alleyyooper

I learned to pick up patches when shooting round ball to read what was happening. So it was only natural to continue to pick up and look at sabots when shooting pistol bullets to see what was happening.
Here are 3 sabots. Two have been shot, one hasn't. The shot ones were from my T/C plains rifle. One was shot with a temp above 50F. One was shot with a temp of 16F and wind chill of -2F. Can you tell which one was not shot.
I put the different bullets in them so I would remember the unused one, old short term memory ya know.







This question was prompted by some asking if sabots could be reused else where.

Al

yeoman

I'm gonna guess the Gold Dot was not fired. Pretty amazing it's not easier to tell. Was this combo very easy to load? I would have expected greater scarring just from loading the thing. Then again, I shoot slow twist, deep grooves. Wonder if that makes a difference.

Rebel Hog

I would say .....the one in the middle, XTP

Bake North

I would say the Gold Dot and the XTP had been shot.

dmurphy317

I'm going to say left to right 1. shot at low temp, 2. shot at higher temp, 3. unshot.

So what do I win?

alleyyooper

Bake North& dmurphy317I see have been reading sabots them selves. They have the correct fireing.

So the next question? Would you shoot any or all again at the range?

I have some T/C express Mag sabots that are as scared up from pushing them from the breech to the muzzle unloading the 54 cal rifle.

MO Archer

By the looks of them I would take 3 'already fired' and 3 'unfired' and shoot two diffent groups with them from the same gun with the same rest. If the 'already fired' ones have a decent group compared to the 'unfired' ones then you should have your answer. Sounds like a cool experiement that alot ofus should do next time on the range and share all of our results together.

dmurphy317

I would be interested in the results of that test. I have on occasion shot a few REAL's that had been loaded once before. What I did is re-lineup the engraved rifling and push it on down. It seemed to shoot as well as the others but the load had not been tweeked so I can't say it was as accurate as it could have. I've not tried it with a sabot before. Let us know how it goes.

alleyyooper

I've already tried it and found that the groups are the same as with new sabots. Of course I won't use them for hunting and I also won't reuse the ones with the skirts really thined from shooting on real hot days.
Al