Tweet
I'm going to make a thread for myself mostly to catalog some of my findings and some good links. I've been interested in jacket swaging for a long time, and I'm finally getting to the point where I'm ready to start manufacturing projectiles. The science of swaging has really picked up lately and there are a lot more options available for less money.
Many people cast bullets, it makes shooting super cheap. The problem (and the reason I've never fully embraced it) is you're limited on velocities - to about 1,200fps or so. Above that the barrel gets quickly leaded and you can have boom bitches. For me, I mostly shoot magnums and high velocity bullets (10mm, .44 mag, .50, .223, .308, etc) so it doesn't make much sense. You can use gas checks which is a copper disc at the back of the bullet to basically seal off the lead from the combustion and lower the leading and increase the velocity, but it still poops lead into your suppressor.
If you're not familiar with swaging, it's basically the art of forming bullets through pressure. But it's most commonly used when making jacketed projectiles. Cheap is the name of the game here. If you've ever played around with empty brass cases you probably realized that a .40cal case fits just about perfectly into a .45ACP case, and a .45 ACP case fits into a .50 cal case, and a .22LR case fits into a .223 case. Well, that's the idea. You use brass cases to form the jacket, you fill it with lead, and then you swage and resize it to the proper dimensions, and bam, you have a jacketed bullet capable of pretty much any reasonable velocity. You might laugh, until you see what's possible.
Not too shabby right?
Anyways, I'm going to just post up various links and information as I find it and see if I can put together a reasonably priced swaging setup to do various calibers.
Many people cast bullets, it makes shooting super cheap. The problem (and the reason I've never fully embraced it) is you're limited on velocities - to about 1,200fps or so. Above that the barrel gets quickly leaded and you can have boom bitches. For me, I mostly shoot magnums and high velocity bullets (10mm, .44 mag, .50, .223, .308, etc) so it doesn't make much sense. You can use gas checks which is a copper disc at the back of the bullet to basically seal off the lead from the combustion and lower the leading and increase the velocity, but it still poops lead into your suppressor.
If you're not familiar with swaging, it's basically the art of forming bullets through pressure. But it's most commonly used when making jacketed projectiles. Cheap is the name of the game here. If you've ever played around with empty brass cases you probably realized that a .40cal case fits just about perfectly into a .45ACP case, and a .45 ACP case fits into a .50 cal case, and a .22LR case fits into a .223 case. Well, that's the idea. You use brass cases to form the jacket, you fill it with lead, and then you swage and resize it to the proper dimensions, and bam, you have a jacketed bullet capable of pretty much any reasonable velocity. You might laugh, until you see what's possible.
Not too shabby right?
Anyways, I'm going to just post up various links and information as I find it and see if I can put together a reasonably priced swaging setup to do various calibers.
Comment