Posted: 01 April 2008 at 03:59 | IP Logged

Anybody here making shot? I am giving this some serious thought, since shot is the single most expensive part of reloading shot shells I need to cut costs by any means I can find.

I know several makers are available and homemade ones are around just looking for thoughts and input.

Rick

Posted: 01 April 2008 at 07:33 | IP Logged

Shot is tiny "round" balls.  The more perfectly round the truer they fly.  The more out of round the more they fly erratic.  Years ago I bought some cheap import shot, set a handful on the kitchen table and it rolled around crazy, out of round.

The way to make shot is to have it fall.  In free flight all liquid forms a sphere.  If it falls long enough it will be perfect.  So to make shot you build a high shot tower.  At the top you have molten lead.  You pour it thru a sieve on a high spinning disk which makes it go into generally uniform droplet.  Then you let it fall.  The higher the drop the more round it will be.  Shot towers are usually 5-8 story high.  But you want the droplet to solidify so you want some air blowing upward to cool; then it hits a water pool at the bottem (hopfully it is solid enough to not flatten.

You also want a hard shot so you might want to mix some hazardoous materials into your liquid lead.

After the shot is made it is sorted to size by passing it over some accurate screening.

So if you are serious, it would be a massive task.  Many shot operations are out of the the US because of the enviromental issues.

Now does that shot price seem a little more reasonable? 

Just toooo much work to make tiny lead balls isn't it?  Makes casting bullets seem like childs-play.

Posted: 01 April 2008 at 15:23 | IP Logged

Bear I appreciate you answering my thread but there is a much easier way,  Rock and Trigger are right on the mark, I have done both of those things fellas but before I spend the $$$$$ for the Littleton at Magma I was just wondering if anyone here has had these crazy thoughts or maybe had made the leap.

Rick

Posted: 02 April 2008 at 10:29 | IP Logged

That is the short-drop method.  It avoids the tower, and produces pretty poor grad of shot.   It fails to get a sphere in air and it fails to cool in air.  So the rock hits the water/coolant molten and not properly formed. 

Water /coolant is thicker than air so in the short drop method the shot falls slower (and shorter distance) thru the coolant than in air and the "dwell time" is somewhat increased.  No one has used this method to make commerical grade shot.  It requires lots of cooling equiment and heat regulation of the water (the water/coolant heats up fast from the lead pouring in).   There are some system that you can build to roll the shot (sort of like the swedged RB for muzzlemoading) while the shot is still molten.  But you will never get round shot with these processes.

I looked at the Magma site and that unit is only a melt unit, with drop holes.  You could use a frying pan and electric hotplate, just drill some holes in the edge of the fry pan.  Better plan on lots of $$$ if you buy the Littleton melter.  It is like buying tires if you want a car.

good luck.  Please let us know how it goes as you develope it.

BEAR

Posted: 02 April 2008 at 10:54 | IP Logged

Bear I agree it may not be perfect, but last Saturday I shot trap against 2 fellas that make thier own and they both did pretty fair shooting 1 ounce loads of #8, I did shoot a better score than them but I had to work at it. I will now open up an argument  my Dad always contended that with the advent of plastic wads and shot cups that shotguns didnt shoot the same as the old paper hull and wad collum shells did, his contension was that the shot was much more protected in plastic and did not get distorted by the blast and barrel any where near as bad, All the posts I have read about homemade shot testify that the shooters are shooting just as well with homemade as with factory, long story short, if I can make 50-60 pounds of shot an hour for less than 5 bucks total I am gonna go for it, I allready have a good supply of hard ingots, and the coolant issues seem pretty easy to overcome, at the rate I am shooting I go through 25# of 7.5 shot in about three weeks and I have not started shooting ATA again (yet) thats 300 rounds a day, 25# bag nets 355 rounds of ounce and an eigth loads or 400 one ounce.

I will report back when my finacial adviser gives me the go ahead for the littleton,  Rick

Posted: 02 April 2008 at 12:13 | IP Logged

I loaded the paper shells for years, and then the plastic collars then the all plastic wad.

As a hunter the paper were pretty good; except if they got wet.  I loaded paper up to the '90s as I didn't like all that plastic in the enviroment (ponds, lakes fields).  When living on a farm the plastic wads would often bind a mowing machine,*&&^%

I think the two things you raise paper shot/distortion and homebrew shot have the same basis.

Most hunters are not good shots.  And magumitis in shotguns is called "use a tighter choke".  When I was a kid if you didn't have a full (or long Tom) choke on a 12 guage you were a wimp.  So shooting a full or a modified with shot out of round really creates a "skatter" load.  I use to do the same thing by inserting a small hand cut piece of card board (and X shape). in my reloads.  So an "old codger" might get more kills on small game with bad, non-uniform shot; and think it was better.  No negative intended on your dad.

As you know shooting competitive shotgun sports means being consistent.  And uniform patterns only happen with hard shot that is uniformly spherical.  AS I said I once bought imported (cheap shot) and when I opend the bags you could see the out of roundness.

Regarding the littleton, if you can make the cooling system, screening mesch, you also make the melter.  It is just a bottom pour Lee pot with a multiple hole funnel.  I don't see the small metal flap as being anything helpful, except to keep lead from splaching back.

We need your test results.  Go for it....but you are obligated to report back to us.

BEAR 

Posted: 23 May 2010 at 01:36 | IP Logged

I haven't posted on this Forum much, but I've been making my own shot for over 25 years.  My shotmaker is very similar to the Littleton, and I'm on my second one.  When I was shooting competitive Trap and Skeet, I was making 600-700 lbs of shot per year, and shooting around 10,000+ shells per year.  I still average 100 shells per week, just about every week of the year.

I just saw another thread about making shot on this Forum, and posted a reply there.  I then read this thread, and felt I should comment on the following quote from BEAR.  

"Regarding the littleton, if you can make the cooling system, screening mesch, you also make the melter.  It is just a bottom pour Lee pot with a multiple hole funnel.  I don't see the small metal flap as being anything helpful, except to keep lead from splaching back."

The Littleton shotmaker is essentially an aluminum pan over an electric (stove) heating element.  The pan is mounted at an angle, and the bottom edge is straight and has a lip on the outside.  There are 7 "nozzles" in the straight edge of the pan, and each nozzle has one or two holes in them that the molten lead passes through. 

The diameter of the holes is critical, and that is what determines the size of the shot.  The nozzles that I use make size 8 1/2 shot, and as near as I can measure,  the holes are 0.015" in diameter (slightly larger in diameter than a single wire in a wire brush). 

The molten lead passes through the nozzle and makes a sphere shaped droplet on the outside of the nozzle.  The droplet then falls onto the lip, then rolls off the lip and falls about 3/8" into the coolant.  The lip is lightly coated with welders soapstone to prevent the lead droplet from sticking to it.  The drop distance from the lip to the coolant is also critical for making round shot.

The coolant that I use is liquid laundry soap mixed 5:1 with water.  My coolant is contained in two stainless steel rectangular "buckets", one inside the other.  The shot falls into the inside bucket which has holes in the bottom to allow the coolant to drain out when it is lifted out of the outer bucket.  The coolant displaced by the shot drains into a jug to be reused.

The coolant temperature must not get above 150* F and the shot has to fall through at least 2" of coolant, or the shot will be deformed.

As I posted on the other thread, I then wash, dry, and tumble the shot in graphite.

My shot isn't perfect, but it's been good enough that I have used it to shoot many 100 straight targets in 16 yd Trap and in 12, 20, and 28 gage Skeet.

All lead shot is deformed when it is shot, regardless of the type of wad or shot cup it is or isn't in.  The plastic shot cup only prevents the shot from contacting the inside of the barrel of the shotgun.  The force of the shot pellets going from 0 to 1200 +/- feet /second inside the barrel forces the pellets together, and a flat spot is formed where the pellets touch each other. 

When the mass of shot passes through the choke, the shot pellets are further compressed into each other, and that increases the pellet deformation.

Bottom line is, the rounder the shot pellets are, the truer they will fly, but they don't have to be perfect to be effective, and no lead pellet shot out of a shotgun is a perfect sphere. 

And there's more to the Littleton than drilling holes in a frying pan.