I've owned a Lee Load-All for about 15 years but never have used it. I bought it when I owned a ranch about 35 miles west of where I'm at now and that place was loaded with doves which I hunted throughout the long season. I shot a lot of shot and wanted to use the Load-All to load my own. At about the same time, I sold that place and moved to my new ranch location. The doves live here most of the year, this country is predominately native brush, except during they hunting season when they migrate to the grain fields immediately to the west. I always wondered where all the birds lived but figured it out after moving here. I haven't fired a single hull of bird shot since I moved here.
I ran across a very good deal on a new Rossi Single Shot combo with barrels for a 50 cal muzzle loader and 12 gauge rifled slug. With the Lee 7/8 and 1 ounces slugs cast and the Load-All mounted to the bench it was time get loaded. Oh wait, there is a lot to this!
I have spent countless hours looking for the materials that make up the loads and reading about the complexities of launching a slug out the barrel. To sum it up, the Lee load tables included with the slug molds are a bit dated and many of the components are tough to come by. In all my reading, I've become a follower of Mr. James Gates words. As I searched with Google and his name appeared, I would stop and read. Mr. Gates is the proprietor of Dixie Slugs but despite developing his own product line he has nothing but good to say about the Lee slug designs and freely offers his advice as to what what is needed to get them out the barrel and accurately on target.
The Lee slug is a saboted slug. It is designed to sit in a plastic, petaled wad which escorts it out the barrel. When casting the slug, Lee is adamant that it be cast with pure lead. Not only does this help it drop from the hollow base mold but it maintains the design diameter. A huge percent of bullet casters overlook this in their casting. Projectile diameter varies with alloy. The Lee slug depends on a specific diameter as it must fit into a wad with a specific petal thickness so it will fit in a hull of a specific thickness so it will fit in a rifled barrel of a specific thickness. That is the true why of casting with pure lead.
You will notice that the base of the Lee mold is "keyed". This allows the wad to form to the key under pressure so that the slug rotates with the wad as the pedals engage the rifling. Remember that the slug does not engage the rifling, it is under bore diameter and depends on the petals of the wad to act as a sabot.
With Lee's data and the listed components in hand, I assembled the first loaded rounds. I think I'm a fairly sharp tool so the learning curve was near vertical for me as I worked through each stage of the press. Here are the rules I will follow in the future. I will:
- Charge the case off the press using a weighed charge. I think dropping charges are fine for shot loads but in effect I am loading a large centerfire cartridge and if I want downrange accuracy, the charges should be weighed.
- Develop a consistent feel for seating the wad. I think that I will figure out a way to measure the pressure applied to the wad. With it measured I will learn what a consistent pressure feels like at the stroke.
- always seat the wad with the slug in the same stroke. I wasted loaded components trying to seat the wad and slug separately and this rolls back to how much compression is being applied to the powder underneath these components.
This is only at 25 yards but I see the potential if this is done right. Besides my rules for using the Load-All, I think the 3" chamber used in modern slug guns presents an issue with using a the Lee slug set up in a 2 3/4". There is a steep step as the chamber transitions to the rifling and it presents a 1/2" gap that wad (sabot) must cross without chamber contact (the thickness of the hull is missing). In this travel, it is felt that the petals of the wad fold back and disrupt the concentric contact the slug makes with the rifling. Knowing what I do about cast bullets and seeing the above wads (the only two I found) missing a petal, I think this is a very real possibility.
The solution is using a 3" hull. For those of you that might not know, I didn't, the length of a shotgun hull is measured with the hull fully extended. That would be before a new hull is crimped closed or after a hull has been shot. A 3" hull extended at the shot provides hull thickness for wad (sabot) support to the chamber step.
Honestly, I haven't figured out why the move from slug guns which 2 3/4" chambers to those with 3" chambers. Some of the factory ammo is using up to 1 1/4 ounce slugs but an 1/8 ounce only consumes .070" of hull space so an additionally gain of 1/4 ounce uses .140" of the additional 1/2" of space. All 12 gauge shells have the same SAAMI pressure limits, regardless of hull length, so the space additional space must simply be filled with spacers or wads. The best balance of chamber length seems to be 2 3/4" but again, most of the current rifled slug guns I've researched have 3" chambers. One thing I'm sure of, even after only 3 shots out the barrel, shooting a 2 3/4" shell in a 3" chamber leaves a considerable amount of coking at the step. The build up in my rifle is considerable, there is no way the wad petals can pass across it without being upset.
Of course the use of a 3" hull throws the Lee data completely out of the window but, honestly; it is rather lame to begin with. The 3" hulls brings another set of variable into the play especially in sticking with the 1 ounce slug as the sum of the components (powder, seal/wads, wad, and slug) must come together under reasonable compression within the confines of the hull. Other reloading sources have very little to no data for the Lee Slugs. I so own the RSI pressure trace equipment and a strain gauge is "curing" on the chamber of the barrel right now. I will develop my own data and pass it along as part of these posts.
What I would like to achieve is build a complete set of data using only the two Lee slugs from a set of modern, currently offered components. Ballistic Products seems to have the best selection of components and I have spent hours on their website calculating what it will take to fill a 3" hull under the appropriate compression using only the Lee slug. I will even be using clear 3" hulls so that I can see the effects of the components stacked on each other. Once the components are received, I will get to work with the following Hodgdon powders I already have on hand:
- Clays
- HS-6
- International
- Titegroup
- Universal
