Reloading 12GA with (Pyrodex) Black Powder in the Field

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afternoon guys Dave camera at the Pathfinder school back with another video in the 21st century long winter series what I want to talk to you about today was reloading black powder into a 12-gauge spent casing okay yesterday we talked about muzzle loading the h NR in England Arms single-shot 12-gauge in a lot of people kind of missed the point of that the point was that it can be used as a muzzleloading implement okay you can also reload shotgun shells in the field and I thought that I would go ahead and show you how to do that in your camp with common tools that you have and then you can reload this with black powder and shoot it like a normal 12-gauge shell now the advantage to that is that you can make quite a few of these in camp put them in your bag and you've got reloaded shells with you the other advantage to using black powder over modern smokeless powders is it's a lot harder to screw it up okay modern powders don't take a whole lot of charge to overcharge something and really damage your gun or possibly make it unsafe for you to use as well so black powder is a little bit harder to mess up you can get away with 25 20 extra grains here 25 extra grains there maybe without blowing up your gun whereas you know 25 extra grains of a blue dot or a green dot powder could really really be dangerous so I want to make sure that you understand that before we shoot this video the process for this is very similar to what we did yesterday except we're not going to cut the plastic part of the casing off we're not going to use any dyes or tools or crimping or anything with this we're just going to use a high brass casing this one came from a slug I'm going to show you how to do that right now so hang tight okay guys real quick the tools of the trade for this you know to load a shotgun shell are a little bit different than for muzzle loading you're going to need something that's a little bit longer and deeper all this is the screwdriver extension quarter-inch with one screwdriver bit in it that's got the smallest Phillips head in it alright everything else other than some beeswax and a smaller shot is what I'm going to use in this video it's exactly the same as what we did yesterday the process is nearly the same except we're going to load the shell instead of down the muzzle now if I'm going to reload shells in the field I'm going to load them with pretty heavy shot see they're going to be BB sized shot or it's going to be sling shot and most ice I shot almost like buckshot the reason for that is I want the most versatility I can get out of that loaded shell I can kill anything from a bird with that show especially if it's got bb's in it all the way up to and including medium sized game like large possums large raccoons things of that nature now you're going to need that buckshot size load if you're going to try to take down a deer or even ball ammunition round ball ammunition which you can buy molds to cast your own round balls from wheel weights it's not a big deal I've showed that in videos past so what we're going to do now is I'm going to set some of the stuff out of the way for a minute and we're going to get down to the nitty gritty the first thing I'm going to do is knock the frame around just like I did yesterday I'm just going to take this magnet that I have again that's multi-purpose in my kit because I can use to magnetize a needle with does it take up hardly any space at all and I'm going to put it on the bottom of this shell and I'm going even it up with the primer then I'm going to turn out upside down and I'm going to put this now it being a punch instead of a screwdriver bit straight down on the top of the primer and then I'm going to beat on that primer out and all I need to do is hit that a couple times until it slips and it will get stuck again in my magnet I'll pull it out then I'm going to put a new primer in this case okay so now that I've taken the old primer out I've got a box of 2 9 shotgun primers here I'm going to pull one out of the box I'm going to push it in by hand as far as I can just like that and see it as best I can

looks like it's pretty well seated but if I pull this out this quarter inch driver will go straight over the top of that primer then all I have to do is tap it in place again on a flat surface is to make sure it's well seated there it is nice and flush and now I'm done with this part of it I don't need this equipment anymore that's a very small amount of equipment to carry in your pack you know one extra tool right there with the screwdriver bit in it to reload 12-gauge shells in the field pretty simple stuff so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure my powder okay same as I did yesterday same green weight as I had yesterday I've got this powder measure set at 100 grains I'm going to go ahead and fill it up make sure that it's good level slide that over to make sure it's level and I'm going to charge my shell all right now generally what you'll have in a shotgun shell is you'll have a shot cup that separates your powder from you from your charge over your throw your load what I'm going to use for that purpose is I'm going to use just a piece of wadding here and it'll just be a piece of this patch that I had yesterday and it doesn't have to be very big really actual I'm going to cut this one in half there we go and I'm going to fold that up into a square nest it down inside take my piece again and just pack it down tight on top of the powder just like that okay at that point I'm ready to add my BBS or my shot or whatever I'm using like I said I like to use bb's they're easy to get most of them are made out of you know some kind of coated they've got coating on them of zinc or they're copper and they won't damage your barrel I'm going to go ahead pull this up again for that same pipe got a couple extra ones there put them back inside save those for later and then I'm going to dump those into the shell next sometimes the bb's get jammed up in there a little bit on you not that big a deal just racking around a little bit they'll come loose okay now we've got all the bb's in there we're going to put another wad okay which would normally be a piece of cardboard on top of that and again we're just going to shove it down on top of there and see it real good pack it in tight just like that okay now the only other thing we need to do is we need to seal this round up now I can look at this and I can see that that there's about a quarter of an inch difference there because this thing is not going to be crimped so the crimp is right there I can cut that off if I want to with my knife it's not a big deal and then I can use that after I cut that off it'll just save me the amount of wax I have to put on there so I'm going to trim that down some I'm not going to trim it down a ton but I'm going to trim it down even with my knife and you only have to do this once obviously and once you've got it to where you've only got you know a little over an eighth of an inch there or something like that to seal the top of that that's what you're going to want and then you can use that shell over and over again in the future so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to seal this round with wax the way I would do that is if I had a beeswax candle or something I could use that I could use tallow but tallow is not as good as beeswax is in that tallow will not stay hard in hotter temperatures as good as beeswax will so I'm just going to take this and I'm going to drip some hot beeswax on here to seal this shell like I said if I had a candle it'd be real easy but I don't have a candle right in front of me I got a chunk of beeswax from my pack that's what I'm going to use use what you have I don't have to run this all the way to the top I just have to make sure that I got a good seal in here against the plastic a candle I could just not use might not spend my lighter so much and just go direct drift but with my lighter I'm going to have to spend a lot of fluid to do this and I want that to be a good eighth of an inch thick seal one thing that I'll do with this you can see that wax in there is still not quite hardened yet and I'll go ahead and kind of just push it around the sides to make sure I got a good tight seal push it down in the middle with my thumb make sure I got it packed in there good now at this point you could trim some more off of that shell if you were convinced you know that was going to be your load all the time but you never know things vary a little bit you might get a couple extra pellets in there something like that you might need that extra room so you don't have to cut that off not going to hurt anything for it to be on there once that's good and hard it's ready to be put in a shooting bag we're going to go test this out on a bird target right now okay guys we got a little fake bird target made out of that same floor mounting material I stuck it in a tree back here try to get this camera out of the Sun for you I can and you can see them right there I'm going to set this camera down for a minute so you can see what I'm looking at here zoom in on him a little bit if I can all right there we go ready to shoot okay guys got our single-shot 12-gauge here we've got our round that we made with the wax cap on it let's uh shoot this little bird and see how it goes all right got a zoomed in you step off the few paper

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okay there lies our bird here we'll pick him up see if you can see them not I take camera over there I'm zoomed in about as far as ice cream there we go got holes blasted all over and you know because we reloaded that shell you know and we didn't cut the brass off of it it will eject just fine all we gotta do is take that dude back to camp reload it again pay for the shot okay guys like I said you know there's our spent shell now all we have to do is take that right back to camp knock that primer out put a new one in reload it we're good to go we could do that with ten shells keep them in our pack and we're ready to rock and roll with ten shots anytime we want to just another way that the 12-gauge is so versatile you know that single shots little gauge is to me the most versatile gun ever made you can see you know with that shot that we use just in it devastated that bird and that was out about I'm going to guess 15 to 18 yards maybe there's probably I'm guessing 40 holes in that bird and that was a brand new one shot target so almost every BB that came out of that gun hit that bird this is a modified choke three-inch modified choke hnr you can get these in full choke you can get them in modified choke so I hope you've enjoyed us second in the series about the 12-gauge on the 21st century long Hunter series my name is Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school I appreciate your views I appreciate your support and hope you have a happy Thanksgiving

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