Smokeless powder in original 87 Winchester

[Gabriel Law]

Esteemed shotgunners...can I use smokeless powder, Clays, for example, in my original '87?  My current load that all my 12 bores like, is 17 grains of Clays, and 1 1/16 oz shot in AA Winchester shells.
I do not want to jeopardize this fine old shotgun.

[jimbobborg]

Those shotguns were designed for 2.5" shells, so new shells are a bit too long to eject properly.  I'd suggest you find some shorter shells and reload those. 

[Gabriel Law]

Thanks for the reply Jim.  I'm thinking I'm best off with brass shells and black powder.  I should be feeding her what she likes.

[Jubal Starbuck]

   When I was shooting my original Winchester 1887 in matches, I  put a cutoff wheel in my Dremel tool and cut Winchester AA cases off at the crimp, loaded them with 2fg blackpowder, put a thin overshot wad atop the shot and roll crimped them with an antique roll crimper I found in an antique store.  I also bought a roll crimper from Ballistic Products that fits in a drlll.  It works well also, but I thought the  hand operated crimper was more fun to use.  Never had a bit of trouble with these shells,feeding, extracting, or shooting.  Seems like I made some paper shells also, but I had lots of AA's on hand, so I used them most of the time.   I reloaded Magtech brass shells with bp also, but used those in a Rossi Coach gun exclusively to avoid having to resize 'em.  Worked for me.

[rickk]

You may find that brass hulls don't feed well. If they do, that is awesome.

If they don't, do as Jubal says and cut some plastic ones down. If you want to cut a lot of them, both Precision Reloading and BPI sell a hull trimmer that will cut them with ease to whatever length you wish.

[Cemetery]

Esteemed shotgunners...can I use smokeless powder, Clays, for example, in my original '87?  My current load that all my 12 bores like, is 17 grains of Clays, and 1 1/16 oz shot in AA Winchester shells.
I do not want to jeopardize this fine old shotgun.

I remember seeing a discussion of this on a black powder thread....it was concluded that one would be well advised to use a slow burning, low pressure spike smokeless powder.....otherwise, load with the data from the low side grainage side of the chart.

As for modern length shells in an original, why not get the chamber reamed?  Or dropping in a modern length shell to see if it's already been reamed, that's what I did, turns out it was already fixed for modern lenght shells.