I'll Never Have To Buy Pellets Again !
Since I got a couple of days off during the holidays, I finally got the chance to try my hand at making my own .22 caliber pellet swaging dies. As is usually the case when I do a project, my first attempt missed the mark in terms of diameter dimensions. The actual die turned out good and functional but I had measured my bore incorrectly using some Cerrosafe to make a chamber-cast.
These pellets wouldn't even load into the chamber. They were .004" to big so I made a push-thru sizing die to bring them down to the right diameter. This too worked out well however, the finished pellets weighed from 25 to 28 grains. This was much to heavy for my Break-barrel Umarex Octane air rifle.
The 14-point-something grain and the 18-point-something grain conventional pellets have always shot extremely well out of my air rifle so ideally I was wanting to make a finished pellet that came in at similar weights. To control the weights I made an adjustable five cavity cylindrical hollow pointed lead slug mold. By screwing the hollow pointing pins in or out I could control the weights of the slugs and thereby, the weights of the finished pellets with a minimum of trimming.
I'm not a machinist and I suck at math so all of my projects are tackled via the Trial-And-Error method. After four different attempts at getting my dies to spit out the right sized pellets I then started with the tweaks to get them as close to perfectly symmetrical as possible; followed by chronographing and accuracy testing.
I always wondered why, with all the cutting edge advances being made in the air gun field, none of the air gun manufactures ever seemed to give any attention to upgrading the design of the ammo that air guns shoot. Think about it; thousand-plus dollar cutting edge PCP and such, shooting first generation wasp-waisted, shuttle-cock pellet designs. It just seemed to me to be like a state of the art fighter-jet being pulled along by a propeller driven engine.
To that end, I thought I'd try a different, more ballistically streamlined pellet profile. To do that and still be able to let my new pellets be long enough without being to heavy for a low powered Gas-Piston break-barrel air rifle, I had to make these pellets in the Bore-Riding Hollow-Core design. This also leaves enough of a Bore-Riding section to stay centered in the bore as it's moving toward the muzzle.
Velocities are in line with conventional pellets of the same weights. Accuracy thus far is continually increasing as I figure out the nuances of using these new dies. I discovered that if I spin the die as I'm swaging my pellets, they seem to come out more concentric and more accurate on target; as well as weight-wise. I'm able to get them to within .3 grains of each other. Even my tin of conventional first generation pellets don't all come in that close to one another.
I also made a tail forming pin that allows me to shape the tail ends into a Rebated-Boat-Tail but that iteration still needs some major tweaks to get it to form concentrically. It may take a whole new project to get the Boat-Tailed pellets to fly well.
I'll post pics a little later. In the mean time, I couldn't withhold my excitement with this project. I have two five gallon buckets full of discarded Stick-On Wheel-Weights that represent a life time pellet supply.
I'll be back when I get my photos edited.
HollowPoint