Adding weight to a 20 ga shotgun to manage the recoil.

I had been loading some low recoil shells for my son too keep the recoil down. I was using a 3/4 oz and 1100 fps speed. I recently decided that that was probably hurting his clay target shooting scores. So I decided to try and move up to a standard 7/8 oz and 1200 fps shell. I snuck in a box of standard shells at our last outing without telling him. He could tell the difference and said his shoulder hurt and that he didn't want to shoot any more. That was with a 6 lb shotgun and an extra shoulder pad.

So after reflecting on that and looking at the numbers I decided that his gun needed some more weight added to it. So I ended up filling the hollow plastic stock full of lead shot. That got the weight up to 8 lbs. He tried it out in the back yard blasting away at a poor milk jug. He now appears ok to shoot a standard 20 ga load. I will be interested to see if his scores improve the next time we are at the range.