AmBraCol
I've long been intrigued by the lowly 410...
Tuesday, March 15, 2022, 13:18

it was the most used shotgun in the Amazon basin back when I was a kid. Powder and shot being expensive for the common man, they looked on the 410 as the answer to their need for a relatively inexpensive game getter. Back then they used mostly FFFg powder (a 38 spl case being a handy measure), a jute over powder wad (literally wadded up jute fiber), a tiny dose of lead and another jute fiber over shot wad. They used this caliber on anything from rabbit sized rodents to tapir (the largest game in the jungle) as well as using it to take onça (jaguar) and the occasional homo sapiens of one skin color or another. The above load was put up in full brass shells with berdan type primers of the corrosive persuasion. The cabocolo (Brazilian peon) looked down on new shotguns as they'd not been properly "poisoned" (shot and not cleaned) and thus were seen as unable to take game with. They were convinced that only by shooting it and not cleaning it would the pay load be able to pick up enough poison to make the gun deadly. Looking at it from a more practical angle, what made the "poison" work was the ability of the hunter to get close enough to game to practically put the barrel in its ear before pulling the trigger. BUT you can't reason with folk who "KNOW" what they're talking about and logic loses against prejudice almost every time.

Now I've got my hands on one of these lowly poppers again, but still need time to play with it. The full brass shells have been out of stock for ages now, and suitable brass for fire forming (not to mention primers and powder) are also difficult to come by. Eventually I hope to put up a few loads "for old times sake", but doubt I'll use black powder as I've no nostalgia about it at all in this regard. My own approach to the loading of full brass shells lay in putting up loads of Tupán powder using the 28 or 24 gauge measure in a 32 gauge shell. This along with a carefully sorted payload consisting of nested balls (in layers of two or three balls per layer) with a payload of 6 to 9 (depending on two or three balls per layer in the shot column) resulted in a satisfyingly effective load in the 32 gauge - once I learned to eschew the native jute fiber over shot wad for one of shredded paper. Someday I hope to recreate something similar in the lowly 410, but using a more efficient over shot card wad. Shucks, it's only about forty eleven projects down the list, who knows? I may get that round tuit one of these days yet.