I misused sporting clays. I meant clay shooting. Just the general shoot a clay going through the air for sport. I know, I know, the blasphemy.
Yeah, over pressure rounds.
I'm not talking about in registered shoots. One of the places I would shoot at would run a registered shoots with a few fun ones mixed in. Things like "buddy shoots" and 5 stand.
To be clear, I meant from the 50 yard line in shoot offs. As in, 50 yards from the trap house. I'm not sure how far the trap machine throws, but I know there was once heated discussion about whether one of my shots broke the clay or it hit the ground, so pretty much out to whatever range that would be.
I just used google maps to measure on the range and it looks like just over 100 yards, maybe 105 and it was in fact 50 yards from the trap house. I'm guessing that method is accurate within a few yards. They planted a blue spruce to mark the shoot-off line. If there were a couple good shooters we would start stepping back every round after a few rounds. If it went 6 or 7 rounds you could get really far back.
"Hot rodded" handloads, yes. I put a few through one of the loaders guns(I borrowed for the shoot-off when I had a Moss 500 and target loads). I mostly used Remington Nitro Pheasant loads in my shotgun, which were the stoutest factory loads I could get locally, and I was at a distinct disadvantage, although it was certainly still possible to break at the long ranges.
All the +P+ pistol rounds, and some of the +p, are off SAAMI charts. You don't ever shoot those? The 12 GA limits are REALLY conservative because they were designed to be safe in 100+ year old cheap farm utility guns that were some of the absolutely worst made center-fires in history. Shooting a slightly "hot-rodded" 12 ga shells is really low on the list of stupid things I've done. In fact, it really doesn't make the list. How about when people load those 30,000 PSI pistol cartridges in shotguns with the sub cal adapters? Heck, I've seen them for centerfire rifle cartridges. Sure that short bit of barrel reinforces the chamber, but what about everything else? Those pipe shotguns? I keep waiting for one of them to blow up, but I never hear about one doing so. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying load them to 30,000 PSI or anything. I'm not sure what the recoil would be on that, but fairly unpleasant to put it mildly.
It is clear that observing the normal over-pressure signs for metallic cartridges means you are WAY over pressure in a shotgun, but how often have you heard of people shooting such loads without ill effects? Decent shotguns can simply handle WAY more than SAAMI. Any sort of half-hearted heat treating on a heavy gun will do so.
BTW, I'd really like you to show me how to change the choke back and forth in that BT-99 I had sometime. I owned it for years and I never could quite seem to figure how to remove the factory choke. I sold it to a friend, but I'm sure he'd enjoy the demonstration also