Cheap 2 1/2" shells - How to make

Ganderite

Ganderite

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Farm south of North Bay
Buy whatever 2 3/4" in shells you like. I use a lot of the Challenger target loads for making light plinkers.

Buy a 16mm ceramic hole cutter for your electric drill. I paid less than $5.00 for one on ebay.

Holding the base lightly with a vice grip, so the shell does not spin, cut a hole in the crimp, just inside the folded rim.

Use a card wad and some glue to hold the shot in place.

The fired case will measure about 2.4"

This video shows how to cut out the crimp to make wax slugs. The first part shows the hole cutter in action.

 
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I have been doing this for a few years now, ever since I found a nice English double 12 guage. Since it was made before 1930, (about when the 2 3/4 inch shells became common,) and the difficulty of getting shorter shells due to distances, I found a way to make my own shot shells for bird hunting.

First of all, the crimp cutting method works, but I use a small drill press so that I had consistent depth of cut on the crimp. Two pieces of wood were hinged together to make handles for the original shell, similar to older bullet molds, and the shell held by the wood.

When the crimp was cut, a shot measure made from a cut off brass shell casing that held 7/8 oz. of shot instead of 1 1/8 shot was used to put a charge of shot back into the shell, and a stiff cardboard wad was pressed down so that it was held inside by the crimp that remained. For field loads, a small bit of wax sealed the shell and made it more resistant to moisture. This gave me the equivalent of a 20 guage shell in that old 12 guage shotgun. I really did not notice the difference when shooting at birds, and a lot of Manitoba game birds were taken with it.
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I cut my shells on a bandsaw and either roll crimp with s vintage tool or fold crimp on several different machines .
i adjust with wad height as needed with fibre wads .
i shoot far more 2 1/2" low pressure smokeless or black with paler cases and all brass cases than I do smokeless shotgun rounds
Cat
 
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Anybody do this with 16ga? What would the hole saw size be? This would be money for Remington Game Loads in my early model 12.
 
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