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Long Guns, Canoe Guns&Testing the Wax Slug 12 GA Load

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Tags: Long Guns 12 GAuge Shotgun,Pathfinder,Dave Canterbury,Survival,Bushcraft,Primitive,Archery,Hunting,Trapping,Fire,Cooking,Knives,Guns,Longhunter,Tracking,Flint Knapping,Longbow,SelfBow,Spear,Sling,Slingshot,Slingbow,Trapper,Shelter,Navigation,Animal Trapping,The Pathfinder School

Video Transcription

morning guys dave calibrate the pathfinder school back again with another video in the series in the 21st century long learner now we've been talking mainly about weapons up to this point and we've talked about fire kits a little bit what i want to get into today before we go into another load style for the 12-gauge and again remember in this series we're talking about using black powder or black powder equivalent to reel in a 12-gauge shell in that we are looking in the 21st century long winter series for adaptability ok and adaptability of the modern 12-gauge to black-powder is very simple from muzzle loading to just reloading the shells themselves with black powder so we're not talking about modern shells a lot of questions asking me about cut shells things like that I've seen the videos by Iraq veteran on cut shells very good videos I suggest you go look at those if you want that information we're going to concentrate on is black powder type loads we're going to talk about the wax slug load today and some of my reasoning behind this you know it's hard to explain sometimes but I had a guy yesterday throw a comment up on the 21st century long hunter discussion board that we have on Facebook and a comment that he made was you know with the invent of the inline muzzle loader and the popularity and inexpensiveness of the inline muzzle loader lots of people have them in their homes so in an Advent where you had to look for components or look for aiming nishan in a case of you know maybe there was a natural disaster and there was a lot of abandoned homes and you were looking for ammunition such as you can hunt the feed your family chances are not only are you going to find 12-gauge ammunition in every farmhouse henhouse and outhouse in the country which is a lie profess the 12-gauge so heavy but you may also find to a nun shotgun primers and either black powder or pyro decks equivalent to black powder for inline muzzle loaders which again goes right back to the versatility of that 12-gauge one of the things that I want to talk about today before we go into this next load is I want to talk about the difference between what they call a long gun and a blanket gun or a canoe gun and some of the reasoning for that and some of the reasons that I think maybe a blanket gunner canoe gun may be just as effective or even more so sometimes in Eastern woodlands then a long gun would be okay most of your hnr single-shot 12-gauge has come with about a twenty seven and a half inch barrel in the frontier days to qualify as a canoe gun or a blanket gun or a trade gun that they used to use to train with the Native Americans it would be 26 inch barrel length or shorter some of them were cut down very very short obviously we know in this day and age ATF regulation requires that a shotgun have an 18 inch barrel from breech to the end of the barrel and it has to be over 28 inches I believe it is and overall length don't quote me on that but there's an overall length mandate there as well there's lots of information on the web about how to cut down a shotgun if that's what you choose to do I'm not professing that you cut down a shotgun in this video I'm simply explaining the difference between a long gun and what they would call a canoe gun or a blanket gun so a regular long gun barrel back in those days would probably have a barrel that was five feet plus okay so in our case buying a normal single shot 12-gauge at the 27 inch barrel length would be fairly close to a canoe gun already and would be very good for the Eastern woodlands when you get into canoe guns that are you know 26 inches - down to 18 inches to become legal or stay legal with an ATF regulation peanuts barrels are very common you can buy them where you can choose to cut them off I'm not advocating that the point of the matter is with that 18-inch barrel or maybe up to say 21 inches that shorter barrel is going to give you a lot of advantages in Eastern woodlands as it did in canoes okay and that's the reason they call them canoe guns they didn't want those great big long barrels tryin to wield them around in a canoe that might have more than one person in the Native American tribes preferred them because they were easy to swing around and Eastern woodlands where you've got lots of heavy brush and vegetation you don't want to have a big footprint trying to swing down around so the shorter that barrel was the easier it was to manipulate out here that dense forests of the Eastern woodlands especially in the spring and summertime when vegetation can grow very high brambles get very thick and things like that that shorter barrel allowed those Native Americans a lot more versatility and a lot more you know advantage for the attack or the ambush if that's what you want to say in that type of environment I think that's why they chose and then we're so happy with those trade guns and canoe guns and blanket guns and things like that was because they were so much easier to wield in a frontier environment of the Eastern woodlands where everything was really thick all the time you know what we see now as far as thick woods isn't anything like what they had back then you'd have to go into the Monongahela National Forest somewhere in the middle of 260 thousand acres even get a taste of what they had back then but the fact of the matter is that's the difference between what they considered a long gun and a canoe gun all right so if I were going to travel by canoe or if I were going to have an encampment or a station camp where I wanted to make sure I had something that was really accessible was it great digging along to try to swing around well maybe it's inside my wall tent or something like that or inside you know my shelter half armed Eileen I want something I can get up you know if I've got a bear come into camp I want something I can get to very quickly the canoe gun or blanket gun will give you that option okay and like I said 18-inch barrel shotguns are not uncommon they're easy to find I just saw one at a pawn shop yesterday for 70 bucks H&R 12-gauge where they stock eighteen and a half inch or eighteen inch barrel on it so they're not hard to find but they give you some advantages over the long gun now from what I've read in the research that I've done on the internet and I can't speak from personal experience because I've never tested it to side by side but an 18-inch barrel and that normal 26 inch barrel twenty-seven and a half inch barrel that comes on the New England shotgun stock for a modified chunk which is what I have and I recommend that's all you use for modified loads don't mess up full chokes that's another thing I need to specify in this video is that you can't fit it dime down that vent down that into that barrel you've got a full choke you don't want to mess that too much modify chokes are the way to go all of the twelve gauges that I have are modified so twelve gauges I prefer them for that reason all right but that twenty seven and a half inch barrel when you cut it down to 18 or 19 inches and you're losing that six or eight inches off the barrel or eight or nine inches off

barely if you're losing you're not going to change the pattern of what comes out of the end of that barrel for a 10 to 15 yard shot so if you're hunting close on small game with your 12-gauge you're not going to lose much by having a shorter barrel now once you try to reach out there if you're trying to shoot waterfowl you're trying to shoot Birds you're trying to shoot squirrels up at the top of oak trees and things like that you may want that longer barrel to get that reach but that's a kind of a give and take situation that you have to think about look at so I wanted to kind of go over that with you and then give you some theories on that you know from my mentality and we're going to talk about the wax ludlow today so stay with me we're going to load one up we're going to shoot it and see how she does okay so I've loaded my shell again exactly the same way I did any other videos I have put my powder in I put a patch on top of that tamp it down real good and I put my load of my bb's that I use my steel bb's in there and I've used my powdered acts like powder equivalent to load the shell the only difference is now instead of putting another wad on top of that I'm going to melt wax into here and make these bb's one solid mass and again I'm going to use my lighter here because I don't have a candle but I've used my powder measure every step of the way from the powder to the shot itself now I make sure I put a good thick heavy wad in there this time because this one I'm melting the wax directly into the BBS I want to make sure that no wax gets down inside here at all into the power and I'm going to put about a quarter of an inch plug on this thing hoping that that stuff will melt down into the bb's really really good okay guys you can see I've got a feed bag hanging up back here from a tree my intent with this wax slug is not to see how much damage it will do necessarily what my intent is I want to see is if it will stay together as a slug so I'm going to get back about 20 yards and shoot this bag and I'm hoping I'll see one hole and not 40 holes I know it's going to do damage if it hits as a slug because it's got a ton of shot in there not worried about that I want to make sure that's going to stay together because that's the theory behind the wax slug and now is my question in my intent for this shoot so just hang tight with me for a minute we'll get set up more shooter okay guys here's our wax slug see what we can do here I get this camera somewhere where you guys can see what's going on all right I'm gonna get this camera up close and personal with this bag and I'm going to take a walk so stay with me

okay guys I'm gonna have to slow this thing down myself to see but it looks to me like that would not be an optimal load as far as I'm concerned unless I just didn't do something right but it looks to me like we got one split right here that probably wasn't there for sure and that's probably worthy a majority of the pit is right there but there are a couple holes right here that I don't believe we're there either and maybe even one up here so some of our shots separated in the process and that wasn't our intent now maybe I didn't you know mix that well enough maybe I didn't make sure that I put a little bit of shot in added some wax put a little more shot in out of some wax and I think I'm going to go back and do that right now and we'll try it again and see what happens stay with me guys okay I've got my shot here and I'm going to put part of my shot in the bottom of the shot Cup I'm going to hold on to the other part of my hand I'm gonna go ahead and melt this down over the top of some of the shots in there now to get it all seized together real good when I look down there and see that there's quite a bit of wax down there I'm going to add a few more bits of shot in there I want to lose any of what I got here I got the exact amount I need and I'm gonna melt some more wax in there what I'm trying to do is seize that all together into one big mass for one slug we're staking this experiment and this final one will be my plug - you saw that melt about a quarter of an inch over the top of that shot the wind don't get me here okay guys here we go I know I've let this one dry for a good long time let that wax get pretty hard melted into the layers like I said modified choke shotgun guys modified choke don't try some of this stuff with a full choke not necessarily this but other things will damage your gun for sure a lot of people have asked me how many times can you reload one of these shells well this is probably the 12th or 15th time I've reloaded this one just playing around with stuff and it's still doing fine not a problem at all a guy did mention yesterday on either on youtube or on the on the discussion board for 21st century long hunter that if you shoot this out of a different gun you're not going to be able to reach aim burr because there is expansion in the shell when it fires so when it expands its going to expand to that barrel and that chamber you try to put it in a different chamber it may not work without being sized so if you're using that shell for the same gun over and over again it's going to last you for a good long time all right so we got our target back here again let's get the camera up close to it and see what we can see

alright I'll take a walk okay gosh

what I'm seeing is I'm seeing a lot of spread out shot on here and that's not what I would consider you know a good round for trying to make a slug because there's a lot of spread out shots on this target beyond the shadow of a doubt they did not hold together as a slug maybe I'm still doing something wrong any experimental bit further but what I'm seeing right now dot did not hold together as a slug on the other hand you know the dime load that we talked about yesterday I saw a lot of comments on there from people saying oh well Mythbusters said that was no good it's a non-lethal round it wouldn't go through a pig blah blah blah you know I challenge you to take nine dimes in the face and see if it's not a lethal load the fact of the matter is there's no doubt in my mind with a gallon milk jug filled with water with the cap on shot with that load it blew that milk jug apart it would kill any small game animal out there there's no question about it it would be a decent hunting around there's something I'd use all the time or advocate use all the time

absolutely not definitely not unless you had a modified choke but it's there it's just an option that's there that's all I'm trying to show now is options of versatility for the 12-gauge shotgun all right guys one Dave Canterbury for the Pathfinder school hope you're enjoying these series of videos on the 21st century long hunter talking about different loads and different options versatility for the single-shot 12-gauge I appreciate your views I appreciate your support back to another video as soon as possible thanks guys you

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wildernessoutfitters

wildernessoutfitters

From the lore of bushcraft to all things related to self-sustainability, the Pathfinder vision is to pass on the knowledge of outdoor self-reliance. Providing basic to advanced self-reliance training and survival gear, our goal is to offer both practical knowledge and survival gear that will stand the test of time. From emergency preparedness to sustainability, the Pathfinder way is to share and educate.

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