emptymag wrote:The duck/upland loads are copper plated bismuth. The copper helps the shot penetrate more and not fracture as much being that bismuth is somewhat brittle.
Are you sure?
I thought it was because it's soft and malleable, not brittle. They plate lead and bismuth pellets with copper to reduce how many get deformed going down and out the barrel. Between hitting the barrel and hitting other pellets....all it takes is one spot on a pellet to be flattened from contact during discharge and that pellet is most likely going to veer/spin off out of the patterns trajectory.....and become an "outlier" or "flyer" or whatever the technical term the shooting industry calls them that I can't remember right now.
Firing a shotgun shell is a controlled and small but very violent explosion. When you stack a bunch of pellets on top of it they're going to bang into each other.
That's why things like wads and buffering were invented, to reduce the amount of contact the pellets have with the barrel and each other as they're exiting the barrel, because by reducing contact you reduce pellets getting deformed and thus increase the amount that remain in the pattern headed towards their intended target.
Another way to reduce deformities of pellets made from soft and malleable metals is by making them less soft and malleable....which is what plating them with copper does.
The name of the game when it comes to wingshooting at longer ranges is more pellets
.....since there is no difference of range/kinetic energy between a #4 lead pellet exiting the barrel of a .410 at 1350fps or a #4 lead pellet leaving the barrel of a 10ga at 1350fps. They are the same, traveling at the same velocity, and will inflict the same amount of damage hitting the same target in the same spot at an equal distance.
I want to say that before modern wads and prior to modern choking of barrels, only 20%-40% of the pellets in a shotshell traveled towards the intended direction of the target in the pattern. Approximately 60% of lead pellets end up in the shot pattern in today's guns and shells.....when talking plain lead pellets that aren't buffered, and 80%-85% of copper plated lead shot with buffering stay in the shot pattern.
There's a reason why a lot of the old timers shot 8 gauges and punt guns, and why the 12ga ended up replacing the 10ga for the most practical duck guns......
....modern shells get a higher percentage of their pellets flying towards the intended target.
By getting a higher percentage hunters could get a similar amount of pellets shot towards the ducks they were pulling up on while using less gun.