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Recycling paper...


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Shotshells, that is. About five years ago I got a wild hair and bought a whole big ol' USPS flat rate box full of once-fired Federal Gold Medal paper trap hulls for a project that I thought I wanted to attack but that went by the wayside. Got 'em cheap on the Wire Classifieds from somebody who was sellin' 'em as a fund-raiser for some youth group or other in Texas, if I recall correctly. I don't even remember now what the project I had in mind was...

 

So enter the Coyote Cap 87 that I got a couple of weeks ago. I started thinking about that box of paper hulls just sitting there under my loading bench and realized that I now had a scattergun that didn't rely on gravity or lubricity to shuck the hulls, and an idea was born. After some consultation with the Lyman Shotshell loading manual and some experimentation, I arrived at a load using the same quantity of powder and shot as I normally use in my AA's, combined with Federal 209A primers and Claybuster 12SO wads, and I think it's gonna be the cat's hiney! :D

 

During my experimentation I've already loaded some of them two or three times and they're still hanging in there. They crimp real purty, too!

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I'm using the standard MEC Jr. crimping stations with a 6 point crimp starter. Never thought about pictures. I guess I figured nobody'd care that much...

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There's a trick to star crimping paper hulls ... line up your crimper so it uses the original folds.

A mark on the outside of your crimp starter helps.

Pappy had an iron of some kind, it plugged in and got just a little more than comfortably warm ... it was slightly tapered and we would heat it up and push the fired hull onto its tapered mandrel and iron out the old crimp.

We reloaded paper hulls an unholy number of times, when the crimp finally wore out or tore away they were moved over to the "Double Gun Pile" (Pappy hunted grouse with a Damascus gun he loaded only with the Holy Black) and we'd load these with 2F and generally a wad of toilet paper glued over the end in lieu of an over shot card wad.

These, of course, were known as our "Toilet Paper Loads."

Nothing wrong with paper hulls, they're generally waxed and nice and slick coming out of the chamber.

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I've got my crimp starter a little loose and it seems to automatically index itself to the original folds. They do crimp purty...

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