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For all the discussions concerning crimp perfection I've read about here and listened to at the gun club, unless you've spent more time fooling with paper hulls than I have, and my experience goes way back, understand that the old paper hulls were not all that great an experience when reloading. I have about a thousand 16 gauge paper hulls here but still mostly reload plastic for their congeniality.

For openers, if the paper hulls you find have been lying about for some time, the wax in the mouth area dries out and the paper goes gollywop. In order to re-use the hull it's necessary to re-wax the hull mouth to make it strong enough to hold a crimp. And even after re-waxing, those crimps aren't always something to have an orgasm over. Reloading re-waxed hulls is akin to sailing the Titanic. A lot of work to bring it to the job site and still failure of the hull looms.

Then there's the paper base wad. 'Nuff said on that subject.

So, my suggestion is to stop looking for the Mona Lisa in your plastic hull reload crimps, keep calm and keep shooting. Have a shot of Single Malt Scotch. It makes everything look better than it is.

Joined: 28 Oct 2005 Posts: 126 Location: penna

I have secured hulls as recommended and the "slow progressive application of a ever increasing Pre crimp " advice given works well. Now I will see how subsequent reloading affects the established crimp on the new hulls.
As for base wad dislodging I confess to possible hot loads. When shooting crows I go beyond a bit and my crow gun a 311 takes a beating and keeps on ticking. My nice
SxS 's get 2 1/2 loads of 7625 and see more walking than talking.
I woulld like to add to this topic that I feel roll crimps give a wider pattern than pie crimp. I base this on hundreds of crows and nothing at the pattern plate. Empirical
Testing. So for a tight shooting grouse gun try roll crimping.
Again Thankyou.