Less is More

The 28-gauge: Wingshooting's best-kept secret

The first 28-gauge shotgun I ever handled was a boxlock Westley Richards back in AD MCMLXXIV. It was a real sweetie, even compared to my own Bernardelli, never mind my pumpguns. My prized Italian side-by-side handled well, but it was a 12-bore. I already was clued in enough to say "bore" instead of "gauge" (and well on my way to becoming a bore on the subject, in fact), but I regarded the 12 as the default setting for shotguns and the 16 and 20 as suspiciously light. That little English 28 capsized my canoe.

I worked for the Orvis Co. at the time, 1974, and lived in Southern Vermont, then a Mecca for trout & grouse people. Appropriately, the Westley belonged to one of the Perkinses, who still own Orvis. Just like the Ducati café racer that I found parked next to my big, blocky German motorcycle one day, also back then, the little gun was so sleek and elegant it just had to be fast as sin. Egad, what next? Three-weight fly rods?

Instantly, but secretly, I began to ache for a side-by-side 28 of my own. It was a secret, because the 28 was the "expert's gun" and I did not care to set myself up that way in anyone's eyes. Like all upland gunners, I wanted to be able to step into a covert as an underdog, not a self-proclaimed hotshot, so that any and all downed birds would reflect to my credit. Really, what I wanted was to be a person who could kill gamebirds-especially those thunder-winged nightmares, the ruffed grouse-with a 28. That little-bitty cartridge? No recoil! Three-quarters of an ounce! You might as well shoot a .22!

This attitude persists today. Show up in camp with a 28 and a few eyebrows always go up, at least among the newbies. In fact, though, the 28 is not so much the expert's gun as it is the veteran's gun. When one finally lays aside preconceived notions and questions the conventional wisdom, the truth is within reach. Sooner or later the bark, recoil and weight of a big-bore gun take their toll, and the sheer delightful efficiency of the 28 wins out. For any game requiring No. 5 shot or smaller, the 28 can equal or surpass the 12. More fun, less pain.


In the May 2006 issue of American Rifleman, Steve Fjestad wrote: "The Holy Grail for Parker collectors is an original 28-gauge model that Parker introduced in 1902 and remains the only gauge invented by an American shotgun company."

And in that month's Shotgun Sports, Tom Tabor noted: "Charles Parker, founder of the famous Parker Brothers shotgun, is credited with the 28 gauge's development. I'm sure in 1916 Charles must have had big hopes for the success of his new cartridge, but didn't live long enough to recognize it as one of his better visions."

Ed Muderlak gets closer. In his book Parker Guns he says the first 28 appeared in the Parker order book on June 27, 1900, and adds, "Parker is credited with introducing and popularizing the 28-gauge in the United States." However, he allows that Parker may not have introduced the cartridge.

Correct. The 28-gauge was certainly not a Parker creation. Rather, it dates from the very dawn of self-contained cartridges, nearly 200 years ago.

The most extraordinary entry in the ninth Gold Medal Concours of Fine Guns, at Illinois' Northbrook Sports Club, in May 2005, was a dainty little side-by-side, Serial No. 175, made in 1814 in France by Samuel Pauly, which perfectly chambered a modern 28-gauge round. In a press release, the Concours cautiously described it this way: "This may be the oldest 28-gauge shotgun known. It is a breechloading centerfire design, thought to be decades ahead of its time. The shotgun is highly embellished and with a very short (approximately 10 inches) buttstock, and was purchased from the estate of Napoleon Bonaparte at a Paris auction in the late 1800s."

Nick Tooth, a British gunsmith living in the US, had bought the Pauly off of a cluttered table at a gun show and, gleefully aware of its spanner-in-the-works effect on the gunmaking technological record, submitted it to the GMC jury. Samuel Pauly is well known as a gunmaking genius of his day, but the fact that this example of his genius happens to be a 28-bore shotgun was extra cream in the coffee. The gun won not only the NRA Cup, for its historic significance, but also the Boothroyd People's Choice award. It helped generate this article, too: Hey, how long have 28s been around, anyway?

Napoleon III wrote: "Inventions that are before their age remain useless until the stock of general knowledge comes up to their level." After Pauly, it seems to have taken the world a few decades to catch up to the 28-bore cartridge, never mind breechloading centerfire-cartridge guns. Casimir Lefaucheux's inventory records indicate that he had 2,000 rounds of 28-gauge pinfire ammo in stock in his Paris shop in 1850. According to The Gun Report of January 1956, Eley in the UK was selling centerfire and pinfire 28-bore cartridges in the late 1870s or early 1880s. The Modern Sportsman's Gun and Rifle, by J. H. Walsh (Vol. I, London, 1882), discusses the price of loading components for the 28-gauge.

"Gauge" is a measure of bore diameter: In this case, 28 lead balls that add up to a pound in weight are each 0.55" across. Hence 28 gauge is .55 caliber. Hence, too, a rationale, perhaps, for the 28-bore round and gun: For centuries sporting firearms largely were based on military weapons, and military cartridges steadily evolved toward ever-smaller (and faster) bullets. American rebels drilled by British Brown Bess muskets in 1776 suffered .75-caliber (three-quarter-inch) holes; today's NATO assault rifles fire .22-caliber (5.56mm; less than a quarter-inch) bullets. En route, this evolution lingered for many decades at about the half-inch-diameter mark-everything from the various European 11mm-plus cartridges to the .577 Snider. Pauly notwithstanding, this was where and when the 28 emerged for good. In Europe, a .55-caliber projectile using the ballistic technology of the day covered the bases. With ball or bullet, it felled not only enemy troops but also stag and boar very well; and a shot cartridge was a natural add-on.

The first American 28 may have been the Model 1853 Sharps, available chambered for a 28-gauge paper cartridge from 1854 to 1856. The Model 1865 Maynard rifle could be chambered for the company's proprietary .55-caliber shot cartridge, in a 2.27" brass shell. In the Civil War, the seven-shot Spencer rifle was leading-edge technology. Its original chambering was .56-56 rimfire, with an actual bullet diameter of .55". In Spencer Repeating Firearms, by Roy Marcot, there are photos of .56-56 shot cartridges made by the Union Metallic Cartridge Co. and Winchester Repeating Arms circa 1870, and Marcot notes US Patent No. 50536, issued on October 17, 1865, for the cartridge.

The October 1961 issue of The Gun Report has a photograph of a brass ".55 Frank Wesson Shot Cartridge." Frank Wesson-the younger brother of Daniel, of Smith & Wesson-made a wide variety of guns in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1859 to 1888. (His partner was Gilbert Harrington, and the company changed from F. Wesson to Wesson & Harrington to Harrington & Richardson.)

There is evidence that by 1879 Winchester was producing brass 28-gauge shotshells; but Winchester's February 1893 catalog shows shotshells of paper and brass in gauges only from 4 to 20. The International Ammunition Association (www.cartridgecollectors.org) indexes some 6,000 magazine articles, by caliber, going back more than 50 years. The oldest reference to a US-made 28-gauge round is 1901. Modern shotgun cartridge dimensions were standardized in 1902. Like the 12 and many other loads, the 28 was widely produced in 21/2" and then 27/8" and finally 23/4" lengths. If you are fortunate enough to get hold of a good vintage 28-bore gun, check the chamber depth.

In 1890 the John P. Lovell Arms Co. catalog offered a huge range of shotguns in America-Scott, Colt, Greener, Parker, L.C. Smith, Ithaca, Lefever, Remington, Wm. Moore, Bonehill, Baker and scads of no-name imports-in gauges from 20 to 8, including 14. No 28s, though.

Our hero emerges permanently in this country only in the 20th Century. Parker made its first 28-gauge gun in 1900. The Remington Model 1893 break-action shotgun, produced from '93 to 1902, was available in 28. A search of period catalogs turns up no other American-made 28s until around 1908, when H&R apparently introduced a break-open single-barrel 28. Ithaca rolled out a 28-gauge pumpgun in 1911, and the ALFA (Adolf Frank) catalog of 1911 lists more than two dozen assorted 28-gauge guns and a wide selection of brass and paper 28-bore ammunition.

These were the exceptions, however. Not until the 1920s did American-made 28-bore guns begin to show up fairly often in the catalogs-if rarely in production. The record shows that only one L.C. Smith was ever made in 28 gauge. Total Parker 28-gauge production was about 1,750 guns. Marlin (non-L.C. Smith) and Fox evidently built no 28s. After 1908 Ithaca made a few in the Flues and NID models. Remington doesn't show another 28 in its literature until the Model 11-48 in 1952. It appears that neither Savage nor Stevens ever made a 28-gauge double, but both offered single-barrel 28s, as did Iver Johnson.

Although 28s in early bargain-basement off brands such as Union Firearms, Sam Holt Guns, American Bar Lock and Long Range Winner appear to be non-existent, based on the evidence of catalogs, it seems that, other than Parker, the early domain of the 28 in the US was the el cheapo single-shot. And not a lot of them, either; until the 1930s, when the Winchester Models 21 and 12 were chambered in 28, the total production of 28-gauge guns by US manufacturers was probably less than 2,000. In a still-raw land of vast wild-bird populations, market hunting and no bag limits, and at a time when a 10-gauge was the standard and many people still relied on shotguns for self-defense as well as food, the 28 was too small, too specialized, too little understood.

But even today, despite the trend toward shooting slower preserve birds, in this country the vast majority of 28-gauge rounds are fired on skeet courses, many of them through adapter tubes in 12-gauge guns. Skeet, as has often been pointed out, kept the 28 alive, as part of the official four-gauge competition suite. For this we are grateful, but the 28 deserves a far wider role in wingshooting. Evidently, it's happening: Sources ranging from Browning and Beretta to fine-gun retailers report increases in demand for break-action 28s, and even some "value-priced" side-by-sides are now available in the gauge-with scaled frames, at that. There are also a few 28-gauge live-pigeon guns in the works, as at least in some circles the prize money is bigger for smallbore shooters.

In the UK, where shooters could order whatever they wanted and a mass-produced shotgun was sneered at as a "monstrous horrendum" (Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey-game shot, inventor, author), 28s historically were not plentiful either, but available. Lock, Stock & Barrel, by Cyril Adams and Robert Braden, contains a photograph of Purdey No. 10354, a 4-pound 14-ounce bar-in-wood 28-bore hammergun that was made in 1879. The Donald Dallas Purdey book includes this line from the maker's 1885 catalog: "Double guns of 28-bore, suitable for ladies, in all qualities." The 1900 Holland & Holland catalog recommends 16, 20- or 28-bores as ladies' guns. (This may be one of the few instances where ladies got the good stuff, even if unintentionally. If 28s are ladies' or kids' guns, are scalpels kids' knives?) David Baker's Heyday of the Shotgun reproduces a 1904-'05 W.J. Jeffery ad devoted to the 28-bore. The guns were made in Belgium on Anson & Deeley actions with Greener crossbolts and 28-inch barrels; they weighed 41/2 pounds and sold for £6 10p.

Husqvarna, in Sweden, made rolling-block single-shot 28-gauge guns from 1877 until the 1930s. Like the Belgian Jefferys, no doubt these were meant as vermin eradicators or entry-level boys' guns. At the other end of the price continuum, according to historian Donald Dallas, between 1891 and 2001 Boss made 6,073 guns, of which 22 side-by-sides and 14 over/unders were 28-bores.


So the 28 is hardly recent. The controversy over killing game with it began long ago as well. Shooting-Field and Covert (London, 1886), by Lord Walsingham and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey: "Hot disputes often rage in the sporting papers amongst the advocates of 16-bores, 12-bores, and 20-bores, even 28-bores being strongly recommended by some.

"Many sportsmen advise 20-bore guns-28-bores need not be discussed, as anyone who has experimented with them knows they are foolish toys when used on anything except a young partridge at short range, and that it is ridiculous to maintain that they will hold their own with a larger bore.

"For young birds or easy shots flying straight away, as when walking up partridges early in the season, they are all very well; a 28-bore would kill such birds; but for game when it gets wild and strong, or for driving, or for ground game-save rabbits in covert underfoot-a 28-bore heavily handicaps a man for successful shooting."

Yet W.W. Greener's great and much-reprinted book The Gun and its Development describes in Chapter XV a "Young Nimrod" (age 11) shooting a 28-bore: "In public pigeon matches he was placed at 27 yards, and at that distance upon more than one occasion has killed his 38 out of 50 best Blue Rocks [live pigeons] . . . . His score of 88-100 at clay pigeons with 3/4 oz. of shot also deserves recording." Greener concluded, "The small-bore gun is not the toy some suppose it to be." I imagine this kid's father was careful not to infect him with the conventional wisdom, and instead sent him out to ruin the big shots' day with a gun (made by Greener, in fact) and cartridge that suited him and his game perfectly, and let him make the most of his young eyes and reflexes.

At the other end of the age range was Sir Joseph Nickerson (1914-1990) of Lincolnshire, whose lifetime game bag exceeded, by a slim margin, the legendary Lord Ripon's. He gave up 12-bores for 20s in 1972 and then, in his last three years, relied on a trio of Purdey 28-bore over/unders for all of his game-red grouse, gray partridge, pheasants and Spanish redlegs. He said, "If you have been using a 12 bore all your life, switching to a lighter gun is quite an exercise but worth the effort in the satisfaction it provides. The advantages of a lighter gun when one is older are quite pronounced, permitting a faster swing. I am now down to 28 bore guns for all types of shooting and am killing birds as difficult and as far away as ever I did with a 12 bore . . . . The average number of cartridges expended per bird has worked out at 1.8, using a pair of guns and taking on all shootable birds, not just the easy ones." This is from his book A Shooting Man's Creed (anyone interested in driven-game shooting should hunt down a copy; one of his daughters, Rosie Whitaker, reprinted it through David Grayling, London, in 1998), and it was this paragraph a decade ago that made me see smallbore guns in a new light again-like the little Westley had done, 20 years before that.

By ancient rule of thumb, a gun should be 96 times heavier than its charge. Given that the optimal 28-bore payload is about three-quarters of an ounce, the gun should thus weigh 41/2 pounds. A bit feathery, that, and difficult for an adult male to mount and swing smoothly. Sir Joe's Purdeys weighed one pound more, and that is ideal for a 28 game gun, especially with 28-, 29- or 30-inch tubes. Call it the Rule of 117.33.


One lucky BB can bring down anything, but from shot to shot and bird to bird-whether woodcock or pa'tridge underfoot, high-altitude geese or driven game, a cock pheasant flushing at 40 yards with his armored backside to the gun-we need to put three to five pellets of the appropriate size on the target to kill it. More are OK; less won't reliably do the job. A 28-bore charge of three-quarters of an ounce of No. 71/2 shot amounts to some 260 pellets. The same mass of No. 6 shot has about 170 pellets. If we could find 28-gauge No. 5 cartridges, they'd hold 110 pellets, give or take. In each case there are way more than enough for the job. And because these pellets are the same size and traveling at the same speed whether shot from a 12 or a 28, their ballistic performance is the same. So why is a 28-gauge gun a "foolish toy"?

Shooting birds with a 28 is not at all comparable to the brief vogue, back in the 1960s, of hunting big animals with tiny, hot-rodded bullets-going for a grand slam on sheep with the .219 Wasp, for example. That was simply dumb and ultimately cruel. We owe our game a quick death, and a bird falls as readily to a 28 as it does a 12, given the right shot choice.

Regardless of bore size, there are two ways to up the odds of putting four pellets on a bird: pattern control and, um, skill. We can buy the former with high-quality cartridges and maybe some gun-barrel tuning; the latter, a combination of coaching, experience, conditioning and gun fit, is what we all strive for.

(There is a third factor that also can affect our shooting: Mind-set, or perception. Get your head past the notion that a 28 is "too small" and-like Greener's Young Nimrod, who didn't know he couldn't do it-you may discover a new experience. Recently I shot modern skeet with a friend who does well with his Perazzi 12. After we popped in a couple of 28-gauge chamber inserts, his scores, along with his eyebrows, went up, and by the end of the evening he was enthusiastically making plans to reload 28s.)

Consider pattern: An ounce and an eighth of No. 71/2 shot-a typical 12-gauge upland load-has about 125 pellets more than a three-quarter-ounce No. 71/2 28-gauge shell. Throw more lead and, statistically, chances of a hit go up. However, the interior of the pattern is much the same whether 260 or 385 pellets leave the muzzle, and a proficient shooter centers the target-so where's the advantage? How much deader can you make a bird? Then we are told that 28s are lethal out to 35 yards, with the implication that at 36 yards something goes off. Huh? Look at the pattern thrown by a high-quality shotshell fired through an appropriately choked 28-bore barrel: At no range at which No. 5 or smaller pellets retain enough energy to kill do gamebird-size holes appear.

What makes the higher count of a bigger load more desirable to many of us is not the middle of the shot cloud but its presumed width-extra margin, literally, to help compensate for error. But here, too, conventional wisdom steers us wrong. The pellets at the fringes are basically junk. Those are the ones that got mashed out of round by the barrel wall or stuck to the plastic wad cup, and "out there" they're traveling relatively slowly and erratically. Their patterning is uncontrollable and their penetration substantially less. They're pretty much wasted, in other words.

Now consider skill, expressed as accuracy: Virtually everyone handles a more dynamic and slightly smaller gun better, especially in instinctive game shooting; and don't underestimate the harm, both instantaneous and long-term, done by recoil and noise. There are more subtle forms of flinch than the classic eyes-closed rejection of the gun; many shooters react to physical and aural abuse by unconsciously abbreviating their follow-through or not cheeking the stock properly. (In addition, like hearing loss, tissue damage from recoil also seems to be inevitable and cumulative. At a clinic where I was to be treated for hip and knee injuries, the therapist who was giving me a whole-body scan stopped when she reached the front of my right shoulder. She dug her fingers in deeper and said, "Ooh-crunchy! What do you do?" Crunchy? Well . . . I shoot a bit.)

The "secret" to shooting game is not filling the sky with shot-and pounding ourselves silly-but rather putting a few good pellets on target. So why not launch fewer but more effective pellets and reduce recoil, noise and gun weight for equal or better results? As with a good three-quarter-ounce (no more!) 28-gauge round.

Sure, you say, but the pellets at the edge of a 28-bore cloud are also pretty much wasted, for the same reasons, so there really is a net loss of "margin" in going from a 12 to a 28. Correct, but our proficient shooter uses the center of the shot swarm, so the fringes don't matter. And there is a way to greatly reduce the deformation of those edge pellets and maintain their efficiency: buffering.

Comes now Jay Menefee, the mastermind at Polywad, in Macon, Georgia. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of hulls, wads, inserts, powders, primers, shot and buffers, and he knows how to combine them to best effect. The list of his accomplishments includes Spred-R, Polymag and Vintager shotshells, the development of Hevi-Shot loads, and other good ballistic things too numerous or classified to mention. Under the name Crak-R, Menefee is about to launch a new line of cartridges that rely on smaller payloads, minimal wadding and maximal buffering. "The efficiency of the loads is in direct proportion to the amount of buffer I can put in the hulls," he said. "I can't get as much as I'd like into a true three-quarter-ounce 28, so the shot load is going to be either 20 or 21 grams [.702 or .738 ounce]. The buffer material is rather round-the same way we like to keep our shot-so you might say these loads are 'on spheroids.' In Full choke it gives ridiculously tight patterns. For general shooting, better to use a skeet bore."

A dense, proprietary double-base powder produces 1,350-fps velocities. The wood-fiber base wad breaks up instantly on leaving the muzzle, and the shot rides in a tough Kraft-paper mini-cup. Menefee calls this his BioWad system; it produces no lasting-or even hardly visible-debris. "We plan to call this series of shells by the weight of the payload in grams." Menefee said. "Thus the 28-gauge will be the 20 Gram Crak-R. The 21/2" .410 is the 13 Gram Crak-R."

With or without milk, the proof is in the performance. Even in a light, open-bore side-by-side game gun, pre-production samples of Polywad's 28-gauge 20 Gram Crak-Rs atomized long clay targets with startling crispness. In November they'll be put to the ultimate test on high-speed, high-altitude pheasants.

Whereas new rifle and handgun cartridges are introduced at every SHOT Show to fill imaginary gaps, no new shotgun cartridges have emerged for perhaps 150 years. Many gauges have about disappeared-4, 8, 14, 18, 24, 32-and others, such as the 10 and 16, are on life support. The only real news since George Daw's Central-Fire cartridge of 1861, which finally nailed down the modern shotshell, is in the evolution of the components: smokeless powder, non-corrosive primers, plastic hulls and wads, and nontoxic shot. Shotgun ballistics are unchanged since Lefaucheux's day as well. Then and now, pellets leave the gun at about 1,200 fps, while with "dram equivalents" we're still describing cartridges in blackpowder terms. Even Polywad's new shotshells achieve their superb performance through technology-buffering and cardboard wads-that dates back to Victorian times. However, it took a fresh way of thinking to assemble these "antique" components in a "modern" way, proving once again that less can be more. Just as we might describe the long-lived 28-gauge gun itself-wingshooting's best-kept secret-as it emerges into new prominence.


Author's Note: Many thanks to Steve Helsley for sifting his extensive library of old gunning books and catalogs for evidence of early 28-gauge guns and ammunition (and photographing several of the shotguns in this article).


Silvio Calabi is an Editor at Large for Shooting Sportsman.

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