Is it possible or feasible to load bird shot or buck shot into a black powder gun?

Yes, you can do it quite safely. In fact, in teh old days, they used to use what whate was called ';buck and ball';. This was a load consisting of both a patched ball and some buckshot. it was a very effective load. Shot loads work best in a smoothbore gun. If you fire it from a rifled gun, you have two probelms. One is the pattern will not be good and the other is that you will have leading in your bore caused when the lead from the shot gets into the rifling causing lead fouling which will have to be scrubbed out.





Here is the way to load your gun with shot. Start by using the same amount of powder as you have been using when shooting a patched ball. Pour this amount of powder down the bore, place a piece of wadding on top of the powder. The old timers used waspnest and claimed it was the best thing to use. Just be sure to harvest your waspnest material from abandoned waspnests. Once you have seated a piece of waspnest on your powder, pour the same volume of shot as the amount of powder that you used. Just use your powder measure to measure your shot. Place another piece of waspnest on top of the shot and you are ready to fire. If you do not have any waspnest handy, you can just use some wadded newspaper instead.





After you are through shooting, you will need to pay special attention to cleaning the lead out of the rifling in your bore (if you were shooting a gun with a rifled bore). If your gun was a smoothbore, you should have no lead fouling to speak of.Is it possible or feasible to load bird shot or buck shot into a black powder gun?
Yes, they make black powder shotguns specifically for birdshot.


The old original black powder guns were smoothbore, and they loaded them whith whatever was handy and available (the blunderbus)


More modern blackpowder RIFLES have a twisted rifling machined in the barrel to provide a spiral or ';spin'; to the bullet as it is leaving the barrel. You could certainly load a blackpowder RIFLE with bird or buckshot, but it could possibly harm the rifling inside the barrel. I'd suggest only using a smoothbore blackpowder SHOTGUN for bird and buckshot.Is it possible or feasible to load bird shot or buck shot into a black powder gun?
Somewhere in my mothers china cabinet is my grandfathers shot dipper. He had a blackpowder double barrel shotgun, and used the dipper for measuring loads to pour down the barrel. So yes, it's not only possible, but it's something that's been done for over 100 years!
Definitely possible and feasible. Until paper cartridges came about, that was what they did. Be careful at first until you figure out a load that will work well for you. Also, make sure that it is not a rifled barrel



If it weren't most of the hunters in history would have been in trouble. It's only been a little over a century, after all, that we've had smokeless propellants.