Home Forums Reloading Shotshells My take on shorty shotshells.

The thread in the Shotgun Forum about "shorty shells" made me think about these.

One winter, more years ago than I want to remember, I was bored. If you recognize the AA Plus and ACTIV hulls you can date yourself. I was trying to figure out what to do with a bag of AA Red wads I had been gifted. Cheap SOB that I am, I dug through the reject box and found some hulls with mouth splits. I cut off 1/2" to clear the spilt/worn crimp. I had to make an adapter, MEC sells one now, to raise the shell up enough for the crimp station to work. Loaded 18 grains of Green Dot and 1 oz of #8's. These are 2 1/4" fired length. Six segment crimp worked better on un-skived hulls. They shot just fine. Lot of work, probably wouldn't do it again unless I happen upon a shotgun with 2 1/2" chambers.

One of my cousins, not a particularly gifted wing-shot, cut his magazine plug so that he could get two 2 3/4" shells and one of these in his magazine to shoot doves. He would slip the short shell out of the magazine when the game warden showed up. He finally shot up the box I loaded him and came back for more. He got mad when I told him he would have to cut grass while I was working on more shells.