So a couple days ago, I found a flat of loose shells that I had (stupidly) set in my garage last fall and forgot about. When I opened it up, I saw a bunch of rust. Dang it. So I went through and wiped them all down with a rag and WD40. What I found kinda surprised me. The pile on the left are perfect, no corrosion. In the middle, will still shoot but have some corrosion. On the right, are going in the garbage. The Federal Premiums (red box) had little to no corrosion for the most part. The Estates did ok, and the Kents were almost all corroded really bad.



For the second part of my test, I tore into the shells to check out the powder, wads and pellet uniformity. The wads were all different, with the Feds and Kents both having a one-piece wad and the Estates having a 2 piece wad. Powder was nice and dry in all three. However, the pellets in the Estates were absolutely abysmal. Every single one was deformed and had some kind of flaw. Slag, dimples, ovality, etc etc. See for yourself.

Kents


Feds


Estates

Time to put in my application for quality control manager at the estate factory

Estates are made by Federal. I have a couple buddies that work at the Federal plant in Anoka, MN. They swear up and down that all of Federals shells (including Estates) come off the same line.

if you think that is bad, you should cut open a hevi shot shell, or buy a bag of it for reloading....its absolutely ridiculous. there will even be some that is pretty much two and sometimes even three pellets lumped together. Not what you think youre getting when you buy and or reload shells that are 3-5 dollars each