Two budget priced lighter loads for comfort at a modest price reviewed by Richard Atkins
Richard Atkins has decades of experience testing guns, cartridges and accessories, and is our expert on all aspects of ballistics, shotgun performance and technical analysis
We are hearing much more about lighter loads at the moment. Considering all the hoo-ha that surrounded the original move from 32 gram to 28 gram shot loads, when a lot of shooters thought their scores would go down, the desire to go to 24 gram loads for clays seems to be growing by itself.
Pondering the reasons for increasing interest in 24 gram loads I suspect there are three main aspects: First is the potential cost saving (although some premium 24 gram loads will cost more than some budget priced 28 gram cartridges). Another obvious one is lower recoil; providing the 24 gram loads are not ultra high velocity this is easy to detect for yourself and a very desirable feature of lighter loads.
The key factor then becomes effectiveness: just how well can a 24 gram load compare against a 28 gram load?
I’m sure the well established 21 gram 12 gauge loads, used by many instructors and shooting schools etc, helped spread the word and knowledge that lighter loads can break clays well too. Introduced when lead prices rocketed a few years ago, with many of us glad of a cartridge that helped keep costs down, they remain quite popular.
We were happy to keep shooting albeit (as we often thought) shooting at a disadvantage; but we also found they were amazingly smooth and soft to shoot with and, to our amazement, we were soon breaking more clays than we anticipated.
I have written articles explaining why lighter shot loads can, and often do ‘punch above their weight’ so won’t re-run that here; but there are sound reasons why.
We have featured some of the recently reintroduced Maionchi AZ20 range (and have more for future review) but with growing interest in 24 gram loads we look at those this month.
The distinctively printed yellow, blue and white cartons of 25 carry the shot size and load information weight on the front. Note that the 2.4mm printed alongside 7.5 indicates shot size is Italian, so pellets should be closer to UK shot size 7.
These loads closely follow the makeup of the 28 gram loads we reviewed previously; they even use the same 70mm long orange plastic parallel Martignoni cases with 10mm metal heads. It would be easy to load the lighter load into a 67mm case and save a
