is it safe to shoot slugs from a winchester ws-1 skeet barrel?

will it ruin the barrel, blow up in my face, etc?

I don't know the spec of your WS-1 barrel, and if anyone does, jump in. Skeet barrels have very little choke, which is good. There may be some hard slugs you should avoid, but the soft Foster style slugs should be no problem. Your barrel probably has 2 3/4" chambers, so don't use any 3" shells.

Bye
Jack

thank you very much

im not sure of the barrel details either, a friend was asking me about it and i couldnt find anything on the net about it.

Thanks again for your reply

tjb - I dug through some of the books I have around, and found out a little information, so I wanted to put it out there. In reading through Jack O'Connor's "Complete Book of Rifles and Shotguns" he speaks of Skeet No 1 and Skeet No 2, and states that they throw patterns of about cylinder to improved cylinder for No 1 and about modified for No 2. One would think that Winchester's WS-1 and WS-2 chokes were approximately the same as this. With that in mind, I'd guess that your WS-1 is a fairly open barrel.

If you have a means of measuring it, you could get a diameter reading at the muzzle and compare it to the standard for whatever gauge your gun is to get an idea of how constrictive it is. And, if you do that, you could also take a measurement of one of your slugs and see how it compares.

My understanding is that your typical rifled slug is soft enough and partially hollow so that it can expand to form a gas seal and then squeeze down through a barrel's choke without causing problems. Not sure how the sabots would work out though.

If it were me, and it was just a typical rifled slug, I wouldn't worry, but taking a few measurements could give a bit more piece of mind.

I only skimmed through my "Winchester Model 12" book by Madis and also through Stadt's book on Winchester Shotguns/Shotshells, and I didn't find any specific reference to constriction amounts, only saw that they had WS-1 and WS-2 available in addition to your standard chokes.

So with that in mind, by all means, if anyone else has more on it than me, please chime in.

Dan