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Can anyone help me to find a UK source of .38 Special shot cartridges, or the components to reload my own.
I understand that CCI manufacture these.

Your local registered fire arms dealer or Henry Kranks.

I cant find what I want on Henry Kranks ( I have pervoiusly looked ) and my local RFD has drwan a blank !

Heres some, and it says they are in stock......

https://www.airgunspares.com/0766830370 ... hells.html

I just put "CCI .38 special shot shells UK" into Google........

tonyshooter wrote:Can anyone help me to find a UK source of .38 Special shot cartridges, or the components to reload my own.
I understand that CCI manufacture these.

I've not done it myself but I have read on another forum some years ago of a shooter creating .38 shotshells for rat control in a barn using just gas checks to encase the shot within the cartridge case. The lower gas check acts as an over-powder wad and the top gas check is held in place by the roll-over crimp. Photographs of the patterns at seven to ten yards that he posted were no better or worse than those that I have witnessed with the CCI commercial cartridges and obviously the cost if it really does work will be considerably cheaper. There might even be something on Youtube showing the process.

Back in the happy times I bought a pack of the CCI plastic capsules for home loading. You could fill them with any shot size you wanted, cue our own "Devastator" rounds, a mix of LG and No7. However on firing the first few rounds the target looked like it had been shot with wadcutters. On average 1 in 3 would fail to split along the preformed nose cuts. Even with just No 7 or 8 shot the results were the same.

I did try a pack of the factory loads but the patterns weren't much good beyond 10 meters.
The .22LR ones were even worse.

There was an article in Gun Digest that made use of cut down .410 wads and a simple card overshot wad, the concept being encapsulation to help protect the shot and mitigate blown out patterns caused by rifling. The author made up some in .45 ACP using cut down .308 cases and had good results. I think he also tried the gas check approach in .38 SPL using .357 cases with better results than the capsules.

I made some up to use in my .44 marlin on rats in the hay sheds but quickly came to the conclusion that they were good for popping balloons and not much more.