Shotgun loading doesn't get much comment here. Its pretty formulaic and not much experimenting to do, so I guess not much interest locally.
Anyhow...
I had to make up some more of my short range duck loads and went and grabbed a bunch of my once fired AA hull pile.
These are all AA HS hulls, but are a bit older (You can tell by the variety of markings on them... and the usual lack of the HS stamping on the case head...)
I was going along and all the sudden noticed some really odd looking primers in the dump tray. Went in and picked through them...
This is what I found- and went and pulled some hulls with them...
Notice the varying colors and sizes of the primers.
The "newer" one is the 24 gm hull with the AA-HS headstamp. These were nickel plated battery cup with a copper colored primer.
There is the older AA hull marking light load with a similar appearance but the primer head is brass colored as opposed to the redder copper color.
Then there is an intermediate one which has the old style case head (no HS markings) but is with the new style case printing. This has a copper battery cup and primer. There are actually two variants here, but you cannot tell them from looking at the cases...
Finally, there is a older (but still HS) International hull with a nickel battery cup and primer.
Then there are the primers...
The primers fall into these groups:
A new unfired W209 primer
Length 0.298" diameter at base of battery cup 0.243
All copper long version- length 0.2965 dia 0.239
Nickel cup/copper primer length varied a bit- 0.333 to 0.311 (these are fired, but this one did show a lot of variation in the 5 I looked at-) Diameter 0.243
Copper battery cup/brass primer- length 0.316, diameter 0.244
Nickel cup and primer- Length 0.309, diameter .2435
Short copper cup with copper primer- Length 0.226, diameter 0.245
I thought this rather odd.
While I noticed color variations over time with Winchester shotgun primers, I never noticed any size discrepancy... yet here it is.
These were all factory Win AA loads that I brought a while back- I typically just keep recycling them until the lot either looks too poorly or starts loose primer fitting, and I really haven't usually paid attention with the AA loads as I typically load those on my hydraulic PW press which I have set up to dump primers into an old powder jug, so I don't really see them...
I found this interesting and somewhat odd- but the shells all loaded fine and they all functioned fine when new, so I have no idea if there is performance changes.
