How does the wad affect the shot? Does it blow through the shot somehow after it leaves the muzzle?
A. No, a modern plastic wad does not “blow through” the shot charge. Today’s plastic wads are very light in weight and (by law of physics) cannot independently fly ahead of the heavy metal shot charge to disrupt it once it’s out of the muzzle and separated from the metal shot. Anyone who claims otherwise (as some do) is very uninformed. The modern plastic shotgun wads generally serve 2 major purposes: they are designed to be a gas seal in the bore and to hold/encase the shot charge and protect the shot from rubbing against and being deformed by the gun’s bore (and with hard iron/steel/tungsten shot, from rubbing the shot against the bore and scratching up the bore). These wads are much easier to load, very cheap and produce more reliable and consistent results than do the previous-tech paper card, fiber, etc. wads. But, with conventional constriction “chokes” (i.e., fixed and interchangeable tube chokes, which we here refer to collectively as “funnel chokes” because of the way they loo
