I bought the capsules way back in about 1986. I know it was then because one of my good friends had a heart attack the prior Thanksgiving. He up and croaked on his living room floor. But the ambulance showed up and revived him. Then he croaked again on the ride to the hospital. They got him running again but just like clockwork, he died again for the ER folks. Well they worked on him and sure enough, he was just restin so he came back to life again. Mean old buzzard.
So that next summer we were working on a club project puttin' up a fence out on the back acreage. It was decided it was too hot for anyone with any sense so we made him sit up at the building. To give him somethun to do, I handed him my model 60 and a full box of my reloaded shot loads. Since he was off beer (doctors orders, like he ever listened to them) he needed amusement. Actually the shot loads were for us to keep track of him. Every time we'd hear a gunshot from up there, we knew he was still alive (not so much the critters).
Well, I'd had a problem loading them. I could never find any shot small like the #12 they used, so I cut up a few #9 and used that. Seemed OK at the time. They loaded up real nice and neat, so I figured they'd be OK and I'd get a report soon enough.
So even if the temps were in the mid 90s and humidity about the same, we managed a pretty good day of plantin poles. And we realize we'd not heard a gunshot in a while. Somebody brighter suggested we might have an emergency, and the cold beer was up where Grady was hangin out. You never saw so many jeeps and pickup truck haulin' toward our building. I shoulda took a picture of the old man, sittin there sippin on a coke. Never saw him do that before or after. Anyway, back to the loads.
He said he fired all of them. He did knock one starling out of a tree, but missed with all the others. So he quick hustled over and stepped on it. That's a time tested solution to assure a dead birdie. I never bothered with loading them for myself again. I've tested factory loads for the years since. If you pattern factory stuff on paper you often get a blown pattern you could throw a dead cat through. They did work on the 'coons I had on the back porch. I used 9mm loads for that. I'm not sayin' I got good results, but I guess it depends on how you define good. The back door opened inward, which would start the festivities. Then the storm door opened to the outside. The critters would all hustle over toward the steps down to the pool. I had to step outside to get a semi aimed shot off.
For a while I was havin' a good ole time. Unlike my wife who suggested I'd get arrested. I ran out of the factory loads for a while. I was using them in a 547 and it provided practice and kept the critters in exercise. so that following summer my oldest and his kids showed up to swim. OK with me. Then he looked at the upright and the handrail down to the pool. He asked me if we had woodpeckers working on the pressure treated wood. Seems they were real well perforated. Go figure. Didn't see many 'coons hangin out though. Never did find any dead or smell any.
I'm going to guess with almost no basis that the factory stuff patterns better than my loads. I had no control over the distance Grady was burnin ammo at. Sure seemed like the fleeing 'coons found another gear some of the times I fired. That or they decided our garbage wasn't worth a sore backside.
