Home Forums Reloading Shotshells 20 Ga Patterning: Thanks! (pic heavy)

Got a few minutes to go to the range and test some loads. While I didn't get the beautiful, round, perfect patterns that you see in books, I did get much better patterns than I started with. And I had a great time researching the sources you guys sent me to. I have a couple of new books that I think are better than the one I started with.

The shotgun was the basic Mossberg pump 20 gauge with a X-Full in-barrel choke. These are 25 yard patterns. Squares on the targets are 1". Pictures were done the lazy way, taking pictures from my shooting bench, so the image quality is just adequate.

This is a picture of our starting point, a 2 3/4" 7/8 oz #4 load. I wasn't expecting much, and my expectations were almost met. This clearly isn't a good load. The depressing part is that the 3" 1 1/4 oz #4 Fiocchi Golden Pheasant was a lot like this, but with more pellets.



The next image is actually the first shot of the day. Since I bought the gun with the front bead missing, I was having a little trouble finding the target. I was about 3" higher than I should have been. The load was the Tom Roster load #32, with 1 1/8 oz #6 shot. After a conversation with Tom, I substituted an SP20 wad and one of my now empty Fiocchi 3" hulls. I think this is going to be about as good as I'm going to do. This is vastly better than the Fiocchi 3".



Now here's an interesting lesson. A friend gave me most of a bag of old #5 shot. It's labeled "chilled shot". Apparently, it's not such great shot. This is again Tom Roster #32, but with 1 1/8 oz #5. The increased dispersion completely covers the defects visible in the #6 pattern.



I couldn't resist the temptation to try a #4 load, just to see how it compares. It's definitely better than the Fiocchi 1 1/4 oz commercial load. But the pellet density just isn't that great, and there are some major gaps in the central part of the pattern. Still, it's far from the worst 20 gauge load I have tested.