Little Skeeters bore reducers any experience?

[Deavis]

I have the following sets:

12 to 20
16 to 20
20 to .410

I have only used the 20/410 before for fire forming rifle brass to load .410 and some close range grouse.

I'm going to pattern and chrony.

Just curious if anyone has been down this road?

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[CountryGent]

I haven't done that particular conversion, but I did do a 10-gauge to 12-gauge. Results were less than positive.

Your experience with chamber inserts?

So, they've been around for as long as I can recall: those steel inserts that you can drop into a shotgun and they allow one to fire a smaller shotgun cartridge or a rifle/pistol cartridge. What has your experience been with them? Handy tool or waste of time? How did they work out in...

www.northwestfirearms.com

 

[bcp]

I would think chamber inserts would greatly lower the velocity, then let the powder gases really mess up your pattern.

But I think insert barrels would be worthwhile.

Bruce

 

[Deavis]

I have a 16 to .410 Savage fourtenner barrel thing coming so I will test that out too.

I will be curious to see what happens with velocity and pattern.

 

[Will_White]

Insert barrel tube sets are worth it, high end over-unders often come with them, but those chamber inserts are basically a 1 inch barrel. I'd expect patterns to open up rapidly and velocity to be much reduced from lack of a gas seal.

 

[xtratoy]

I made a 16 gauge to .410 adapter and the groups stayed pretty tight out to the 25 yards I shot it. The full choke of the barrel seemed to keep the pattern together.

 

[Deavis]

Testing has commenced:

Meet Barney (The Barn Gun). Barney started life in 1945 and has made his way to The Deavis Home for wayward guns. A place for restoration, invigoration and sometimes to be remade into something new. All guns are welcome.

Barney had been neglected, but not abused. Somewhere along the line a pop-in replacement forend was fitted. Barney was missing the buttplate and had a Redhead slip on that cracked and began to disintegrate when I peeled it off. A little duct tape and good as new.

Barney has a full 30" barrel marked "choke". At 0.625" I'm guessing full.



Barney was born as a 16 ga but now can freely transition to 20 and .410.

 

[Deavis]

Ammo used today:

Sadly I did not have any good exact matches and the .410 was weak even by .410 standards:



I shot patterns on my club's pattern grease board at 20 yards. The cut out circle is about 4 3/4 "

These are the results:

 

[Deavis]

I bought a new chrono last year (Garmin) and fell in love with it and the app. So much so that I gave away my ancient sky screen model. That was a mistake, because as awesome as the Garmin is, I cant get a velocity on shot.

So, until I get my hands on another unit for shotgun testing I did some informal book penetration testing with an old copy of The blue book of gun values hung at 20 yards. The book is nearly 2000 pages long. I shot a shot, recoreded how many pages to stop the pellets and recorded the last one. I then tore off the pages, including dimpled and torn beyond the recovered shot and repeated the test.

Highly scientific.

I also fired some other shot guns with the same ammo to get a baseline.

The test guns:



.410 18" snake charmer
CZ 26" 20 ga sxs
Barney
Spanish 19 1/2" 12 ga sxs coach
Mossberg/higlu O/U 24" .410

 

[Deavis]

Book penetration was sub-optimal / not very repeatable but I did obtain an old school chrony and will do more in the future. A few noteworthy measurements:

19" Coach Gun (same barrel):

12 ga = 98 pages
20 ga in 12 ga = 90 pages
410 in 20 in 12 = 87 pages

Snake charmer .410 = 87 pages

 

[Deavis]

I got the old school chrono.

Found some shells I would never likely use in the field, established some baselines with appropriate guns and shot the tubes.