Interesting slug experiment results....

115grfmj

New member
Okay folks, I'm a man of many hobbies (much to my wife's chagrin:D ).
I have this model airplane prop balancer, a perfectly good remmy rifled slug, and way too much time on my hands;) .Any way I decided to test the old rifled slug myth. Oh well I decided to destroy the shotgun shell with a razor knife and remove the slug. I removed the wad, a pinned the slug on the rest where the prop normally sits. After about 5 minutes of spinning it to get it oriented to the point where I would call it balanced. I took the wife professional hair dryer and pointed it at it...............:eek: :confused: The damn thing was spinning......slowly I'll be it but it was spinning with the hair dryer pointed at the front of it. Folks I have always felt that the rifleing on a slug would not spin even in flight.....that it was kind of a gimmick meant to sell slugs. I did this figuring I would put the myth to rest, at least in my own mind, for good. I have since retried this with three separate remmy slugger, all of them exhibited spin, from the force of a hairdryer ( I would only estimate maybe only 20 to 30 RPM ). Since the velocity they acheive leaving the barrel is far greater they would only spin faster.

Has anyone else tried anything to judge whether they can get spin out of a slug. I tried this way because it most represents how a slug would present a profile to the wind. I now doubt my previous position on this. I think slugs do spin, if they are fired in a IC gun, but not in the way you might expect. The rifling is more akin to they way fletching acts on an arrow.

Thought I might share this.......
 
Interesting. I doubt you'd get a high rate of spin even with higher velocity though. As your analogy to fletching on a arrow, which has more aggressive air deflection and more surface area, the arrow only spins about 4 to 5 revolutions max in 60' and that's at speeds of about 300fps. True, a shotgun slug would travel much faster but has much less air deflection through the "rifling" grooves. Still, it was a good experiment.
 
Interesting.

I read an article that said that since the slugs are supersonic, they push a shockwave, and that creates a vacuum along the sides, leaving no air to act on the vanes.
 
Ah, but how much of that rifling remains after a trip down the bore and through a choke? Will a slug driven through the bore by a rod have more or less surviving rifling than one driven by a powder charge? Inquiring minds...
 
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