Brass Shotgun Shells

[Pomona Pete]

      Need a bit of help.  I know this is the wrong place for this thread but I hope I will be forgiven.  Can anyone help with infor about loading 16 gage brass shells with Trail Boss.  Thanks

[Steel Horse Bailey]

Not in charge of forgiving: 

Have you tried the website?  http://www.imrpowder.com/trailboss.html

It would seem that IMR doesn't recommend it for shotgun use.

[Abilene]

Pete,
Threre are probably better places than STORM to ask your question, but I will mention that as a user of brass hulls for BP for a number of years, I've read lots of posts about using them.  It seems that they can be made to work with smokeless but it is more difficult to achieve decent performance than with BP. 

The following paragraph is a post from StoneyMike that I saved from 2001:

"I use Remington-Umc all brass hulls. They take a regular rifle/pistol primer. I use CCI Magnum pistol. Never had a light strike or misfire of any kind.  I use Titegroup in my 45Colt pistol and Rifle so I looked on the Hodgdon web site and found a handicap load using Titegroup that looked good.  It took some tweaking to get it right but now I'm set on 22 gr of Titegroup, on top of that an 11,guage, 1/4 overpowder wad from CircleFly wads. Then a half inch fiber cushion wad also from CircleFly. and another 1/4 card wad. This is mainly to take up space in the hull. I them use a Win AA RED wad. A regular white wad will be too long even without the last card and the red would be too short, trust me this is the combiation that works the best for me. I use 1 1/8 ounce of 7 1/2 shot and then another 1/4 heavy card and a slight
crimp, Just enough to hold the card and cycle good, It doesn't take much.  You need the 1/4, harder card at the end instead of the thin overshot card.  Unlike blackpowder you need pressure to get a good burn. I tried the thin over shot card glued in with various things but the primer was blowing the wad befor the powder ignited and the shot and wad barely left the barrel."

Note that he was using Rem-UMC hulls which are probably pretty similar in thickness to the Magtech, if that is what you are wanting to use.  Although your question regarded 16ga instead of 12ga, perhaps the info above will be useful to you regarding shell load construction and the need to use the larger overshot card to help the burn.  In the years since I've seen a few other people mention using smokeless so it can be done.  Others have mentioned that the additional pressure of the smokeless loads causes the shells to expand more and need to be resized.

Hope that helps.  Good luck,
Abilene