hard skin cast boolits

[jbunny]

i was awake half the night thinking about shooting cast boolits at rifle
velocitys. u either GC or PP or shoot zinc cast. have u ever notice when
u scrape the corosion of your car battery post, that corosion skin is hard.
i wonder if u could duplicate that and eliminate the need for cg and pp.
an acid,salt bath???? electroless nickle plating??? zinc electroless plateing???
has this ever been tried?? maybee like anodizeing aluminum?? any chemical
gerus on this list?
regards
jb

[helg]

Copper plated rifle bullets are on a market. Check e.g. Federal Fusion. Unlike pistol plated bullets, these have pretty thick jacket (about .02") over a soft lead core. Copper plating thickness varies about two times on a single bullet. After plating the bullets are swaged to a perfect shape. Because of the varying thickness, center of mass in not on the axis. I shot them in .223, the accuracy looks on par with regular jacketed, about 1MOA.

Should be fun to plate with the thick copper layer, right?

[jbunny]

the only copper plated i'm familiar with is the frontier. they are ok i guess for
handgun velocity but they didn't work to good in my 44 mag carbine. i was thinking
more along the KISS principle. more like a titanium screen basket in a salt or acid
bath with perhaps a tricle curant to form a hard skin? i'm not a chemical engineer
so i'm looking for ideas. i'll try anything once, twice if it's good.
jb

[HORNET]

I believe that Speer Gold Dot's are also made by electroplating, then swaging to final form and create an opening in the plating to initiate expansion. Sounds like a lot more work than water-dropping and gas checking.

[MtGun44]

Think ahead. Let's imagine that you succeed in finding a cheap, simple and
effective way to shoot cast boolits at 'rifle velocities' - not defined, but I presume that
.30-30 velocities are not what you have in mind since they are relatively easy
to get to work. If you mean 3000 fps, then what are you planning for when the
boolit hits the game? I think you will get either instant disintegration or if you
manage to come up with a really, really hard heat treated alloy, you are back to
disintegration if you hit a bone since these alloys are brittle and a caliber hole if
they don't hit a bone. Jackets are as much or more about impact performance
as velocity, with the obvious huge exception of target boolits. If you are planning
for target shooting, of course none of the above applies.

Bill

[mooman76]

Barrys has some 30 cal that they said could be shot up to 1700 fps.

[Bret4207]

As usual Bill hit the nail on the head. If by "rifle velocities" you mean 3K +/- then how are you going to get that alloy to hold together on target? There's a point, and it varies, where the combination of boolit design, alloy and speed will overwhelm the boolit and it'll disintegrate on target. So what do you mean by "rifle velocity"? 30-30 speeds or 308 speeds or 300 Mag speeds?

[jbunny]

sorry guys, writeing is not my forte. 30-30 velocity would be fine. this is not for hunting
strictly paper targets. lets forget about copper plated bullets. go scrape some corrosion
of a car battery post and see how hard that stuff is. i was trying to raise somebody
with a chemical background to see if this could be done to bullets to form a hard
skin on them. i believe a hard skin would make it resist gas cutting and be able to push it faster. i guess i'm on my own.
jb