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< 16ga. Ammunition & Reloading ~ Winchester Ranger paper hulls... |
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Posted:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 12:27 am
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Joined: 21 Sep 2019
Posts: 31
Location: Lake Taupo, NZ
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I have some 16ga paper Ranger hulls primed and never shot.
The question is how many reloads am I likely to get out of them?
Loads are going to be light (3/4 oz and slow).
Don't know if I should use them or just keep them.
Any thoughts? |
_________________ Simplify, simplify. |
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Posted:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:55 am
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Member
Joined: 09 Jan 2013
Posts: 2170
Location: Florida
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I am on my 3rd load on some I have , not sure they will go a 4th . These where fold crimped . |
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Posted:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 4:33 am
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Joined: 01 Oct 2007
Posts: 962
Location: Minnesota
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I’d load them up. Guessing 3-4 loads before you see lots of pin holes just above the brass. |
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Posted:
Sat Oct 09, 2021 1:42 pm
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Joined: 21 Sep 2019
Posts: 31
Location: Lake Taupo, NZ
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All good. I'll load them up.
Thanks. |
_________________ Simplify, simplify. |
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Posted:
Sun Oct 10, 2021 11:18 am
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Member
Joined: 01 Dec 2005
Posts: 1550
Location: Minnesota and Florida
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bruski -- Best to shoot those shells in a break-action gun so you can look down the barrel and see if the famous "cup" portion of the basewad of these hulls did not separate and lodge in your gun barrel. Since these hulls are pretty old, they're probably pretty dried out inside, which means those basewad pieces can become easily separated. I have found them in my 12 gauge barrels. Shooting your gun with one of those pieces can result in a barrel bulge. Even in their day, those old Winchester-Western paper hulls would shed that inverted cup part now and then if reloaded a few times.
The basewad construction of these hulls is like no other -- not wound like the paper base of a Federal, or compressed of fiber particles as in the original Remington SP hulls. The Remington-Peters paper hull basewads hung together better. None of those others fail in a way that will obstruct your gun barrel. Olin was extremely proud of their hull construction, and put a little color illustration on the side of a lot of their Winchester (Ranger and SuperSpeed) and Western (Xpert and SuperX) shell boxes showing this feature. Over the powder was a slightly-waxed inverted cup seal made of paper. Felt and fiber wads were placed between that and the shot. Under the powder was the cup I mentioned above. It looks just like the over powder cup, but it has a flash-hole through it so the primer can light the powder. That upward facing cup can dislodge and stay in your barrel. The older your hulls are and the more reloads they have experienced the greater the likelihood of that part separating and obstructing your barrel.
Depending on your load, two or three total firings is plenty for those hulls. It is possible to stretch them further, if you are very careful about checking your barrel. In the days before plastic wad units or shot sleeves, hull mouth wear was probably the biggest issue with paper hulls -- after a couple of reloads the case mouth would become pretty thin and floppy and crimps would be soft. Now, with plastic wad units, papers hardly wear at all at the hull mouth, so hulls can look deceptively re-usable, with the major "wear-outs" being hull wall burn-through and primer leakage (a problem mostly associated with Federal papers).
I will digress to say old Federal papers, as well as old Federal plastic hulls would crack circumferentially around the brass rims, releasing a lot of powder gas and particles. Not good. I still have, embedded in the cornea of my shooting eye, a speck of burnt powder or some other black debris from an incident with one of these hulls. It was a 7/8 ounce load in a 20 gauge Federal paper, not reloaded more than twice, I shot from a Marlin hammer pump gun. It happened back in 1963 or '64. Hurt like the devil -- trip to the local doc -- same doc that delivered me back in '51 -- no emergency room in the little country hospitals of those days in North Dakota. He cleaned out my eye and sent us home. That was the only time I ever threw a gun in anger. Dad had borrowed the gun from one of his friends. No harm done, I guess, but I'm not proud of that. Shortly after that Dad bought me a new Model 12 20 gauge. Any further gas leakage from over-reloaded hulls would go out the side and not out the back through the firing pin hole as with that Marlin. And yes, that Model 12 experienced many cracked paper Federals and pin-holed Winchester-Westerns. I still have that gun. Since I now had a "safe" gun, I took to experimenting with how many times I could reload a hull. Fool that I was, I got 10 7/8 ounce reloads out of a Winchester Ranger 20 gauge hull, all in one day. Those loads were all with conventional card and filler wads -- no plastic wad units. I gave up on that hull when I had to use masking tape to hold the shot in. We reloaded in the basement. I would just walk up out the back of the house to let 'er rip against a snow bank. Its what you do in the short cold winter days when you're a curious young gun nut living on a farm out on the great plains.
Anyway, I don't advise 10 reloads. Maybe a couple is enough.
Cheers!
Tony |
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Posted:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 7:01 am
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Joined: 20 Feb 2014
Posts: 68
Location: Festus, Missouri
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Morning,
I have stumbled into several paper hulls and would like to load them up.
Hull 1 is a Sears (pinkish red)
Hull 2 is a Federal (purple)
Hull 3 is a Imperial (blue)
Hull 4 is a Western (red)
Would you be able to help? Everything my search is bringing up is Red dot and I have none! I have everything else. Ha!
Thanks[/img] |
_________________ My favorite scattergun is my Remington 58 16ga. |
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Posted:
Thu Feb 03, 2022 7:22 am
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Joined: 04 Mar 2019
Posts: 1844
Location: Central ND
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The only loading data that I can find use powders that are long gone.
FOR LIGHT LOADS ONLY!!!
Generally speaking, you can use the same loading components in a paper hull as you can in a plastic straight wall hull. There will be a slight drop off in velocity. If I was doing this. I would find a nice 7/8 oz. or 1 oz. load using a Federal plastic hull with paper basewad and proceed from there. I would not change any other component. In the Lyman #1, the load data is the same for both a Federal paper hull as well as the Federal plastic hull with paper basewad.
I am not telling anyone to do this, just saying that this is what I have done.
I would not use data that was developed in a 16 ga. Winchester CF or 16 ga. Remington hull. The results will probably be very poor. |
_________________ Mark...You are entitled to your own opinion. You aren't entitled to your own facts. |
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Posted:
Sun Feb 06, 2022 2:14 pm
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Joined: 18 Apr 2018
Posts: 28
Location: Alaska
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You could try the old fiber wad and nitro card loads. they are contemporary with those paper hulls and both Ballistic Products and Precision Reloading have the materials.
I got out the old Speer manuals from that period and found that Speer #7 has loads for 16 gauge with Green Dot, Red Dot, Herco and Unique. Those old manuals turn up on Amazon and Ebay.
You wind up trading plastic fouling for lead fouling and if you put the formula into a modern reloading table you have some blank spaces. |
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Posted:
Wed Feb 09, 2022 1:38 pm
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Member
Joined: 15 Mar 2007
Posts: 601
Location: Virginia
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MaximumSmoke wrote: |
I will digress to say old Federal papers, as well as old Federal plastic hulls would crack circumferentially around the brass rims
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One of the shooters on my winter league team offered me some once-fired Federal papers that he had shot that day. Was going to reload them but noticed they all had a crack around the rim. Not sure if it was his gun or a defective batch of shells. I have loaded many Federal papers and never saw that before. The date code was for 2020. |
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