Email this page  Print this page  del.icio.us  digg  Feed

The .410 gets absolutely no respect, yet we all have at least one, in the safe if not in memory-often an el cheapo hammer single-shot. Depression Era kids still talk about being sent out with two cartridges and orders not to come home with fewer than two rabbits. Baby Boomer kids tagged along with the grownups, their .410s occasionally allowed to interfere when a bird got up close to the dog. Once in a while we see high-grade double-barreled .410s, and everyone knows a guy at the clays club who shows off with a pump-action Model 42 Winchester; but those are aberrations. Aren't they? Most pros advise against starting with a .410; many also say the .410 is a dreadful game gun and wingshooting with it is irresponsible. Beginners miss too often and game is too often wounded, goes the rationale, because of the .410's small and patchy shot patterns. But if everyone "knows" this, why are there so many .410 guns? Why has the .410 been in every gunmaker's catalog, here and overseas, since the pinfire era? Why isn't the .410 today listed with the 16 as an endangered species?

For one thing, the littlest smoothbore is flat-out useful: small yet genuinely effective. At close range with a 110-grain slug, the .410 compares roughly to the .30-caliber M1 carbine round. As a shotgun, it's way more deadly than any handgun or rifle "pest" cartridge loaded with birdshot. Pellets leave a .410 muzzle at the same speed they depart a 12-gauge-1,200 fps, more or less-so it's a real shotgun. (If you think the .410 is a pipsqueak, ask yourself: Would I mind being shot with one?) Fans of the three-quarter-ounce 28-bore and the two-inch 12 point out that their cartridges throw far more shot than the mere three or four pellets required to kill a gamebird. The same can be said for even the lightest .410 cartridge, so here, too, the issue is not killing "power" but accuracy and pattern control. If light recoil, noise and weight plus the satisfaction of being efficient make us admire the 28, we ought to love the .410 as even more of the same. In fact, though, when it comes to wingshooting, the .410 is usually the victim of its own ammunition and choke boring. More on this later.

After my "Less is More" story (Nov/Dec '06), a few people predicted that the Parker Gun crowd would have my hide for puncturing the notion that Charles Parker invented the 28 gauge. Here we go again. Many people think the .410 is American too, derived from the .44XL metallic shotshell of the early 1900s (itself descended from one of the many .44-caliber-actually .425" -cartridges of the Old West). Not so, but it's an easy mistake to make. In 1900 the Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold a back-action hammer side-by-side (the "Little Pet"; $14) in .44XL. By 1923 Sears was selling single-shot and double guns that would fire both the .44XL and .410 cartridges and also was offering .410 ammunition. By 1927 the transition was complete: The Sears catalog listed only .410s -four single-shot and four side-by-side guns as well as two-inch (3/10-oz) and 21/2" (3/8-oz) .410 ammunition. The brass-hull .44XL was gone. To anyone who didn't know the .410's history, it would seem to have evolved from the .44.

Confusion over the .410 continues. Particularly in Italy, people still refer to it as the 36 gauge, a misnomer that can be traced back through American, British and European gun catalogs, advertisements and even proof-house papers for at least a century. Again, not so. It takes 67.4 lead balls of .410" diameter to make a pound, so .410 bore equates to 67 gauge. The "36" may have been adopted as simply the next step in the progression of actual shotshell sizes-20, 24, 28, 32-regardless of true diameter; and the British long ago decided to stop the gauge scale at 50, so 67 wouldn't fly.

In France the .410 sometimes was called the 12mm, but that makes no sense either, as 12mm is .472". A century ago there was an 11.15x52mm European shotshell, but its .439" bore made it a 55-gauge, so again no direct relationship to the .410. The various obsolete 9mm and .360 shot cartridges were even farther off the mark, dimensionally.

In any event, we know the .410 was a European immigrant. C.W. Harding, in Eley Cartridges-A History of the Silversmith & Ammunition Manufacturer (Safari Press, 2006), shows two forms of "ELEY BROS. .410 LONDON" pinfire headstamps and writes, "Where ELEY BROS. appears on the headstamp . . . these were made between the late 1860s and 1874." Systeme Lefaucheux (Graph-ic Publishers, 2002), by Chris Curtis, has a photograph of a British .410 pinfire cartridge, apparently a 21/2", of that era. Thomas Bland, in England, was offering .410 guns and ammunition by 1882. And on www.4-10.co.uk there is a photograph of a Kynoch Gastight .410 round, evidently sold by Smith & Sons, Newark (Nottinghamshire, that is) in 1886. However, like most other pinfire cartridges, the .410 probably originated in France.

Ron Stadt, writing for the International Ammunition Association at http://cartridgecollectors.org/ 410/collecting410.htm, says that some time after 1868 the French proof house decided that guns of a caliber smaller than 10.6mm (.417") would be tested differently from larger ones and that Pietro Fiocchi, of the Italian ammunition-making family, thus deemed that the .410 became "the divider between serious guns and play guns and that this was probably the birth of the .410 . . . ."

Stadt also turned up a Remington (Union Metallic Cartridge Co.) 11/2" .410 shell from 1915. Remington can't confirm it, but this likely was the first commercial American .410 cartridge. Another source suggests that early Remington ammo was marked "36 GA .410-21/2 IN. (12 MM)," which means the company got it wrong two ways out of three-or was aware of the misnomers and trying to help its customers.

By 1913 the .410 was Eley's third-most-varied shotshell, after the 12 and 16. It appears that, at the time, Eley made at least 31 variations of the .410 round, including seven for handguns and three rimfires. Case lengths ran from 11/4" to 21/2"; among the pinfires there was a ball load. (Pinfire ignition never caught on in the US, save for a few revolvers used in the War Between the States, but in Europe and Britain pinfire shotguns were made well into the 20th Century.)

The .410 has been and still is put to use in a lot of unexpected ways. For example, from the 1930s until the 1970s Holland & Holland made single-shot .410 "whale guns" for the UK's National Institute of Oceanography and other organizations that plotted the movements of whales. These fired markers that were left in the whales and returned if recovered from harvested animals. At the other extreme, at least in the size of their intended targets, were featherweight "collector's guns," generally side-by-sides chambered in .410. In 1885, for example, Purdey's offered them in "all qualities" in .360 or .410 as well as with a .410 shot barrel and a .360 rifled tube. Many companies sold these for the gentlemen adventurers who fanned out across the globe with butterfly nets and guns in the footsteps of Charles Darwin to seek unclassified species. Little guns could kill small game with minimal damage, so their hides and skeletons could be salvaged for science. (And if they also served to shoot rats out of the midden and put food on the table, so much the better.) William Evans offered a .410 walking-stick collector's gun-a barrel in a cane, with a muzzle plug, a folding trigger and a detachable buttstock-and both shot and ball cartridges. Stick and even umbrella guns were fairly common around 1900, and many were chambered in .410. A tea-plantation owner in India or Kenya might carry one to knock off pesky mambas; his counterpart in the city to protect against footpads and cutpurses.

A 1910-era BSA catalog includes a single-shot .410 bolt-action based on the Lee-Metford rifle. Beginning in 1927, .303 Short Magazine Lee Enfields (the renowned army SMLEs) were converted to .410 by the Ishapore armory, in India, for police use. The US Air Force's M6 takedown .22 Hornet/.410 survival gun, made by Ithaca in the 1950s, is little different from Marble's Game Getter of 1908, also a short-barreled, folding over/under, in .22 and first .44XL and then .410. Stevens Arms sold single-barrel .410s as early as 1915, and by 1929 offered five .410s, including a bolt-action and a side-by-side. Savage sold a .410 barrel for its Model 99 lever-action deer rifle. During the Great Depression, Marlin produced a lever-action Model .410; anyone who bought four shares of Marlin stock, at $25 apiece, got one free. J. David Truby and John Minnery's Improvised and Modified Firearms (Paladin Press) lists a WWII assassin's .410 developed by the British Office of Naval Intelligence. In the 1990s Winchester even brought out the New Model 9410, a .410 version of its hallowed lever-action Model 94. Today we have everything from a .410 Derringer to the AK-based Russian Saiga .410 semi-auto with a detachable box magazine.

Beginning around World War I, virtually all American gun companies-including finally, in 1960, Browning with its Superposed-piled on the .410 bandwagon. The first .410 Winchester Model 21 was made in 1950: a 20-gauge frame with two Model 37 .410 barrels. Overseas, every maker from Beretta to BSA made .410s in every grade from sidelock "best" to folding knockabout. But despite its ability to put food on the table and eradicate vermin, its utility for self-defense and crowd control, its alleged standing as a ladies' and kids' gun, and then, by 1940, its inclusion in official competition in skeet, no one has ever taken the .410 seriously as a game gun. Our attitude toward it has not evolved since British author Henry Sharp wrote in Modern Sport Gunnery (Simpkin Press, London, 1906): "Mention made of diminutive arms like the 32-bore and the .410 . . . will be calculated to raise a smile on many faces. Probably few sportsmen would now think of starting in quest of game armed only with a 32-bore, or a .410, as thus they would consider themselves handicapped with greatest severity, both in point of range and width of the killing circle of the shot whilst shooting in competition with those of their companions carrying larger and more powerful weapons."

There's that word again-power. But in bird shooting we're not looking to deliver the smack-down impact of an ounce or more of lead; we only want to put a few pellets just where they're needed.

As English smallbore specialist (and author of Climbing the North Face of the .410) Tim Woodhouse puts it, there is "more to producing even, well-distributed patterns than merely launching as much shot as possible downrange, treating it to an excessive degree of choke and hoping for a satisfactory outcome." This is nowhere more true than in the case of the .410. Overloading, overpowering and over-choking any shotgun harms its patterns, and the smaller the bore, the worse it gets.

Intuitively, for gamebirds we want to pack small shot in our .410s because we think we need more of it-standard modern payloads are "only" half to three-quarters of an ounce. But larger pellets produce better shot patterns because they are less likely to be damaged in their ride down the barrel. This is partly because bigger pellets resist deformation better and partly because there are fewer of them to be deformed. Anything a No. 9 will do downrange a No. 71/2 will do much better. Fewer pellets, of any size, also pattern better than more, because a shorter shot stack in the cartridge requires more wadding underneath it, which cushions the brutal acceleration of combustion and also reduces pellet deformation. (The pellets at the bottom of the stack and along its perimeter suffer the most damage and become the erratic, slow fliers that peel off in odd directions and lag uselessly behind the shot cloud.) Combining these two things-bigger pellets in a smaller shot charge-improves the performance of a cartridge even more. And then the payload can be fired at lower speed because larger (heavier) shot retains more energy (lethality) downrange, which reduces pellet damage more yet. A lighter payload at less speed also reduces recoil, which may be the single best way to improve anyone's shooting. All of this is especially critical in the .410 because the shot charges are minimal; there's not much margin. (And seeing as lead shot now costs more than steel-about $35 for a 25-pound bag of lead-why not use less and do more with it?)

Now consider choke boring: .410s are often choked Full or fuller. However, too much constriction at the muzzle produces even more pellet damage as the pellets are jammed together. Worse yet, it has the perverse effect of wedging apart the shot cloud as the after portions of the payload, still tightly packed and still accelerating, are driven into the pellets that already have emerged from the tube and begun to slow down and spread apart. Because its bore diameter is so small, this effect is proportionally greater in a .410 than in larger guns (and greatest in the 3/4-oz 3" Magnum .410).

The biggest problem with most .410 cartridges and guns is that the former are overloaded and the latter overchoked; ironically, both are meant to make the little gun perform better. As in so many endeavors, it seems that less is more and the answer is "Stop trying so hard!"

Bruce Buck, SSM's Gun Review Editor, calculated chokes for the .410 proportional to its bore: A .003" reduction in barrel diameter at the muzzle is Skeet choke; Improved is .006" constriction; Modified is .011" and Full is about .020". (That's half the rated Full for a 12-gauge gun.) In an e-mail he wrote: "In practice, I've got a Model 42 with a .015" Winchester factory Full choke. Occasionally I humiliate myself shooting FITASC with it. We have a few 50-yard birds. I never hit those. The gun seems to hit that glass wall at about 35 yards. Another of my Model 42s has Briley screw chokes in .003", .009" and .019". At skeet and preserve quail, I can't tell the difference between .003" and .009", but as soon as I screw in the .019" I start to miss.

"If I had any sense, I'd set up all my .410s with .007" and let it go at that."

My own English hammer .410 (one of those "collector's guns" out of India) has Cylinder bores-no constriction at the muzzles-and is proofed for half-ounce 21/2" ammunition. Instead of the unsatisfactory results I half-expected, I discovered that, especially with No. 6 shot, it is an astonishing killer at normal range, so long as I'm on my game and not thinking too much. (If it had been a new gun, I would have gone straight to 3" Magnum loads, for the extra shot and "power," and maybe I would have been disappointed.) Now, 10 years later, I understand why. I also see why the conventional wisdom is anti-.410: To try to make up for the bore's perceived shortcomings, many shotgun and ammunition makers have been inadvertently stacking the deck against the little gun.

If a pellet is traveling at 686 fps when it reaches a pheasant (as a No. 6 is at 35 yards when launched at 1,200 fps), does the bird care whether it was fired from a 12-bore, 20 or 28-or a .410? It's how many pellets can be put on the target that matters. Firing at least three shot into a gamebird's boiler room from any gun requires some skill, a proper combination of cartridge and choke, and the judgment not to reach beyond the effective range of that load/choke/pellet combination. This is especially so for the .410. As well, the "Little Engine" factor ("I think I can, I think I can . . .") applies to the .410 even more than it does to the 28: Regardless of cartridge tuning, choke and the laws of physics, you won't do well with a .410 if you don't teach yourself to believe in it.

Shooting a .410 is easier than we are led to believe, once we get past the handicaps, which are largely self-inflicted or perceived. By now the 28 has claimed its rightful place as a superb game gun. If a good 28-gauge outfit compares to a Porsche Boxster, which can make any driver look and feel like a hero, then a similarly well-sorted-out .410 might be a Lotus Exige-a bit harder to master and more limited in its uses but for all that maybe even more rewarding. There is nothing inherently "bad" about the .410, as many veteran quail hunters can attest. Figure out the variables, apply them correctly, and this smallest of smallbores will return boatloads of satisfaction.

Along with Tim Woodhouse, the other smallbore authority and shotshell contrarian whose expertise we've learned to rely on is Jay Menefee. His Polywad 13 Gram Crak-R shells for the 21/2" .410, with 0.46 oz of high-quality lead shot packed in buffering compound and biodegradable Kraft Paper wads, are the best, most effective .410 loads I know. (Polywad also makes a 3" .410 called the 17 Gram Crak-R, packing .61 oz shot in the same matrix.) Just like Polywad's 28-gauge 20 Gram Crak-Rs, the 13s and 17s compare to deluxe handloads painstakingly worked up by the most clued-in smallbore crank you know-no other factory is doing this kind of work in .410 shotshells. As Menefee likes to put it, "People spend thousands getting the gun right, and then they feed it crap ammo."

If the .410 compares to an Exige, then Lotus's late founder Colin Chapman's famous mantra applies here too. While other sports-car builders beefed up performance by adding horsepower, Chapman instead ordered his engineers to "Add lightness!" Lotus made its name by doing more with less. Chapman would have understood the .410 too.

Author's Note: Many thanks to Steve Helsley for his insights and for sifting his extensive library of old gunning books and catalogs for evidence of early .410 guns and ammunition.