.17 cal

[tjeffords]

Anyone cast 17 cals at .172 roughly?

[williamwaco]

One word:

YIKES!

[tjeffords]

lol? i was just wondering cause i wanted to try to use a few to modify and use in my pellet gun. see if i can get anything better than what im using i figured if they worked any better id cast some insted of buying them.

[steg]

They may be a little heavy, IMO, as I recall the factory ones are weighing in at around 8 grains or so. Keep the thread going if you come up with something, sounds interesting.

[turbo1889]

I added a 17-cal smooth sided cavity in-between the cavities of Lee two cavity mold once using an 11/64" drill bit with the tip re-ground to the desired nose shape and then cut a third sprue hole with a counter-sink cutter in-between the existing two sprue holes. Thus I got an extra 17-cal pellet every casting cycle with that mold mixed in with the boolits it already cast. I tumble lubed them and used them in my primer gun. A primer gun is a gun that propels an air gun type pellet via a 209 shotgun primer where you simply load the pellet and then a shotgun primer on top of it in the chamber cut to accept that combination they are somewhat of a rarity and most are either home-built or one-off gun smith made guns.

I don't think cast would work very well in most center fire 17-cal cartridge guns that are built for extreme velocity and I think a heavy solid cast pellet with solid flat sides without any relief/lube grooves would work very well in all but the most powerful of air guns. Was just about perfect for my primer gun though.

[JeffinNZ]

Lots of so called 'experts' have said it's hard to cast .22 bullet and them to shoot. Those of us that don't take no for an answer beg to differ. If you really wanted to do .172 I bet you could.

[HollowPoint]

I was very happily surprised to stumble onto this thread. As it happens I've been saving up to buy one of the new "Nitro-Piston" air rifles that are all the rage.

Due to allergy symptoms that won't allow me to stay outdoors as long as I'd like, I've been going mad with cabin fever. An air rifle would go a long way toward regaining my sanity.

Since I suffer from the malady of always trying to fix what's not broken; or trying to improve something that works perfectly fine, I've been getting the metal stock together so I can try casting some of my own .177 pellet designs.

As many of you guys may know, conventional pellet designs can shoot exceptionally well up to a certain point, then they start to de-stabilize in flight so, I've wondered the same thing that the OP has wondered about casting .177" bullets/pellets.

I haven't even bought the air rifle in question yet. I'm having to sell my canoe in order to come up with all the funds but, that's just a matter of time. The wheels are already spinning in my head.

Some time ago I purchased a big bore 45 caliber air rifle that I designed and cast bullets for. It was a hybrid design that incorporated a skirt like conventional pellets have, along with an integral boat tail that I though would enhance the ballistic coefficient and long-range performance.

In the 45 caliber, that particular bullet design worked well in the 260 grain weights. In something as small as an air rifle pellet, I'm not sure what weight might work.

I was thinking that a scaled down version of the same design might be worth a try.

HollowPoint

[canyon-ghost]

At one time, I think John Cook over at Specialty Pistols built a .17 caliber, then a .14 Sqack! He went by the name Otter and made some nice grips for Contenders. But, I'd think real bullets would be too heavy for air rifle.

I just bought a Ruger Air Hawk to use for pesky varmint birds since I have large trees. Out to 40-50 meters, wow, they're pretty fierce!

[tjeffords]

I was thinkin about taking a few standard .17 cal soft nose jacketed bullets cut them a little shorter hallow the base out some to drop some of the weight.

See what i can get from that.

[HollowPoint]

I was thinkin about taking a few standard .17 cal soft nose jacketed bullets cut them a little shorter hallow the base out some to drop some of the weight.

See what i can get from that.




I say give it a try. It's not going to hurt anything.

Where I live we have all kinds of pigeons that just love to poop all over the place. We call them feathered cockroaches.

I've been dispatching them with an old break-barrel pellet pistol with very limited range. I only recently installed an old AR-scope and a make-shift stock onto this pistol in order to get a little more accuracy out of it. (just as a side note; I've been scouring the internet in search of a Gas-Spring that I could use to replace the existing coil-spring in this same pellet gun.)

I think the longest kill-shot I can get on a pigeon with this little pistol has been about twenty-five yards. And since the pellets are traveling so slowly, they have to be head shots otherwise all I do is slap them and spook them away temporarily.

With a high-velocity air rifle, I'm sure I could take them at far beyond that distance once I tweak that air rifle. (trigger job, de-burring, lubrication, new scope--etc.)

I actually own a .17 Remington BDL. I also have all the reloading components to cut some of the bullets down for testing but, this little pellet pistol just doesn't have the balls to give me any kind of meaningful results. I'd just be ruining perfectly good bullets.

Let us know how your cut down bullets work.

HollowPoint

[tjeffords]

yeah i have just a simple Crosman Storm XT its 1000 fps with standard pellets so i can deal with a little loss of speed as long as I keep my kinetic energy up.

the max distance I usually shoot is only about 40 feet. (lol squirrel eradication in the attic!) Ive taken 2 coons up there also one point blank as I was climbing up and the other about 18 feet. All these with just standard Destroyer EX pellet.

[M_59]

Hey HollowPoint, that .17 sounds like a great candidate for the Convert-a-pel. I have them in .223 and 220 swift. They use a shotshell primer for propulsion. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 800-1000 fps. I talked to the manufacturer at one point and it sounded like if I sent him the cases he could convert the. I was looking at doing .17 rem and .17 M4. They don't shoot too bad as well and they are fairly quiet.

[Silvercreek Farmer]

Not to try and talk you out of it, by all means, try it out, but I did some research on the subject a while back, and as others have mentioned, I think it would be pretty difficult. From what I saw, the pressure curve on an air rifle is much slower than say a .22 LR/.17 mach II ect, making the soft skirt on standard pellets essential to sealing the bore for top performance. Most commercial pellets are swaged rather than cast making the skirt easier to form. A .22 air rifle rather than a .17 would offer a few standard molds, but most bullet weights are far heavier than pellets. There are heavier pellets not found at Wal-Mart, but from online suppliers. When I read through the comments on them many folks didn't have much success with the heaviest pellets which were still significantly lighter than the lightest cast boolit molds available.

[HORNET]

Some years ago, there was a group buy on a .17 cal pellet mold. Try a search under "Pammy Pellet". IIRC, it was too long to stabilize in many medium to lower powered pellet guns due to twist rate issues but became quite popular in Mexico for use in shooting armadillos. They seated them backwards with the point trailing. It was also reported to work well in the .17 centerfires at low velocities (no gas check). It's been a while back.

[GaryN]

If you're really looking for a challenge then go all the way and cast them at .162 and then Paper Patch them.

[JeffinNZ]

I reckon something like a .32 Long lecked to .17cal would be a start. Get Charlie to make a FC II for a boolit. Who's keen.

[44man]

Long ago I tried shooting pigeons off a factory roof that was 100 yards away with a Sheridon 20 cal. I would see pellets veer off long before the roof.
I drilled holes in wood and filled them with lead. Split them out they would actually hit and kill the birds.
I shot many with a slingshot too. I would aim a little high to start and the bird would look at the ball as it went by, got my range and there would be a cloud of feathers.
We had so many around I put bread on the old flat garage roof and stuck a bunch of rat traps around baited with bread. Boy will those things smack pigeons. [smilie=l:

[OLPDon]

Some years ago, there was a group buy on a .17 cal pellet mold. Try a search under "Pammy Pellet". IIRC, it was too long to stabilize in many medium to lower powered pellet guns due to twist rate issues but became quite popular in Mexico for use in shooting armadillos. They seated them backwards with the point trailing. It was also reported to work well in the .17 centerfires at low velocities (no gas check). It's been a while back.

Here is the link for above..... http://forum1.aimoo.com/Cast___Boolits__/Cast-Boolits/177-Viper-molds-1-759222.html

And yes I have cast .17 I even bought 2 of the Moulds (just to help get the group buy). I have a RWS 54 and didn't work well at all backward was a bit better.

If you look at the date that was the last time I cast them.
Don

[1Shirt]

Posts like this sure do keep it interesting!
1Shirt!

[stubshaft]

Years ago Veral offered both a .177 and .22 cal pellet mold. I never wanted the added frustration of having to cast one.

[Loudenboomer]

44 man. Thinking of you with a bunch of pigeons stuck in rat traps flopin all over the place almost made me blow cherry pepsi out my nose.

[44man]

44 man. Thinking of you with a bunch of pigeons stuck in rat traps flopin all over the place almost made me blow cherry pepsi out my nose.
Yeah! :mrgreen: I assure you they don't "flop" at all. :Fire:
Those flying rats were so bad we got the key to an old school. I had a huge cage built. We went into the attic at night and caught 100 of them by hand. My friend kept the young ones to eat so they were not counted. We took them out, put them to sleep in the grass and trained a bird dog. The dog would point them but hated the smell and would never pick up a dead one. We shot all 100 of them.
My friend stayed up all night plucking them, even the legs and wings! :confused: He ate good for a long time.
I sure miss the old days. Hank was a friend I hated to hunt next to. Another friend was the same because when a pheasant flushed he would shoot it in the back of the head with a .410. I had to let birds ride with my full choke Ithaca so I had to go away from those two.
Hank was a card. He found a sitting rabbit but had a high velocity shell. He opened his gun, inserted a lighter load, then snatched the rabbit off the ground by hand.