How to break clays .com

Q. How much shot is needed to break a clay? I've just shot a few clays and a couple didn't break but had holes in them.

A. So, Frederick, you've just added another reason to all those we use to explain a miss on the card! You may know that cartridges have many pieces of lead, the number varying according to the size and therefore weight of the shot. For instance, a 28g cartridge filled with no8 shot will have somewhere around 410 pieces of shot and a no9 shot 28g cartridge should have about 585 pellets. There are several variables which come into play when we break clays; distance, cartridge, choke, target edge on or full face, target speed - we could go on finding excuses but it all boils down to putting the shot string in the way of the target. Most of our shot will be in a pattern 15 - 30 inches across and given hundreds of pellets in the right place at the right time, we get clays broken convincingly. However, if we don't get it quite right the target could be clipped by a few pellets on the outside edge of the string which will result in a clay with an edge shot off, that gives a good indication of where you are pointing the gun, front, top, bottom, etc. Delving further into shotgun cartridge ballistics we find that some lead pellets are forced along the barrel wall and as lead is a soft metal it can go out of shape leading to what's sometimes called a 'flier', that is a single piece of shot which finds itself away from the main shot string; I have a collection of clays with single or double holes in them, including rabbits shot fairly close, a classic example of fliers. This is a bit off course but I want to explain why single pellets exist out of such large numbers; the real answer to your question though, is only 1 pellet is needed to break a clay - wherever it is in relation to the shot string, a single lead pellet can retain enough energy to mark that clay on your card.

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