I’m resurfacing briefly to go all geeky on the subject of buckshot. Bear with me.

Mention buckshot to the average shooter and he’ll probably assume you mean #00 buck. The gold-standard buckshot load you’ll find in every *mart in America is the 12-ga. 2 3/4″ 9-pellet load; it’s offered by just about every company that pours powder and lead into shotshells. While t’s indisputably effective and I’d never want to be on the receiving end, a little math shows that we can do better.

#00 buckshot is nominally 0.330″ in diameter, with a nominal pellet weight of 53.8 grains. Put 9 of ‘em into a 12-ga hull and you’re launching 484 grains of lead with a total frontal area of .77″. Formidable, to be sure. It’s also not the best use of the internal volume of the shotshell.

Those 9 pellets stack up in 3 staggered layers of 3 pellets each. If you instead switch to #1 buckshot, at 0.300″ diameter and 40.5 grains each, you can make much more efficient use of the shell’s internal space. Instead of a 3×3 arrangement of pellets, you can have a nice shot column of 4 staggered layers of 4 pellets each, like so:

#1 buck shot column on the left, #00 on the right.

So what’s the big deal? With #1 buck we get 16 pellets instead of 9. Yes, they’re smaller and lighter, but the increase in pellet count FAR outweighs the decrease in pellet size. Total payload is now 648 grains with a total frontal area of 1.13 inches. That’s a 34% increase in weight and 47% increase in frontal area! Look at the two payloads side-by-side and the difference is dramatic.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The smaller #1 pellets are fully 25% lighter than #00 pellets, and will give up some penetration. And if you’re launching more lead at the same velocity, you’re necessarily also accepting more recoil in return. Then there’s the matter of availability; you can find #00 just about anywhere, but #1 buck is going to be a mail-order proposition for most of us.

If you can get your hands on some #1 buck, try it in your favorite scattergun. Patterns from my Benelli are the same size as #00 patterns, but with a more even distribution of pellets.

Aaaand I’m back to semi-hiatus mode. Go shoot your shotguns.