Pattern Opinions, etc. wanted

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I recently took an "Introduction to Defensive Shotgun" class. As part of the class, we got to pattern our shotguns, and I'd like to know what people think.

My gun for the class was a police trade-in Remington 870 Police Magnum with a manufacturing date of 1989 (I think). I don't have a lot of experience with shotguns, but it sure felt like the action on this thing was really smooth. I only had two bobbles with the gun (and, of course, both times it was for a timed-test), and I'm 95% sure the bobbles were user error, so that's good.

The bad is that I think my barrel sucks. I didn't get a picture of my 5-yard patterns, but both Hornady Black 8-pellet reduced recoil and Fiocchi Defense Dynamics 9-pellet #1, the patterns were much bigger that I wanted (I know @RustyCrusty has gotten some great results from this Fiocchi load, but not me).

At 10-yards, I switched to Federal FliteControl 8-pellet 00 (LE13300). Not bad
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At 15-yards, however, the FFC started opening up. The bottom spread is Hornady Black (with their VersaTite wad). This pattern was really important to me, as the longest indoor shot in my house is 13 yards.
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At 25-yards with FFC... well, they're all on the target, but I'm not sure I would take that shot
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@TCinVA and @LHS (or anyone else) can you comment? I don't have much basis for comparison. I was really, really disappointed by the Hornady and Fiocchi loads; I expected more out of them.

Some other things I learned from the class:

Bead sights absolutely suck. I need to put a dot on this gun, but the receiver isn't drilled/tapped for an optic, so I need to find a gunsmith.

LockTite is a thing. I discovered half-way through the class that I hadn't LockTite-d my flashlight. It flew off in embarrassing fashion.

A dump-pouch is a poor way to have your reloads, especially a low(-er) hanging one. I need to get myself some more Esstac cards (or something similar) or one of the 5.11 belt pouches I saw that is sized to hold a box of shotgun shells.

(sorry about the double-post; this was probably the right place to put my questions)

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Guerrero

At 15-yards, however, the FFC started opening up. The bottom spread is Hornady Black (with their VersaTite wad). This pattern was really important to me, as the longest indoor shot in my house is 13 yards.
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At 25-yards with FFC... well, they're all on the target, but I'm not sure I would take that shot
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I'm not sure what I'm looking at with that second photo because of the lighting. My assumption is that the pattern in question is the four pellets in the top white piece of paper with the rest of the pattern being further off to the left with what looks like two pellets in nearly the same hole and the final one to the far left right by the wooden strip holding the target up.

If so, that target appears to be a standard USPSA/IDPA silhouette which is about 18" wide. That would mean your pattern's most extreme spread is 9" at 25 yards. Which isn't bad.

Is it as good as other shotguns I've seen? No, but that's the way it goes with shotgun barrels. At the Tactical Conference a couple of weeks ago I saw a Mossberg 590A1 that held a 2.5" pattern at 15 yards. I told the owner it was obviously dangerously defective and he should dispose of it immediately by putting it in the back of our truck.

You also have a single shot there. Every time you fire a buckshot round with a shotgun, you are engaged in a game of chance. You don't know exactly where all the pellets are going to end up. At best you have sort of a cone of relative certainty. (Rifles are pretty much the same thing at distance...a 4 MOA setup is an 8 MOA cone at 200, 12 MOA at 300, 16 at 400, etc) Any single shot could be weird for any number of reasons up to and including some sort of manufacturing error or artifact in a single shell.

In class I usually have folks fire 3-5 rounds to get a better idea of what normal looks like for their gun with that ammunition. We pattern at 5 yards (across a typical residential room), 15 yards (usually the longest shot available in someone's house plus a little bit) and then at 25 if we have an abundance of time and ammo to do it with. Some folks never get to pattern other than in class so I try to make as much room for it as possible. With 5 yards it's usually a single shell because it's usually almost a singular hole...but every now and then we see buckshot that's going to suck throwing big patterns at even 5 yards.

So here's what you should do:

Go to the range and set up at least 2 clean targets. Fire 3-5 rounds on a clean target at 15 yards. Then do the same on another clean target at 25. That will give you some data you can actually begin to work with. With 3-5 shots per range you can see trends in how the gun patterns and how distance is effecting those patterns.

Just looking at the two targets above and comparing it to what I've seen in the past, I'm seeing essentially two groups of pellets behaving like their own individual patterns. Three pellets and a flyer to those three on both shots opening up each mini-pattern. Only one of which ends up around point of aim.

I see this "grouping" phenomenon in even FFC buckshot pretty regularly in class. It wouldn't surprise me if your gun is doing that, too...but with a single shot at both distances it's impossible for me to make that call. If you had three to five at each distance you start to see distinct tendencies show up. You may even find your gun is one of the ones that shoots 9 pellet better than 8 once you start generating some usable data.

Obviously n=5 isn't going to meet any scientific confidence interval, but nobody has time and money to pattern 100 of the same shells from the same lot of ammunition through their guns for the purposes of creating a statistically significant sampling, either.

Or it could just be that those two shots were weird that day because your barrel was dirty or something was up with the ammo. Generally my clue that I need to clean the bore of my shotguns is when I see the patterns start to get weird. Or I will end up putting in a shell that's been riding around in my vehicle for months subject to all manner of vibrations and temperature changes and it will pattern funny.

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I was really, really disappointed by the Hornady

It has been my experience that 9 out of 10 shotguns will pattern 8 pellet FFC better than 9 pellet.
It has been my experience that 9 out of 10 shotguns will pattern FFC better than Hornady Versa-tite.

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and Fiocchi loads

Fiocchi makes good ammo, but their buckshot performance usually ranges from acceptable to pretty good. Their Defense Dynamics loads usually do OK, but I've never seen a gun shoot them outstandingly well. This is what I get from my teaching 870:

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That's my usual 5 yards (headshot) and two shots to the chest at 15. Note that even at 5 yards I have a 9th pellet flyer. That right there is a clue that your gun might greatly prefer 8 pellet.

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Bead sights absolutely suck. I need to put a dot on this gun, but the receiver isn't drilled/tapped for an optic, so I need to find a gunsmith.

I agree. In fact, I agree so hard I wrote a rant that became an entire thread on the topic of shotgun sighting. Most people find beads hard to use when we're shooting for defensive purposes.

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I need to get myself some more Esstac cards

No.

Repeat after me: Vang Comp Shotshell Cards.

What everybody on the internet thinks the Esstac cards do, the Vang Comp cards actually do. They are superior in every way.

Thanks @TCinVA that's gold advice.