Naki:

What a great account. That is exactly the stuff I was looking for when I posted the thread.

I too have wondered about an improved loading of 000/LG since stumbling upon some boxes of the stuff many years ago. I found that in a cursory hodgepodge testing it penetrated similarly to 00. We must remember, though, that "penetration" with buckshot is not as repeatable as it is with a rifle bullet. By that I mean that the pellets in a given shot fired do not all penetrate the same. Even in an homogenous medium some pellets penetrate far less than others. I suspect that improved loadings of LG/000 might beat 00 for game shooting.

Anyway, I tested 11 different loads in two different shotguns for the piece I wrote for Nyala News.

I used an 18x18 inch square backer, fired the shots and covered the densest concentration of pellets with an 8.5x11 inch sheet of typing paper. That method was used in order to give every advantage to the buckshot in recognition that guns shoot to different POI and a buckshot gun is best "sighted in" like a rifle. Some guns that shoot a pattern close to the rib will toss buckshot to a different POI. I did not want to skew the results by saying the gun shot poorly if it did not put its pattern right under the bead because naturally, a shooter can hold "Kentucky Windage" or resight his gun to suit his favored buckshot load if he likes. Anyway, the number of hits recorded was the number that fell under the piece of 8.5x11 typing paper, an arbitrary "kill zone" by my definition for testing purposes.

Unfortunately, I only had a small amount of 000 {Federal 2 3/4" 000} available to me so I only shot it in one gun, a Beretta 424 double. It averaged 6 hits from the full choke barrel and 7 hits from the IM bbl at 25 yards. Various 2 3/4" loads from that gun and also a tubed Ithaca 87 produced 4 to 7 hits!!

It struck me at the time that this was darn revealing!

And incidently, the 3" 00 loads produced 7 to 8 hits, barely any improvement over the 2 3/4 inch loads. {However, the 3" 00 loads did place additional pellets into the 18x18 backer, some of which, on a deer, would likely "help out" though they wouldn't necessarily be in the kill zone/vitals.}

Your LG has, in my opinion, great potential.

On another point, we in the "West" think we are such great experimental handloaders.

A friend of mine was a missionary in Liberia for years and he reported to me the use of modified shotgun shells, mostly in cheap singleshot shotguns, was routine driven mostly by the variability of what was available on the street so-to-speak. And some of the modifications were quite interesting. Such shells were used on a wide variety of bush meat and other things as well.

Thanks for your input Naki. As 500Nitro would say, "Top Stuff"!