A pattern-spreading shotshell I have a great deal of experience with, the Spred-R, is available from Polywad Inc. of Macon, Georgia (800/998-0669). Its designer, Jay Menafee, says it has more spread than a blunderbuss, and he’s not far from right. The Polywad insert he uses looks like a giant plastic thumbtack with a head only slightly smaller in diameter than the inside of a shotshell. When resting inside a loaded shell, the head of the insert sits atop the shot charge while its post is buried among the pellets. As the charge exits the muzzle, air resistance against the large frontal surface area of the insert causes it to quickly slow down, forcing the shot charge outward as it attempts to bypass the obstruction.
In the author’s Fox Sterlingworth, spreader loads open up its Modified and Extra-Full chokes to Skeet and Improved-Cylinder.
This rapid dispersion of the shot results in patterns of larger diameter. Loaded ammunition in available in 28, 20, 16 and 12 gauges, the latter in both 21?2- and 23?4-inch lengths. Inserts are available for handloading in the same gauges. I use scissors to trim 28-gauge inserts to a smaller diameter and load them in the 3-inch .410 shotshells.
Curious to see how effective Spred-R ammunition could be in increasing pattern size, I shot some against premium-grade trap loads with 11?8 ounces of shot. The two Remington 12-gauge shotguns I used included an 1100 autoloader with .004-inch of constriction (Skeet) and a Model 3200 over/under with .040-inch of constriction (Extra-Full) in its top barrel. Spreader loads are intended for close-range shooting, so I backed off twenty yards from the pattern plate and shot the two guns rather extensively, first with Remington STS and Federal Gold Medal trap loads, then with Polywad spreader loads. I also included some of my own handloads containing the Polywad insert and No. 8 shot.
The twenty-yard pattern diameters for the Extra-Full choke, averaged fifteen inches with the trap loads and twenty-three inches with the spreader loads. Patterns fired with the Skeet choke chalked up respective averages of twenty-two and thirty inches. No doubt, the results of my tests would sound more believable if the average pattern diameter increase had not been exactly the same for both guns, but it was.
As the results indicate, the gun with the Extra-Full choke delivered patterns as large in diameter with scatter loads as the Skeet-choked gun did with regular loads. It is also interesting that the spreader loads increase pattern size as much in the gun with almost no choke as they did in the tight-choked gun.
The use of the spreader load is not restricted to guns with fixed chokes; there are times when it can be just as useful in a gun with screw-in chokes, like when singles from a covey of birds flush in open country but end up in the woods. Common sense dictates that it is much quicker to drop a spreader load into the chamber before going in than it is to unload the gun, screw out one choke, screw in another and then reload the gun.
