Remington 870 slug barrel - Is there any harm in shooting reg shot shells with it?

I just bought Remington 870 Express and am looking at extra barrels, wanting a short one to leave on gun when not bird hunting. I doubt I will deer hunt with it, but a 20" barrel would be just about right.

Remington 870 slug barrel - Is there any harm in shooting reg shot shells with it?
As a Dealer and Gunsmith, I can tell you that you will be fine shooting any size LEAD shot thru a Remington 870 Express Rifled Deer Barrel. It will not hurt it at all.........
Reply:No harm will come to the barrel.
Reply:Note what JD said, Lead shot only not steel. Just do a proper cleaning after shooting.
Reply:hi there

if you haven't bought the slug barrel yet , then buy it in unrifled,it will be short,look mean and still shoot pellets pretty fare at a good range. my smooth bore is very accurate too 140 yards so if you do want to deer hunt you will be fine shooting rifled slugs from it also. good shooting, be safe.
Reply:The only "problem" you will really encounter is lead build up. The rifling in the barrel will cause more leadding than a smooth bore would. The rifled barrel also does not have any choke, so patterning wont be great. You can purchase a short, smooth bore barrel for your 870. These can be purchased with a choke. I have a 20" smooth bore barrel with a fixed modified choke for mine. The short barrel is nice and still patterns well with buck and bird shot.
Reply:One thing you will want to be aware of; if it is a rifled barrel, the pattern will probably be pretty bad at more than a few yards. The rifling will deform the pellets pretty badly, and cause the pattern to open up in different ways from what you're ued to seeing with a smooth bore. For home defense, where pretty much all shots are ten yards or less, you won't see any real difference.



If it's not rifled, then it's just a standard barrel with no choke, and you won't see any change in the way it handles shot other than a slightly wider pattern at longer ranges. This is pretty much the way to go if you want an all-purpose barrel and don't plan to actually try to make any really long shots with slugs, but as I said above, rifled or not, choked or not, won't matter a bit to the ten or fifteen yard pattern - you just generally don't want to put a slug through a choked barrel.
Reply:In my opinion the best multi use barrel for the 870 is the 20" rifle sighted, rem choke barrel. You can run birdshot and buck shot, whatever size you want with the choke you want. Want to go to slugs? You can run rifled or foster slugs through the improved cylinder or the modified ( I get much better groups with the modified than IC) and mine came with a short rifled choke tube extension that will allow the use of sabot slugs.

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