16/01/2026
Here is the latest project, I found out from shops and wholesalers that they are still selling plenty of 22 birdshot shells, however as I suspected the little shot shells shoot poorly from rifled barrels, with massive spread and thus limited effectiveness . So I set about making a 22 shotgun, after bit of experimenting and a chat with Akaroa1 on here, I found that I could ream out the rifling on a standard 22 barrel.
A few experiments later found that with a plain 6mm bore the pattern was vastly improved on the rifled version (down to about a 1/3 or 1/4 of the original spread) giving a decent quantity of pellets within a 100mm circle at around 5Mtrs. At this range the pellets would pierce through a cardboard box and embed in the bark of an old tree, so more than enough power to dispatch a small pest. I found that the CCI shells were by far the best so am sticking with them.
Now this thing is very quiet anyway but created a small suppressor to further take the sound down with it now sounding like the old kids cap guns.
So there you have it something very specialized but would potentially be ideal for problem birds inside sheds, barns, cow sheds, orchards etc. and all manner of other small pests. There is not much else that fills a similar where you have minimal risk of surrounding damage and have a pattern as opposed to say one air gun pellet.
