DIY paper hulls

[houghtrain]

I'm not sure which forum this should go. Off topic? Black powder cartridges? I'll put it here because I guess this is where the shotgun stuff is.

People take pride in making their own stuff right? Cast your own shot/boolits, Reload your ammo, shoot your own dinner...

Why not roll your own hulls? I've found very little info on this on the interweb, except for a video on youtube where some kid was making his own shotshells from paper to fire in his paper shotgun. (uses gunpodwder and copperhead bbs, actually pretty cool)

I remember making model rockets in shop class. We took a length of kraft paper coated in glue and wrapped it around a dowel rod. When all was said and done, it turned out pretty sturdy.

I suppose one could make such paper tubing, gut the brass out of old hulls and make new ones. Or maybe lathe out some wood instead of brass?


Am I crazy or am I on to something? Thoughts? Ideas? Your turn.

[JIMinPHX]

I've never made paper shotgun shells before, but I do have a little experience with making cardboard cores for things like rolls of tape & paper towels. The production equipment that is used to do that today is actually still pretty stone age. It's probably not very different from what you did in shop class.

Basically, you feed a few strips of paper in from different places. At least one of them goes through a glue applier, that can be a brush, a roller, a dip tank or some other similarly simple gizmo. The strips of paper then come together around a mandrel where they get wrapped into a cylindrical shape. The whole process is driven by a few electric motors that use big rubber bands which resemble inner tubes from a car tire, to pull things along. For ease of handling, the tubes get cut into lengths of roughly 10 ft, 6 ft, or 3 ft typically. After that, they then get cut down to the actual production lengths (like 2") on a core cutting machine.

The cores need to dry before their size stabilizes. A good operator can hold about .003-.005" on dried & finished core diameter. the mandrel does wear over time, in a production environment & needs to be replaced about once every 6-months or when the core ID gets too small. Large changes in humidity can make the core diameter grow or shrink by as much as .01" on a 3" diameter core.

I don't know if the guys that make paper shot shells do something different to control size change due to humidity. I never really measured paper shot shells & then rechecked them on a day with different humidity.

This stuff is darn strong. A 3" diameter tube with 1/2" thick walls is commonly used to hold a 6 foot wide "jumbo roll" that weighs a ton or more.

[turbo1889]

For the head part to accept home rolled paper shell bodies this is what I have come up with just doodling in my spare time a year or more ago. Two piece steel head where the larger diameter socket above the primer hole inside the shell is cut to accept an allen or torx bit for unscrewing the inner part to change out the tube when it gets worn out. The idea being to make long lasting heads that you just refill with new paper tubes as needed cut to whatever shell length you want.

[bandmiller2]

Theirs an article in the latest Handloader mag. about Federal making paper shells, done right its not simple.Almost any skeet or trap range has empties by the barrel or even near good waterfoul blind sites.Probibly perfecting a home shot maker would return much more for your effort,but theirs no harm in trying. Frank C.

[DDLab]

I don't know if the guys that make paper shot shells do something different to control size change due to humidity.

Wax bath in a pressure cooker, followed by baking in an oven at 150-200 until excess wax stops puddling.
I'm having issues with making the base plug my self. They don't reliably hold together on extraction.

[johnnybar]

Did you notice that this was a 10+ yr old thread? Been there...done that...LOL

[GregLaROCHE]

I make all paper cartridges for my 1866 Chassepot. It’s not easy but can be done. The biggest problem is holding the primer tight enough, so it goes off when struck by the firing pin and is not just pushed forward. The cartridge is only as thick as a sheet of printer paper. Everything gets burned and exits the muzzle. This rifle has a rubber seal on the bolt to keep the gases from escaping. If you would be willing to do some modifications to use an O ring to seal the breech, you could probably make it work. However, as has been said, empty hulls are easy enough to come by.