As always, safety comes first when dealing with black powder. This means no smoking should be permitted, and there should be no use of black powder out of the one-pound can in which it comes. You sure do not want to have a pound of this burning up in your face, so always work in small amounts. Also, as far as safety goes, make sure that your shot gun is in good working order. As a rule, muzzle-loading shotguns have much thinner barrels than muzzle-loading rifles. If you are lucky enough to own an old original make sure the barrel is in good enough shape to shoot. If you do not know by looking yourself take the gun to a qualified gunsmith and have it check out.
Now we have to have our supplies besides the powder and shotgun. You will have to have a powder measure, shot of the proper size for what you are using the load for, caps,wads and patches to swap out the barrel after each shot. If you are loading for hunting I like to use a patch that has just a little oil in it. You can make these up by just taking a few patches of the right size and putting some light oil on them and then placing them between two small wooden blocks and squeezing them out in a vise.
I will go through loading a single barrel shot gun, but if you have a double barrel just do every thing twice.
First thing to do when loading is to make sure the barrel and nipple are free of any oil build up from the last cleaning. I will fire a couple of caps off to blow out anything in the nipples and breech. Then remove any fire caps off the nipples and set your hammer to half cock. I will blow air down the barrel to see if it flows easily then I know that it is clear. You can also run a patch down to clean out any oil blown out of the nipples too. If you have a good seal on your patch you will hear the hiss of air coming out too.
Now you will measure out the amount of black powder that you are using in your load and dump in down the barrel. Next you will set a half inch thick wad on top of the powder making sure you get it tight against the black powder. Now with your powder measure set to the same volume fill it to the top with the shot that you are using and pour it down the barrel. Next you will take one of your wads and run it down tight on top of the shot. Some people like to split a full wad in two and only use one half a wad to hold the shot in. But if you are loading a double barrel you should use a full wad. This way when you fire the first barrel the recoil will not loosen the load in the second barrel.
Last thing to do now is to set your caps on top of the nipples and leave the hammer or hammers in half-cock position. You never want to keep your hammer down tight on your cap. If you do you could hit the hammer hard enough to set the gun off.
After you day of shooting you will want to clean your black powder shotgun. Black powder is corrosive and will ruin your gun if not cleaned off.
If you would like to learn about black powder guns and shooting you can go to www.blackpowdergun.foryoutoday.com.
