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Excellent wads can be cheaply and easily punched from discarded styrofoam meat packing trays. Easier on the punches too.

Almost anything suitable was used for wadding material for 18th and 19th Century front stuffers. Paper, scrap leather, thick cloth (old felt, etc.), dried moss, and abandoned wasp nests were used. I'll bet there were plenty of other materials used too.

D-I-M - I LIKE this topic ... I am going to shoot my old caplock before too long . I'm pretty sure I have both OP cards and fibre wads , but haven't put my hands on the fibre yet . May use the newspaper between OP's !

Joined: 01 Feb 2009 Posts: 64 Location: UK

Here in the UK, where many clay shooting venues don't allow plastic wads, fibre wads are much more commonly used than plastics.

Because so few shooters reload shotshells over here, components of every kind are (a) expensive (b) hard to get hold of. So I've been making my own fibre wads for the last 10 years or so.

I use expansion joint filler board, FlexCell brand - I have no idea what it's used for in Real Life, except it's something to do with the construction industry and you can buy enough of it to make a thousand wads for the cost of 100 commercially-produced wads (if you can find any) - which I cut out with a home-made rotary cutter in a bench drill. The same cutter churns out 1/8 card wads. I can run off about 500 fibre/ 1,000 card wads in an hour.

I don't think I'd ever go back to using plastics, even if I could (a) afford (b) find (c) be allowed to use them. So long as I keep the velocities moderate, I get really nice even patterns, clean barrels and low recoil. What's not to like?

[quote="Lemming"]

"...I use expansion joint filler board, FlexCell brand - I have no idea what it's used for in Real Life..."

From a former Florida based concrete finisher and presently, a bridge and highway materials engineer:

Concrete paving expands and contracts as the temperature fluctuates. W/o some type of buffering, pressure will build up and cause the paving to shove, buckle, and crack. Expansion joint material is used between spans of concrete paving to prevent this.

Concrete bridge spans and road spans use specialized expansion or slip joints constructed of steel or steel and some type of elastomer to serve the same purpose. W/o these specialized joints, a concrete and steel bridge will eventually fail and collapse due to the same forces from expansion and contraction.

Construction joints are the lines typically scored into wet concrete walkway paving every so many feet with a special finishing implement called a jointing tool. These scored in lines are intentionally placed to allow the expanding or contracting concrete paving to crack at the joint rather than randomly.

I'm sure this is more info than you need, but I prefer to help by lighting a candle rather than join in cursing the dark. Very Happy

Joined: 01 Feb 2009 Posts: 64 Location: UK

Thank you, 16gaugeguy, for that admirably lucid and concise explanation.

So, next time you're on site and there's a load of offcuts of expansion joint filler board that would otherwise just end up in the trash, nip in smartly and score yourself the raw material for a lifetime's supply of wads!

Joined: 19 Apr 2008 Posts: 477

I had a great uncle who was of retirement age during WWII. He liked to hunt but ammo was unavailable due to the war production. He loaded his own. He got some black powder and used that. For wads he punched them out of sheets of cork. He made his own shot. He had lead sheets and used a paper punch to punch out round circles of lead. Then rolled them up into tubes and folded them over into semi round balls.
They worked. I can't imagine having to do it, but necessity is the mother of invention.