Lee slugs in rifled 12 gauge . . .
Dixie Slugs, you touched on a subject I've been looking for the voice of experience to tell me about. I have a number of questions concerning traditional style slugs in rifled bores. Most of the people I've talked to are of the opinion that Forster (sp?) slugs don't give good results witha rifled barrel. It seems to me there are several factors which would cause this:
1. Being rifled, soft and hollow, they don't provide sufficient strength or contact surface for the rifling to grip and probably strip badly. It seems to me what's needed is a wheel-weight cast slug with thicker walls and smooth cylindrical sides.
2. No lubrication for all that bore length. Even my smoothbore barrel shows a silvery frost at the muzzle and it's not an even distribution. A way to address this using a handloaded slug is with lube grooves, a shot cup or paper-patch them with teflon-tape over the paper-patch. This has worked very well in a .375 Win.
3. Twist rate. The Paradox guns were only rifled for about 2 - 4 inches at the muzzle (like a rifled choke) and the 12-bore had a rate of 1 turn in 100 inches. Very gentle. Today's rifled slug barrels have a 1 in 34" rate which is three times faster, though necessary for the longer .44 and .45 bullets to be stabilized, thus commiting me to the use of $2-a-shot sabot slugs unless I can come up with a less expensive alternative which I thought the Lee arrangement might be, but had no one to ask.
How does my surmise compare with your experiences, and have you experimented with rifled chokes? What diameter are the Lee slugs when cast of a stout alloy?