Brenneke Buckshot

Vang Comper

Moderator
Anyone familiar with this brand of buckshot? It seems like it would produce very tight patterns, plus it is fairly cheap to purchase for the quality of the shot.

http://www.cheaperthandirt.com/ctd/product.asp?sku=AMM-800&mscssid=MLRST0DFC26S8NXNC61CCH22R7490B66

"From Brenneke, the hardest, deadliest buckshot you can buy. The OO buck is 6% antimony and copper plated to avoid deformation and provide deep penetration. Gauge 12 gauge. Size 2 3/4", weight 1 ounce (9 pellets)"

Wow, 6% antimony AND copper plated!!! Anyone care to buy some and test it out for me? :D
 
Possibly.

My 500 likes the Federal Premium buckshot. But I have a lot of Remington available to me. I'd like to try the Estate brand also.
 
Sounds interesting, but a 9 pellet 00 load should run 1 1/8 oz, not 1. Maybe a misprint. I doubt 6% antimony would be enough in itself to make the difference up.

An enormous amount of R&D is being done today making better slugs and buck. Why? Lots of places are experiencing deer herds with explosive expansion rates, and most of these places are not rifle friendly from the safety standpoint. Add in wild/feral hogs and you've got lots of close range hunting.

And, LE/Defense ammo still can stand some improvement.

These loads seem worth trying. I'm backed up, but maybe some soul here will run a T&E,posting results.
 
I bought a sleave of that and never shot it, still got it sitting around the house. I'll go out and test it out on monday compared to some other buckshot I've got cause I have got the day off work.

Sincerely,
Adam
 
Don't know about the Brenneke, but I'm familiar with Federal H332, S&B and Hornady TAP.

H332 is moderately recoiling, produces a livable but not excellent pattern.

S&B produces a 16 inch pattern at 30 yards, very impressive.
It has two down sides.
1. The plastic cases melt to some extenet in a hot chamber, so don't use this stuff in three gun comps.
2. The rim diameter is just over standard for SAAMI spec.
Use it in you Mossberg and you'll need to relpace the
right and left side extractors, extractor springs, and
mag tube spring every 1000 rounds. $55.00 per fix.

Hornady TAP. Heard this stuff was supposed to group in any shotgun. From a six inch barreled AOW it ran 15 inches at 25 yards. From my 20 inch M590 it runs 5 inches at 25 yards, 9 inches at 30 yards, and 14 inches at 35 yards.
Good stuff.
 
Those are some impressive results, Michael. Tell me, what choke does that 20" M590 shotgun have on it? Also, looking forward to hearing your results, Adamantium, wonder how they would penetrate compared to standard buck. Could you prehaps do some penetration tests too? Do you have a chrony? 6% atinomy is very, very hard. That may make a huge difference since the pellets won't deform much at all.
 
I don't have a chronograph, so I can't measure velocity. I've also never seen a very good way of measuring buckshot penetration withouth yellowpages, something that I don't have a very large supply of right now. Plus I've only got possibly 4 rounds to test, the sleeve has been sitting around my house long enough to be scattered into the wind and I've yet to figure out where the last round is hiding. I'll see if I can't figure something out though for a penetration test. If I find that 5th round I would ideally like to pattern 3 then use the last 2 for whatever test medium I can come up with in the next 24 hours.

Sincerely,
Adam
 
Thanks so much for going through the effort to do all these tests, Ad, we will all be better off because of them. If you don't have the phone books some alternatives could be 5 gallon plastic or steel buckets filled with sand. Also milk jugs and the like would also be good. I guess what you could do is prepare two similar backdrops, one for the brenneke and one for a standard 9 pellet lead buckshot load to see how they differ in penetration.

Question on the phonebooks, how long do you leave them soaking before shooting them? How far does 00 buck and 000 usually penetrate into the books and at what distance? I heard of a 3 1/2" load of 0000 buck going 21" deep through wetphone books. Had nothing to compare that too but it sounds impressive.
 
I've used Brenneke before, seemed like pretty good stuff.
But I don't shoot it very often anymore, since I'm well stocked up on S&B 00. :)
 
I have not used the Brenneke buck shot, but I have used a lot of the slugs. The slugs work well in my Mossberg 590, and my Remington 870. Both have open cyl. bore. I am sure that that brand of buckshot is of good quality.
 
VangComper,

The barrel is standard open choke, but I've ported it, lengthened the forcing cone, and backbored the front, so it's equal to just under a modified choke. Lengthening the forcing cone was the greatest help in patterning. Shoots Brenneke slugs REAL well.
 
Isn't that what vang does? Why do you lengthen the forcing cone anyway? That opens up pattern density, you need dense patterns. If I'm not mistaken, you need dense patterns for good groups.
 
Vang, I think that you've got it backwards. Lengthening the forcing cone makes patterns more dense, this is because less pellets are deformed in the more gradual transition from chamber to barrel so there are less flyers. Just imagine two of those tube slides at a Mcdonalds playground. One goes from 4 ft. in diamiter to 3'6" almost instantly, while the other slims down over a couple of feet. The second one will be the less bumpy ride.

Also I think I might have perminantly solved my lack of penetration test materials. For the last few hours I've made my latest invention, a completely reuseable water jug that can measure bullet penetration within a couple of inches. I basically took 3 12x24 inch boards and nailed them together making a U shape and reinforced it. Then along the sides of the boards on the inside I placed wood sticks that are 1 1/2 inch wide, alternating for the length of the box. I started at 6 inches then went for the rest of the length. What I did was from 6" to 7.5" on one side there is a stick, then on the other from 7.5" to 9" there is one, continously going the rest of the length of the three nail together boards. I screwed them in only at the bottom, so at the top you can pull it off the side enough to slip paper down it.

How it works is you put the start of a long strip of paper behind the first stick and put a clamp at the top. then run it over to the next stick and put it behind that, then take out the slack in the middle and put a clamp on the second stick. You continue to run it across the middle and behind the next stick in the box until you reach the end, taking out as much slack as possible and clamping the tops of them all. This way they are firmly stuck so when a bullet goes through them they don't have any give so they tear. After you've done this just close the two sides up with more paper and fill with water. So you basically have a oblong milk jug with layers of butcher paper running across it so you can see where the bullet stopped to penetrate. I figure I'll plank it over a couple of rubbermaid containers so the spilling water can be reused. Very interesting theory, I just hope it works. And hope I haven't confused too many of you, here is a birds eye view picture of it with the paper being the red crayon and the alternating sticks filled in black.



MrBulletTester.gif



Sincerely,
Adam
 
Hmmm, I didn't completly understand that, did anyone get that? Though I do have one question, what happens if a bullet goes through all the material?
 
Alright, I'm back from shooting and patterning the buckshot. I patterned 3 Bren., 3 S&B and 2 Win. Super-X (all I could find) in OO Buck. They were done from 30 feet and all patterned nicely. I used my Moss. 500 with a 18.5 inch fixed cylinder choke barrel. I measured the length of the pattern by taking the longest distance between any two pellets.

The S&B patterns were 7.5 inches, 8 inches and 9 inches. This load would actually have very tight groups if it didn't have flyers. When I dropped off the 3 farthest out pellets (making it a 9 pellet load) the group size shrunk to about 5 inches.

The Win. Super-X patterned at 6.5 inches and 6.75 inches. This was the tightest grouping of the three, with one problem. On the 6.75 pattern, only 7 pellets passed through the paper. The other 2 were off in lala land for all I know because there we no signs of them to be seen. I was shooting at 18x24 inch sheets of paper also.

The Brennekes patterned at 6.5 inches, 7 inches and 7.25 inches. They had the overall least felt recoil and the roundest patterns. S&B had nice patterns other than the flyers and Super-X had almost all the pellets in the outer inch or two of the pattern.

I also shot a round of the brenneke into the device I built that no one has a clue what I'm talking about. Well it blew apart on the first shot so I've no clue how far the pellets penetrated, but the ones I recovered had shed most of the copper plating and were very deformed, but retaining most of there size. Thats a plus of using this ammo in my book though, a deformed pellet will do more damage than a perfectly round one. It was a pure brain fart on my part not to save them and scan them so you guys could see. I also figured out what I did with the last round, I cut it open so I could have a closer look at the pellets. If only I had saved the recovered ones I could also weight them on my powder scale to see the percentage of retained weight more accurataly than eyeballing it. Sorry bout that.

My final thoughts go something like this. The Brennekes are good buckshot, the pattern well and recoil is more than manageable. The Winchesters would be nice if they didn't have any phantom pellets, they kicked a bit more than Bren. but it was still under my tolerance level. They also had a star crimp, so on some shotguns you don't have to cut capacity by one when using the roll crimped Bren or S&B. My mossberg holds 5 of any of them in the tube so it isn't an issue for me though. The S&B kicked the most, had flyers and from my personal experiance with shooting them before hand leave you're barrel with the most fouling. They aren't the best but they are often the cheapest, but now that my personal supply of them is down to almost nothing, I just might switch over to another brand. I also don't like the talk of me having to replace my extractors and some springs because I've already shot about 500 through my Mossberg.

Those were my findings, This wasn't a very expansive test either with how little ammo I've got on hand to pattern, but it is better than just guessing what might happen. Hope it helps, and any comments and questions are welcome.

Sincerely,
Adam
 
I've got 25 rnds of that RWS Brenneke 00 stuff, as they were selling it for 1.50/ sleeve at the local gunshow. As soon as I get to a range, I'll give it a try from my 20" cyl bore Beretta 1201FP and 26" Mod. Rem 870.
 
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