the BFTO vintage shoot, (if allowed) Bell Target, Little silhouette targets etc all between 6-15yds, it would be interesting to see if you could ring the bell or topple a target. You could probably drop a couple of silhouettes at the same time!

As all the chalk powder goes out of the barrel there'd be no detrimental effect to the gun, just clean the barrel after. Sounds like a fun thing to shoot, as long as you can hit stuff with them, which I think your experiments show you can.

As a guess as to why the wadded shots group at the edge of a circle I wonder if as the air forces its way down the centre of the barrel the loose lead shot is pushed to the sides of the barrel before they exit, and so group wider?

Maybe the chalk binder stops this happening as much so the 'Lozenge' shot groups more centrally?

Very interesting stuff, Thanks!

Matt

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[evert]

A very inspiring post!

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?

I'm curious if rifling plays a role here. Do you have any smooth bore airguns to test the chalk cartridges in?

[Jerry Cornelius]

Very interesting. I feel a Giffard experiment coming on.

[DrGunn]

I also suspect the rifling will have some affect on the patterns you are getting. I have read elsewhere (for example see here: https://www.theboxotruth.com/threads...un-barrel.377/) that shot fired through a rifled barrel results in a large spread and a “doughnut pattern”.
In this case I would hypothesise that the chalk sticks don’t engage the rifling that well and so don’t spin that much. The tight fitting wad is more likely to engage the rifling and impart spin to the mass of shot, throwing it outwards. I think it would be very interesting to repeat these tests with a smooth bore barrel and compare the results.

[keith66]

^^^ This is true, Gough Thomas experimented with this many years ago & there is an article in one of his books on the subject, He was talking spreader cartridges for shotguns of mainly 12 bore & the same effect was noted. Rifled chokes opened the shot cloud markedly. Obviously such items would need an fac today.
As Jerry cornelius points out a Giffard shotgun may work quite well with these. But from experience with a 9mm rimfire shotgun you are never going to get good patterns from shot clouds this small. The 9mm rimfire is good for about 8 yards max, 10 yards is stretching it. The driving wad disturbs the pattern centre so much that by that distance the pattern is like a donut.

[ccdjg]

A very inspiring post!



I'm curious if rifling plays a role here. Do you have any smooth bore airguns to test the chalk cartridges in?

It seems that you are right, and rifling is the culprit here. Unfortunately I do not have a smoothbore rifle in .177 or .22 calibre with sufficient power to give meaningful results, although I do have a powerful heavy .25 Gem. I will have go at making some chalk shot in that calibre.

[ccdjg]

Well I did eventually get round to using my smoothbore .25 heavy Gem to test the theory out. The doughnut type of spread pattern is only a problem with the wadded shot technique, as when the shot is contained in a ‘cartridge’ casing or embedded in chalk, you do not seem to see it.

So I used the wadding method with my Gem and packed about 16-17 of the small shot into the barrel, sandwiched between a loose fitting wad of tissue at the front and a tight fitting wad at the rear. I then recorded the spread pattern at a distance of 16 feet from the target. Here is a typical result, alongside a typical result, also at a range of 16 feet, obtained with my rifled .22 Webley Mk.3, charged with shot in exactly the same way.




So it is clear that rifling definitely causes a doughnut type of spread pattern, whereas with a smoothbore the shot spread is more uniform and concentrated over the point of aim. Interestingly the maximum spread of both patterns is about the same.