Hornady Custom Lite Shotgun Slugs

By Payton Miller

In the past 20 years or so, the advances in slug technology—in concert with dedicated slug guns—has been little short of amazing. Yet many guys, like myself, who grew up in “rifle states,” may have been oblivious to it. I’ve used sabot slug loads and scoped shotguns just enough to appreciate the fact at real-world deer yardage, you’re not giving up all that much.

Take a serious, rifled-barrel bolt-action item like a Browning A-Bolt or Savage 220 12-gauge, however, and when it comes to zeroing at the bench, you could well be wishing yourself back in a rifle state with a nice, gentle .243. And you may be asking yourself: “Do I really need to be pushing a 375-grain sabot slug at 1,900 fps to kill a whitetail at 75 yards?”

One way to avoid the inevitable beating is to switch to a 20-gauge. But what if you don’t really want to get another dedicated slug gun? Here’s another option: Hornady’s Custom Lite 12-gauge slug load, featuring an aerodynamically superior 300-grain FTX at a bit over 1,500 fps.

I recently shot some out of a Browning A-Bolt topped with a 2-7X Burris Droptine Slug Gun variable after several 5-packs of “high-test” stuff from various manufacturers. It was like getting a massage by comparison. Hornady claims a 40-percent reduction in recoil and I now believe them.

According to the tables, putting it 4-1/2 inches high at 100 yards puts you dead on at 150. At 100 I was getting consistent 3-shot groups measuring a bit under 2 inches. I’ll take that all day long. Heck, I wish I could rely on that with a peep-sighted .30-30 lever gun!

A couple of issues from now, we’ll be doing an extensive rundown on slugs—high-tech sabot loads employing streamlined projectiles, Foster-type traditional smoothbore and, yes, even some comparisons using a Carlson rifled choke tube. We’ll be using rifled barreled scoped guns as well as iron-sighted smoothbores. It ought to be fun and instructive for as long as our shoulders can stand it! And we hope it’ll provide interesting dope should you be in a shotgun deer state. Stay tuned.

Hornady Manufacturing Company
3625 W. Old Potash Hwy.
Grand Island, NE, 68803
(800) 338-3220
https://gunsmagazine.com/company/hornady-manufacturing-company/

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