Reading that thread about cutting wire to replace shot in a shotgun load got me to thinking about strange reloads I have done in years past.

I used to shoot my .308 Win at jackrabbits in New Mexico, a lot, years ago. I read somewhere about seating the bullet backwards in the case. The theory being that it wouldn't tear the rabbit up so bad. It worked. I'm not sure how accurate they were, but they were accurate enough at the ranges I was shooting.

Another was to reduce the loads significantly, then stuff the remainder of the case with toilet paper, to keep the powder against the primer, and result in a reduced load with minimal recoil.

I don't recommend trying that at home, and sometimes wonder how I managed to live to a ripe old age, but as a kid with a Lee Loader to begin with, it was great fun.

Since growing up and learning that I wasn't invinceable, bullet proof, and that God was only going to put up with a limited amount of crap, I no longer stray from the reloads in the manuals.

My strangest reload and I've been using it for forty plus years is shooting a 150g Partition from 22" barrel Rem BDL in 270. I use once fired brass, neck size only, use CCI 215 (magnum primers) and 60g of H4831. I seat my bullets 1/8" from the lands. They clock 3050 fps from my old 270 every time we chrony them. One hell of an elk load, does very well with grizzlies as well.

I had some 30cal milsurp tracers that I shortened to the approx same length as a 30cal spire point. I loaded them in 32-20 cases and shot them out of a Police Positive and a Savage 23 bolt rifle. Accuracy wasn't the greatest but they were fun to shoot at night!

Rocks in a pellet rifle...

Not really reloads, but in my younger dumber days, me and my buddies opened up shotguns shells and filled them will all sorts of stuff: marbles, nails, bullet weights and airgun pellets.

I had an old single shot that the barrel was cut off at 19" inches and it served as our test bed. Never had any misfortunes, but I guess we were lucky.

.22 lead balls with 6 grains of IMR SR 4759 for squirrels. Shot out of the .22 Hornet or the .218 Bee they're pretty accurate out to 60 yards on body shots, quiet and shouldn't travel for miles. Not much meat damage either.

Back in the high school days, we had a friend whose dad was a big trap shooter and a champion many times over. Of course he reloaded his shotgun shells and he would let his sons use the reloader.

There were 4-5 of us that would go hunting together for ducks a lot and sometimes pheasants and other upland birds. One guy would never buy nor have enough shells during the day and end up mooching shells from everyone else. We decided to fix that and loaded up some 12 gauge with sand for Jerry. They had about the right weight and would produce a recoil. Sadly.....he would never hit anything that day. We chided him about not leading them enough and he probably went home to clean his shotgun and found the barrel polished to a high luster.

When things would get boring out pheasant hunting we would grab the other guy's hat and throw it out about 10 yards and blast it with our shotguns.

Strange but we had a hard time getting permission to hunt on some properties. We would walk up to the door of the farmhouse all scrubbed and American looking with the bill of our hat shot up and ask for permission to hunt their property. Never figured that one out....

Speaking of "shell moochers", on the skeet field I used to carry a couple of "odd ball" shells (so I wouldn't confuse them with the ones that I used) just for the guys that always "ran out".

Remove the cardboard base wad from a "promo load", re-prime and fill with a 3 dram measure of fffg black powder and a wad with the fingers cut off (need the space inside the case) under 1 1/8oz of shot.

This all reminds me of a story my dad used to tell about 60 years ago, about when he and his brother were kids, shooting marbles in the barnyard in southern Indiana. One day his dad, my grandfather, stopped by and was watching them. My dad said he was beating the s*** out of his brother, winning his marbles using his favorite "shooter". My grand-dad asked my dad if he could borrow his shooter. My dad said he thought his father was going to take a break and play marbles with them.

Didn't quite work out that way. He took it to the barn, shot a hog with it, and that was the end of the favorite shooter.

Anyone ever practice shooting pistol in the basement with wax bullets?

Hell, I even shot wasps that got into the house with them!

Mike, I did that for a while, only it was in a garage instead of a basement. I figured out really quickly that round was too strong, even with just using a primer and opening up the flash hole in a 38 Special case: the wax projectiles were shooting holes in tightly stretched carpet at distances of 20' or more!

When I was a kid in the '50s (sigh) I read a story that appeared in Outdoor Life or Field and Stream or Sports Afield of an 11 year old boy who took an Alaskan Brown Bear with a .357 Magnum revolver.

He used a bullet his father had "modified" and graced with the name "Torpedo." "Dad" had taken a conventional hollow-point bullet and screwed a screw into its cavity, the theory being that it would slow expansion and thereby increase penetration.

I loaded some 60 gr speer .312 gold dots in a 308 case at 2500fps They were accurate out to 100yards at about 150 the start to key hole.

They vaporize when you hit any thing. They blow the crap out rabbits and pdogs.

If you tried sooting them out far you could hear them whisle after they started to key hole.

Created 458 Lott "snake loads" for a friend.

Mine was a ball removal jag screwed into a .54 caliber round ball that was further attached to approximately 18" of wooden ramrod that had broken off just below the muzzle of my Renegade .54 cal. front stuffer.

I don't quite remember what all the drama was concerning the reason my smokepole would not go BOOM; (surely my idiodicy) but adding injury to insult; broke the ramrod off below the muzzle attempting to pull the ball. I have a vague recollection of about 3" of broken ramrod clamped into a pair of vicegrips, a hammer, alot of cussing & a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach ......



Anyway ..... I finally managed to make smoke and the ensuing CRACK-SCHWOOSH of the ball & ramrod catapaulting itself downrange will remain forever etched in my memory. In the beautiful crystal clear blue sky of a lovely warm Hawaiian afternoon you could see that Ball/Ramrod bullet Boomeranging itself @ 300 meters downrange. We looked for the World's Longest .54 caliber Projecticle for several hours but never did manage to find it ..... musta gone further than we thought.

Slipping a A-A Black powder load into some trap shooters pocket at an ATA competition shoot. roger

I've done the bullet backwards thing.

I filled up empty space in 38 Special cartridges with cotton thinking it would improve performance. The puffs of cotton out the barrel gave shooting them a feminine touch.

I tried to make exploding bullets by drilling out the end of 38 Special bullets and seating a primer therin. You could hear a tiny pop when they hit something but really not much other drama.

quote:

Originally posted by Doubless:
Mike, I did that for a while, only it was in a garage instead of a basement. I figured out really quickly that round was too strong, even with just using a primer and opening up the flash hole in a 38 Special case: the wax projectiles were shooting holes in tightly stretched carpet at distances of 20' or more!

Doubless,

I don't doubt your claims od shooting through carpet... they do have some velocity, and I would never point them at someone I love... LOL!!!

Still, when I was shooting the wasps in the house, the wax was simply hitting, and splattering apart, with no damage to anything other than the wasp!

My dad taught me to shoot using wax bullets when I was about 8 or 9 yrs old, and we used to hang an old coat in the basement, about 10 ft away, hang a target on it, and shoot... It worked quite well.

My guess, is the most dangerous part of it would be the lead in the priming...

I loaded some walnut shell media in 38 Special cases over a small charge of Bullseye, topped with wads cut from gasket material, and crimped the case end over that. My sons and I had great sport shooting carpenter bees in the barn.

Gerry wins!

I found that mixing Bee's wax and canning wax 50/50 made wax bullets that wouldn't penetrate anything "tough" like carpet
but also would not "spatter" as badly.

Enough so that we were loading them with magnum primers.
The other discovery was that using brass that wasn't sized worked better though the revolver spewed hot wax out the sides of the cylinder gap

Another time we were harassing squirrels in the back yard
with 12ga shotguns.

I had a bunch of Win-AA hulls that had split crimps so I cut them off below the crimp, primed them and jammed a Remington RXP target wad into the shell wrong way around

It was quickly discovered that these could be fired accurately to about 20yards with an open choke (<Mod)

The Wads and shells were re-useable for only the cost of primers (at the time <$2/100)

I made up about 200 of these and great fun was had by all... excepting the squirrels

But we did make sure they got their "Cardio" that afternoon...

When I had a No. 1 in 375 H&H I used to load .375" round balls over 6 grains of Red Dot for off-hand practice in my basement. A gunsmith friend of mine took a piece of 3/8" steel rod and fashioned a hand decapping tool for me with a nice walnut burl ball at the top so I could just insert it into the fired case and pop the primer out with the palm of my hand. The velocity must have barely been 500 fps.

Howdy Y'all,
Well this isn't really strange.....,but it is dangerous.
When I was a kid(12-13) I wanted to mess around with some 22lr ammo,and make it HIGH velocity.
So.......a buddy,and I were at my farm doing some shooting.I forgot the magazine for my 10/22,and we were loading bullets one at a time.........one of us decided to pull some bullets,and add some extra powder to the case then reseat the bullet,and shoot them.
Well,this worked OK for a few shots........a little more powder would be even better.
When the smoke cleared,and I could hear again(this took a while)the little ruger was a wreck...at least in a kids eyes.The extractor was gone,and there was half of a 22 rim imbedded deeply in the palm of my left hand.I never tried that trick again.
How does the old saying go???? Live,and learn........well I learned......the hard way.
D.P.Reynolds

P.S. I hadn't thought of that incident in a LONG time till I
saw this thread.

I knew a guy who would insert 209 shotgun primers into 54 cal. hollow point bullets he casted for his muzzle loaders. He claimed they blew a nice hole through steel plates at 50 yards.

Seems like many kids starting out with a 22 get into their first handloading.........combinig powder, flipping bullets over, or drilling hillow points. I did some of each. It was a crackshot single shot so it was uneventful and less than impressive. However, did find out that making wadcutter type bullets with endcutters would be an effective way to dispatch trapped pests without overpenetration.

A buddy of mine figured out that he could screw a broad head into his M16 cleaning rod. He said that they would use a blank to propel the rod arrow and tried to hunt deer with it.

I guess his CO was pretty mad when they got caught.

As kids we used to take the pellets out of a .410 shell, and then load it back with .22 LR cartridges. How we didn't kill ourselves I will never know.

While in the 'Nam we would grab 12 "split-shot" shot for fishing ( around .30 cal ) and crimp them onto a 2.5" circle of piano-wire. Load them into a 12Ga shell where we had dumped the buck-shot.
What it does to a bad guy has to been seen.

Rapidrob..........that sounds like that would do the trick quite nicely......what do they say......."necessity is the mother of invention."

D.P.Reynolds

Back about 18 years ago, we had a rabies problem with racoons. I loaded about 12 1/2" long pieces of scrap #12 or 14 copper wire from scrap ends left over from doing house wiring, with a cork gasket wad in front of about 8 grs Unique in .357 mag cases. In my 4" S&W they would do about a 12" pattern at 10 ft, and turn a piece of 3/4" plywood into splinters on the back end. The front of the plywood looked decent, just some dots and dashes into the wood. Showed one load to a NYC cop, he thought it would clear a hallway nicely, but he'd spend a lot of years in the slammer for it. Nasty load!
Then there was the old surplus 405 gr 45-70 loads I drilled out for a .22 blank when I was 16--good for splitting firewood in my Trapdoor. Got nervous, when one hangfired, dropped the muzzle, and it went off into the ground 5 ft in front of me. Old buffalo hunters trick I read about in Fur Fish and Game Magazine.

Being 15 years old and in possession of a .32 revolver but no ammo for it, I got creative. I de-re capped a handful of .32 S&W short cases, charged them with one or two grains of Red Dot, and made bullets by cutting some .30 Cast lead rifle bullets in half which got thumb-seated into the cases. I fired the first one at a telephone pole around 15 feet away. The bullet bounced off and came back and hit me in the shin. It hurt like crazy but didn't make so much as a black and blue mark. I was a bit more careful after that (and rounded up the proper components and dies).

quote:

Originally posted by Rapidrob:
While in the 'Nam we would grab 12 "split-shot" shot for fishing ( around .30 cal ) and crimp them onto a 2.5" circle of piano-wire. Load them into a 12Ga shell where we had dumped the buck-shot.
What it does to a bad guy has to been seen.

I heard that piano wire by itself, coiled up in a 12ga. Shell worked good in Nam.
Sort of like a weed whacker.

I have loaded lead round balls into 12 and 20 gauge shells with nylon fishing line tails to keep them accurate, made my own paper shot cups for 357 snake loads using 150 grains of #9 shot and Drilled 125 grain HP bullets to hold 1 grain of HP-38 and seated a small pistol primer on top, but I don't think there is anything strange about those.

My brother and I pulled the lead out of 22LR shells and replaced it with the tips of crayons. We shot them out of Dad's Savage Model 24 22/410.

After determining a lethal range I shot one of our garage cats just beyond that range. I suppose he had a nice bruise for a while.

We also used a notebook paper wad under no. 8 shot with melted wax holding the shot in, homemade bird shot. Didn't work very well.

Speaking of strange loads, we also made our own "guns" once. We took about a 10" section of 1/4" ID steel pipe, loaded one end with a lady finger and a soybean in the other. To fire, you light the fuse and quickly press breach end to the 6x8" piece of 1/4" plywood that hung around your neck with a piece of string. Hit my little cousin in the belly once which left a welt which she showed Grandma. That was the end of our beans shooting.

Oh the memories. No wonder we are still alive with everything still intact.

Chris

As kids we would recover 50 BMG empties along the shore of Lake Ontario that were dropped by the ANG F 84s shooting at towed socks.

Take em home (out in the boondocks), put in a table spoon of 4F, fill the rest of the case with 5010, insert a fuse through a lump of flexible caulk.

Set it in a homemade launcher that shot up about 60 degrees. Light the fuse and clear the area.

"Foosh", up it would go (way up) then the fire would reach the 4F and "KaBoom" ! The empty shell would turn into a large brass throwing star and come "floating down" (fast).

The fun ended when one stuck in the road (about 300 yards from launch site) as the local Deputy drove up.
He "suggested" we "cease and desist".

Today no doubt, we would have been put on mind altering drugs, enrolled in special ed. and been on some list, kept on some database by an unknown government agency.

"Who is John Galt ?"

Well, not really reloading, but close enough. Lets just call it "Stupid kid gun tricks"

I "made" my own shotgun-grenade by grinding a piece of sucker rod into a sharp point and crimping it inside a piece of galvanized tubing (the point served as the firing pin) insert shotgun shell into tubing and throw real high into the air. Kind of the "lawn dart" theory where the heavy end would naturally hit he ground first. When it would land, the shotgun shell primer would hit the sharpened piece of sucker rod and shoot the shell into the air. Usually ... Sometimes you had to throw it up in the air a few times to get it to blow ... But it did work!

God must have some plan for me, because I clearly should be dead. Once I got mad that it wouldn't shoot so I threw it down hard. It shot close enough in my general direction that I figured I better retire the shotgun grenade to the junk pile. I must have been about 10 or 11 when I tried this.

A friend managed to get some .22 cal tear gas blanks by mail order and a starters pistol to shoot them from. So you would shoot them and the "gas" would come out the side of the starters pistol, since it had no barrel.

Yep, they were real, well, real enough. Still not sure what it was, but it was serious! I volunteered to be the test dummy. Hurt like hell and I cried like a baby and had serious red eye for about 3 days afterward.

Of course, like most, I experimented with removing shot from the 12 ga shell and inserting other items.

What is interesting that all the crap we pulled as kids was written off as being mischievous. Now it would be a jail-able offense for the parent. Kids these days clearly don't know what they are missing.

My strangest reload is in my .270 Winchester with 26" barrel. Had a super accurate load on the 150gr Hornady Interbonds (3 shots cutting one another)- 2940fps ...... BUT when I tried out the 110gr Nosler Accubonds (3300fps) they were hitting the target at 100metres at exactly the same point of impact on the target.

I used to load grits in 12ga shells to make blanks. Worked ok for dog training.

i met a dude at a range once.. i left before he could fire his awesome loads, in a 1891 ... seems he felt the bore was a little loose .. he had heard that the 7.62x54r was bigger than a .308... so he bought some "old" mauser bullets .. he awsn't aware of .318 vs .323.. just the old ones... and "reloaded" them for his rifle.. but he wasn't no chances, no sah ... he said he wasnt going to get an automatic, but his idea was just as good ... seems he thought putting TWO bullets into the case was just like having a rifle that shot twicest (his words) but even faster...

powder? will, he just took some (pistol powder, i forget what) and drilled a single primer hole, super glued in boxer primers in a berdan case ... (frankly, i tried that in 7.62x39... i drilled out maybe 5 cases,tried a primer, and threw the parts away... but that was all the rage at one time) and was going to go test his loads... he expected nearly factory speeds (his words) because the pistol powder was faster than rifle powder, and he was hoping for two holes in near enough the same spot....

at which time i packed uo my wife and kids, informed the range officer of his plans, and LEFT....
i have no idea of what happened, but i never saw him again

An interesting one I've heard of (and would like to try) is the .45 BPM. This load is an up to 60 gr black powder charge in a .460 S&W case with .45 LC-type bullets.

Also, I was wondering if anyone could give me information about how to calculate the pressure on black powder loads?

quote:

Originally posted by Cowboy_Dan:
An interesting one I've heard of (and would like to try) is the .45 BPM. This load is an up to 60 gr black powder charge in a .460 S&W case with .45 LC-type bullets.

Why would you do that? Do you just like to see smoke?