Erasmus

Commercial nitro cards are obviously very compressed and hard cardboard, replicating that wouldn't be difficult but you might be spending a lot of time with a punch. For the fiber wads, I would imagine stacks of newsprint type paper might be effective. Cork will work too. If you continue loading in plastic hulls and you want to crimp you have to build a tall enough wad column which can be a chore. If you were using brass hulls, or if you don't mind gluing in overshot cards you can get away with a much shorter wad column. While 44 grains might have seemed like a very weak load, it's likely enough to drop a popper and the decreased recoil can be nice. I'm using closer to 60 grains, but in large volume brass hulls, which gets me about 800 fps with a 7/8oz shot charge. I've not had a single failure to drop a target. Your commercial loads are probably making 1100-1300 fps; overkill for our game.

I primarily duck hunt, and in my area that often means hunting in a high traffic public place. Plastic wads (and hulls) absolutely litter the marsh. The wads tend to float and wash up on the windward side of the levee or get stuck in bushes. The hulls sometimes float and wash up on the levee, or often sink where the base (brass colored steel) eventually rusts and the plastic hull gets stuck in the mud or washes up after detaching. When I regularly hunted the national wildlife refuge (that was) near me I would spend time in the preseason fixing blinds and picking up contractor bags full of hulls, wads, decoys, and food wrappers (among other things). In cowboy shooting most people pick up their hulls and throw them away or reload them, sometimes I see people picking up wads down range after the shoot as we clean up plates. Sometimes it's obvious the club just doesn't care and allows the range to become littered with plastic wads. I, personally, prefer to keep my favorite places clean for the benefit of myself and my pards. Other people are obviously happy to recreate among their own detritus.

You can load fiber wads on your MEC if you want to load plastic hulls. I recreationally shoot some old guns. They were made when fiber wads were about the only game in town (just about). With varying quality/hardness of lead and no shot cups they tended to pattern somewhat poorly and were often choked very full. I can bore out the choke, use spreader wads in shot cups, or use fiber wads to get them to pattern a little less tightly; so I just use fiber wads in those loads. There's still a whole slew of people loading fiber wads with black or smokeless for various reasons (especially 16 ga shooters). Not having to stare at plastic shot cups left by other hunters while walking up pheasants or decoying ducks is a couple of good ones. Not having to bend over and pick up shot cups on the cowboy range is another one.

Cleaning a double of BP without plastic wads is even easier!

Loading brass is probably off topic for this thread but, it's easy, and doesn't require another loader. Though if you load for pistol or rifle that will make priming easier. For me, I deprime with a pin punch, I prime with an RCBS shell holder on my turret press. I toss in a scoop of FFg powder, press in a nitro card with a dowel, wipe a bit of lube on a cushion wad and press that in. Then a scoop of shot, press in an overshot card, run a bead of Elmer's School Glue around the card. Once they're dry I put them in boxes until my next shoot. My light load of black doesn't requiring resizing the hulls. The brass hulls are heavy enough to generally come out smoothly. A 1-1/4 oz (lead shot) scoop of bismuth 3s over a 1-1/4oz (shot) scoop of black FFg kills ducks well so long as you give them a bit more lead. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly not "difficult". I've also used 18.0 grains of Red Dot under 1-1/8oz shot. It chrono around 900 fps if I recall correctly.

Some people enjoy not polluting our ranges (and hunting fields and marshes) with plastic wads, not begging for trap shooter's used hulls which turn into plastic trash after one firing, and not having to clean plastic snakes out of their guns. For those people brass hulls are easy to load, require minimal equipment, and require stocking one less type of primer (the common Magtech hulls use LPP). That is to say you don't have to "do it wrong to some degree"; but it is certainly an option for those who find more period correct loading methods objectionable for whatever reason. For some people there is simply no allure to avoiding plastic wads, not asking for other people's plastic trash, or learning how things may have been done in another time.

I got in to this game a few years ago, and at the time everyone kept saying the Ubertis were better guns. I started off with a Longhunter Uberti and a stock Pietta. They both run great, the Longhunter tuned up gun is fantastic and better than the stock Pietta in every way; but the stock Pietta just keeps running with nothing more than some Slix Shot nipples. I later bought a stock Uberti to send to Longhunter just at the time he stopped doing cap and ball work, so it never got tuned up. I tried running it stock and it wasn't great. The trigger/bolt spring broke, ignition was sporadic, and the short arbor meant it was easy to drive the wedge in too far and bind up the cylinder. I still have that stock Uberti and plan on fixing it up myself just for fun, but if I needed another gun for a match right now, I'd happily run a stock Pietta (better with Slix Shots).

I use 1/2 inch vegetable fiber wads from Track of the Wolf. I don't know if your double thick IT Equipment cardboard will have enough cushion; but the only way to find out is to pattern and experiment. I lucked out, my 12 gauge square load in brass hulls patterns well with a single 1/2 inch fiber cushion wad, 1/8 inch nitro card, and a overshot card held in place by Elmer's.

I use a 7/8oz shot dipper full of 2F in my 12 gauge, and a 7/8oz shot dipper full of #8s. They pattern well, go about 800 fps, knock down targets, make plenty of smoke, and kill clays (when I can hit them). I shoot double triggers, so I have no idea if it's enough recoil to switch barrels on single trigger guns. I've never measured what a 7/8oz shot dipper of 2F comes out to, but some quick googling says it's about 60 grains (4.0cc). Less powder would probably pattern even tighter.

I don't miss, sometimes my bullets just happen to be in the resonant frequency of the plate and don't happen to make a sound...

In my experience the seating plug on the cowboy dies is usually shaped for the typical RNFP bullets in our game compared to other seating plugs which have in the past left a ring on my bullets. Other than that, who knows?

Yup, I learned the hard way. When I started with .45 Colt the cheapest way for me to get brass quickly was to buy a couple of boxes of the Hornady ammo and fire them off. I then reloaded them for a cowboy shoot. Later I found some new Starline brass and loaded it all up for a cowboy shoot but ended up screwing up the first piece out the gate. I adjusted the dies and didn't think of it. After that I had a mix of the Hornady brass and Starline brass. I started reloading and lo and behold, I squashed a case seating a bullet because it didn't have enough flare. That was the "ah ha" moment and I finally took out the calipers and eventually separated everything by headstamp. It's a by product of the FTX bullet shape, the long ogive reduces the bearing surface and moves the crimp groove back. If you load an FTX bullet in a standard length case you'll either see the bullet seated past the beginning of the ogive, or you'll end up crimping over the ogive instead of in the crimp groove. If you have a hornady handbook handy it warns you that the trim length for the FTX bullets is shorter than standard. If you seat the to crimp groove with standard length brass your COAL will be too long (unless you cut off the tip). With a full case of powder you could probably just crimp over the ogive like old school black powder rounds; but without a full case you might be flirting with bullet setback and accompanying pressure issues.

They are not. The pointy tip is soft and meant for use with tubular magazines. Heh, Griff got there first but I'll add: If you use the brass from the Hornady ammo loaded with the FTX (Flex Tip) bullets you'll find it's shorter than 'normal' brass. It's something to be aware of if you're flaring and roll crimping your cowboy ammo and get that brass mixed in.

We're it me, I'd buy a box of the Hornady FTX ammo and go hunting. If your buddy is a slug hunter he's used to putting some really big holes in deer. A cast lead bullet with a BIG wide meplat (so not the standard shaped .45 RNFP) will put a pretty good hole in a deer, one with a small meplat will put an okay sized hole in a deer. An expanding bullet like the FTX will put a big hole in a deer. So long as it doesn't limit penetration, bigger holes are better. Yes, people have killed deer with all sorts of cartridges using all sorts of bullets. But back in the day when cast lead bullets and black powder were standard, blood trailing your shot deer for hundreds of yards wasn't considered abnormal. A deer shot in the heart is a dead deer right now, a deer shot high in the back of the lungs is a dead deer in a few minutes.

I will preface this by saying I do not have any damascus shotguns at the moment. I will add that I'm a 16 gauge kind of person (I have 3), and I'm currently working on purchasing a 12 gauge LC Smith with damascus barrels that I intend to shoot at least every once in a while. Lastly, I shoot 12 gauge black powder for CAS, and have a 12 gauge load I've chronographed and patterned that works well (again, 12 gauge, so take that with a grain of salt). You are on your own when it comes to shooting the old damascus guns, so keep that in mind. A square load in 12 gauge, made up with a 7/8oz shot dipper (so a 7/8oz shot dipper full of FFg, a nitro wad, some lube, a cushion wad, and a 7/8oz shot dipper of #8 shot) patterns extremely well in my shotguns and produces about 800 fps. Most guns tend to produce better (and better killing) patterns with low velocity, high pellet count, loads. I would expect such a load to be pretty similar in 16 gauge with similar results. One area where I don't agree with Grizzly Henry is in using Titebond III over the shot card. Having used Titebond III, Elmer's glue all, and Elmer's School glue; I have decided Elmer's School Glue is my favorite for CAS (though hunting may be a different story). Elmer's school glue is water soluble, and more easily cleans up from the inside of the shotshells than the others. With the shells on which I've used Titebond III, even after wet tumbling in stainless pins I have to scrap the leftover residue out; not so with Elmer's School Glue. As for the short chambers, your gun may or may not be short chambered with 2-1/2 or 2-9/16 chambers. It may have also been reamed out to 2-3/4 at some point (which was popular to do). That said, the magtech 16 gauge hulls are usually 2-1/2 inches long and safe for nearly any 16 gauge chamber.