Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Best sabot shotgun slug?

I have shot Lightfields out of a 12 and 20 with great results. Accurate and lethal!

My experience too with the same gun.

First, the gun has to tell you what is the best slug. My 870 likes, the rem. 23/4 copper solid, my H&R ultra likes the Hornady American Whitetail 2 3/4 325gr sabot. These two loads shot the best out of several brands that were tried.The remington copper solid is very good. Longest shot is 153 yds. The Hornady load stoned a doe this past year at a lasered 208 yds. DRT. The H&R is most accurate gun/slug combo I have ever shot.

With saboted slugs costing so much, my intent was to identify those predominantly producing good results while weeding out those that do not. Twenty + years ago when I had my slug gun barreled by E.R. Shaw I did purchase a cross section of what was then available and range tested them all. With saboted slugs costing $13.99-$15.99 and more testing all available becomes a really costly undertaking. Thanks to all who contributed their experiences and input.

i used lightfields with great success in a 20 ga.

i bought a hastings barrel for a 870 and bought all the different sabots i could even premiums the lightfield was second best but better price so that is what i used.I forget what gave best 3 shot group

have to find what your gun likes

My cousin got a good deal on one of those some years back, then spent literally $200 trying to find slugs that would shoot straight in it, to no avail. He gave up and sold it and went back to the smoothbore 870 he's used for 35 years or so.

I know others have had great results with them and suspect he had forend issues. He's not much of a guns tinkerer, so if something has issues, down the road it goes.

Sounds like yours is a winner.

My H&R ultra 12ga love the Hornady AW 325 gr interloc. I will 1 MOA at 100 and at 200 2.5 MOA. I shoots like a rifle. Best 300 bucks I have ever spent. All it need was a trigger job.

I've gotten more than acceptable accuracy from Lightfields, Federal Barnes Expanders, and Remington Copper Solids. Both my guns shoot the Lightfields well enough that I use them exclusively now. I keep meaning to try some other with sleeker bullets, but I've been too lazy and cheap.

I switched to the Lightfields after Federal discontinued the Barnes loading. Still have 2 boxes of them, just haven't used them.

One thing about the Lightfields, don't be surprised if you don't get an exit. They expand WIDE. I've yet to have a deer go more than 10' after shooting them with one though.

I rather liked the old WW High Impact Supremes in 2 3/4" 12 gauge. Two different 870's with rifled bores simply loved them.
Deer went down fast.
Noticeable difference in effect (compared to reg rifled slugs). Accuracy was very good.
Easy 150 yard rigs back in the day.

Ones you make..

^ Now we're are talkin. Good results?

All I use anymore is an H&R 20g and 11-87 12g with open sights. The H&R shoots excellent with 2 3/4 accuptips. However, when Hornady came out with the SST's awhile back, they were the most accurate slug I ever shot. They changed them not too long ago from the SST to the FTX and that killed them for me.

Have a thread anywhere on them? Casting your own? Would like to start rolling my own slugs this summer.

You got that right, Dan! It's been a while since I've lived in a slug-only zone, but that's exactly what I had to do.

I ran a smoothbore Remington 1100 12-gauge for a while, and it shot just about any Foster slug I cared to try into a 6" pie plate at 100 yards. I never worried about what I had on hand, and I killed a bunch of white tails with that gun.

But when I bought my daughter her 11-87 20 ga rifled barrel slug gun, it was a different story! Some saboted slugs wouldn't hit on paper at 50 yards, and some were tack-drivers. IIRC, we finally settled on Hornady saboted slugs with Nosler 250 gr bullets. And since slug ammo is never a sure thing, I bought a freakin' case of that stuff!



No schitt Sherlock!! I went thru EASILY 15 different types of slug ammo to try to find "the one" for my daughter's 11-87, which means a minimum of 2 5-round boxes for each one... and then I bought the case of Hornady/Nosler slugs when I found out how well it shoots.

Crazy expensive. Not to mention the concussions I sustained firing slugs off the bench over and over again! Thank God I don't live in slug country no more...

Picked up a Savage 220 last year to hunt some local slug gun only areas.
I'm using 2 3/4" Accutips.
This slug gun is very accurate, touching holes at 100. Killed a doe with it too. She went about 10 feet before dropping.

BPI carried all the stuff at one time to make them with data using 50 cal. XTP pistol bullets; I loaded and use them sparingly as their data was way too soft but the results were what I was looking for: it shot as well as the Combined Technology PT Gold and my bullet was hard cast softnosed, so terminal results were the same.

Think there's still a few hundred cases and sabots when I get to tinkering again..

About the same time my Dad bought 500 of the Combined Technology slugs before they got hard to find, so I don't really have a "need" to make more.

Shot one doe last year running away, right up the spout with just the straight up heat treat 50 cal. flatnose solid.

Lengthwise all the way out the front; probably not the slug to use if one drives or hunts in large groups, but if casting your own can be made from wheelweights to get about the hardness of a Brenneke (9 BHN) or pure lead (5-7 BHN).

Don't do the Lyman slug mould; they shoot well sporadically because a shot wad isn't up to rifling.

A bit of advice: use the dual pin roll crimper BPI sells; it will save a lot of frustration.

Brennekes work for me in my Beretta 1301 for social work. 3-4in groups @50yd Not really a sabot though.

Dan,
Funny you say that. That is the exact load my A bolt prefers as well...