Letters

Better with Batha

It goes without saying that of all the magazines and periodicals I receive, Shooting Sportsman is my favorite. It allows me to keep connected to the world of wingshooting and the hunting heritage that I value as an American. I also value the informative team of writers your magazine has assembled: Vic Venters, Tom Huggler, Bruce Buck, etc., and especially Tom Roster and (of course) Michael McIntosh—any sporting magazine in the world would be proud of this staff. (And I also say this as a minor academic of sorts.)

Further to that, I must point out that with the recent edition of Chris Batha as a regular writer (Sporting Clays column) SSM has become even better. I have enjoyed reading Mr. Batha’s guest pieces in your magazine, but now that he is a regular contributor, I am delighted—and I’m sure your other subscribers will be also. His column “Best Foot Forward” (Sept/Oct) is an example of an article that is informative and written so that all may understand.

Of course I am not surprised; Chris Batha’s reputation precedes him. In the past 25 years he has established himself as a knowledgeable wingshooting/shotgun expert, both in theory and practice.

Again, congratulations on bringing Mr. Batha on board. I am sure that your readers will benefit from his contributions. I know I will.
Keith Bukovich
Trenton, Michigan

Show Me the Shotstrings

Admittedly, I am a bit of a “minutia monster” and sometimes succumb to pedantic tendencies. That said, I’ve just finished reading Michael McIntosh’s article “Strung Out” (Shooting, Sept/Oct) and, regarding the article’s historical foundation, I won’t say it’s wrong (few sources are cited), but I have a hunch that some of the observations may not be entirely accurate. I have “no dog” in the shotstring debate but, if the factual base is unsound, what level of confidence can the reader have with the conclusions? Four examples follow with some additional historical context.

McIntosh starts with “In the 1890s some enterprising Frenchman thought of dropping iron plates from the Eiffel Tower while someone shot them on the way down.” Completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower’s roof is 986 feet high. Given the tower’s shape, I’m having difficulty picturing where the shooter would stand as those steel plates raced by on their way to terminal velocity. I suspect that the “Eiffel Tower” was actually a tower in London Sporting Park operated by W. Webster Watts. According to Sir Gerald Burrard in his book The Modern Shotgun, the results of Watts’ falling-plate tests were reported in the February 16, 1907, issue of The Field.

The Autumn 1996 issue of The Double Gun Journal contained an important article by R.J. Robel: “British Study Behavior of Nontoxic Shot.” I assume this is what McIntosh is referring to when he writes “a couple of engineers from the University of London devised a pattern plate comprising one-inch squares each wired to a computer... Their findings were fascinating but still inconclusive.” Robel reports that the study was done by Dr. Roger Giblin of University College London, the London Proof House, Holland & Holland and the Royal Military College of Science. It was funded by the British Dept. of Environment to assess the effectiveness of nontoxic shot. By March 1996 10,000 rounds had been fired through their test barrel and 100 reports issued to various manufacturers. I don’t know if the results were ever released; however, their testing device allowed for the measurement of when the shot struck the target, the velocity, and the retained energy as well as the length and shape of the shot-column profile. I’m guessing that at least a few conclusions were reached. Note: I believe that Bruce Buck has corresponded with Giblin regarding the conclusions. In a document Buck wrote that I found on the Internet, he states that at 40 yards a shotstring will be eight to 12 feet long. Given the way the response is constructed, he seems to have used data from Giblin.

Next we learn about shotstringing that “It remained for a Texan, my old friend the late Bob Brister, to demonstrate the phenomenon once and for all.” Brister attached 4 x 8 sheets of plywood to a trailer and fired at the attached targets as his wife drove by at various speeds and distances. The effort was surely a “labor of love” but had been done in various forms before. In the 1870s Captain Wm. deV. Foulke paid “brakies” to allow him to attach sheets of paper to the sides of coal cars and then shoot at them as they passed. In February 1926 Burrard and his assistant C.E. Allen used a “sheet iron” target on a moving car to study shotstringing. In Brister’s excellent book Shotgunning, the Art and the Science, he describes Burrard’s tests and results as well as those of many others who conducted the seminal research on the subject.

Finally there is the assertion that, using high-speed photography, in the “early ’60s Winchester inadvertently captured at least a portion of a shotstring” for the first time on film. An article in the June 1928 edition of American Rifleman, “Determining the Length of Shot Strings,” by Phillip Quayle of the Peters Cartridge Co., describes a collaboration between Peters and the US Bureau of Standards. Peters and two other (unidentified) brands were tested. Full-sized pictures of shotstrings were taken out to 40 yards. Their conclusions were that there were no differences between brands, that the 40-yard string with No. 6 chilled shot was 12 feet, and that the first 3.6 feet contained 50 percent of the shot. Quayle also notes that in 1925 the first full-sized short-range spark photographs of shotstrings were published in American Rifleman.

The shotstringing issue has been studied for more than 200 years and reported on extensively. In 1801 a Frenchman named Gorbert used a rapidly revolving paper disk to measure shotstrings. In 1887 R.W.S. Griffith did similar experiments using a flat circular target that was 12 feet in diameter. His results were reported in the April 9, 1887, issue of The Field. The shotstring at 40 yards with a choke bore from the front pellets (No. 6s) to the 90th-percent pellet was 7.7 feet, to the 95th-percent pellet was 10.4 feet, and to the last pellet was 14.1 feet.

This is an emotional topic that rivals other great wingshooting questions like “16 versus 20 gauge, what’s best for upland game?” McIntosh concludes that “progressive-burning powders, harder pellets and better shot-cup wads” have shortened shotstrings. That conclusion may be correct, but you can’t prove it with the content of this article.
Steve Helsley
El Dorado Hills, California

Michael McIntosh responds:

I am aware of the “tests” Mr. Helsley cites, some of which were subsequently shown to be spurious—reports, in other words, of “tests” that never actually took place. I could have included them in the story I wrote, but that would have bogged everything hopelessly in meaningless details. I certainly have written my fair share of trivia, possibly more than my share, but if I’ve learned anything in 40 years of professional writing, it’s that every story needs a point, clearly expressed.

Perhaps I failed to make the point in this case, or perhaps Mr. Helsley missed it. Shotstringing does exist, and its extent influences the efficiency of any gun and cartridge. It’s not an “emotional” issue, merely a technical one, of which every serious shooter should be aware.

I’m sorry if I didn’t include footnotes, but I got a bellyful of that in college and graduate school. Endless citations reduce what might otherwise be good writing to the level of dishwater. I chose additional coursework over the option of writing a master’s thesis and chose not to write a doctoral dissertation at all. At the time, writing books and magazine articles for money was a far more attractive possibility. Didn’t work out so badly, after all.

There is more in Heaven and Earth—also in guns and cartridges—than is dreamt of in philosophy or techno-wonkism.