Walking Dead Mental Exercise- How to cast without equipment?

[43PU]

IF any SHTF situation happens, I will stay in my home, in my lazy boy with all of my stuff around me. (advantages of living in 180 acres)

43PU

[lobowolf761]

Pretty much just read the script and do what you are told, don't look directly at the cameras or giggle uncontrollably at the silly costumes and situations.

TV shows aside if you cannot obtain good ammunition or components you should be looking to replicate factory ammo as closely as possible. If you cut corners and try to load ammunition with poorly formed bullets, match heads and pliers to crimp the bullet in place you will have extremely poor quality, weak and unreliable ammunition that will be of little use in an emergency.

Construction of a usable bullet mold or sizing die is not complicated, if you can find a lathe or drill press it can be powered with a generator or rigged to anything that turns (water, gas, steam, treadmill, bicycle, hand crank) and used with a drill and reamer or in the case of a lathe a boring bar. You could also drill and ream your dies and molds with hand tools.

Primers can be reloaded or the cups and anvils can be formed or cut out of brass. You will have to have actual priming compound of which there are dozens of recipes using various chemicals. You will have to make or obtain the neccesary chemicals or else find an alternative such as match heads or toy caps but that still means finding a supply of strike anywhere matches or toy caps. These "alternatives" are not something you are likely to "find" in large quantity and they do not make good quality, reliable primers.

Powder would be guncotton, black powder, sweetener or epoxy based propellent depending on what is available.

Casings would be re-used, converted, drawn or turned depending on what tools and supplies are available. Without a lathe I doubt you will be able to make a suitable pistol or rifle casing but a paper shotgun shell with a metal base would probably be doable on a makeshift homemade lathe or drill press.

Blank cartridges (commonly available in UK/Europe with minimal restrictions) and industrial (hilti, ramset) powder actuated tool cartridges can and have been converted for firearm use. Rimfire tool cartridges can be converted to fire bullets in .22 firearms or installed off-center and used as primers in custom made centerfire cartridges.

Without commercial reloading tools and components 99.999% of the general public would never be able to make good quality ammunition and most would not even try. If you want to be in that .001% that actually would succeed you will actually have to learn what you are doing, learn to use the tools, chemicals etc. Most of the books directed towards amature "survivalists" making their own ammo (poor man's james bond, firefox, US army field expedient manual etc) are very lacking in technical know-how and really more intended to give the reader false confidence.

The old books by Authors such as Frost, Howe etc offer far better information as do a number of websites such such as castboolits and a number of others directed towards reloading, fireworks and rocketry.

Given limited time, resources and skills a very powerful arrow gun can be made from PVC pipe with a ball valve, it only takes about 75-100psi air pressure and you have more power than any modern bow or crossbow. Bows/crossbows are faster to reload but most people will not have the skills or the time and materials to build a really good one that is powerful and holds up.

Don't knock pliers for crimping. I have to use a modified wire crimper/stripper to put a crimp on the 56-56ammo that I reload for my original M1860 Spencer carbine since it shoots a heeled. 54cal bullet using cut down 50-70 or 50-90 brass. This not a 56-50 which can be crimped with a crimp die.

[Super Sneaky Steve]

If I came across a lathe that would be great, but lets assume there's no power to run it.

I came up with another great idea today. Take a fire formed .357 magnum case and cut the base off. What you've got is a small brass mould that you can pour lead into.

For sizing, assuming you can find an instrument to measure, I'd use two flat pieces of metal. Preferably somethings heavy like cast iron or steel. The idea being to roll it like if you were to make silly putty in your hands into a noodle. You'd make your hands flat and rub them back and fourth.

With soft lead I think it could be sized in this way. As you roll it between the metal plates it would get slightly thinner and slightly longer.

After that just cut them into sections like a tootsie roll load and shoot.

It sounds so plausible that I may just try it.

[Avery Arms]

You don't *need* power to run a lathe you can turn the headstock with your hands and slowly make a cut.

Lead poured into an empty case neck I don't see working well as it will tend to be stuck in there and difficult to remove without damaging the bullet or casing.

If I absolutely could not fabricate a push-through sizer I would drop the cylinder out of the gun and drive the bullets directly through the throats with lots of grease, a brass rod and a soft lead/plastic hammer. You would have to use great care to support the cylinder and not damage the front face or the rear timing star but it would work and you would not need a micrometer.

For that matter it is possible to cast your bullets directly inside the throats and then drive them out, I haven't done it but in theory it should work if you were able to carefully measure the molten lead (scoop made from .32 or .380 casing) and maintain the cylinder at the proper heat, it would have to be around 300-350F but not much hotter otherwise you would risk drawing the temper out of it.

Using a cylinder this way would be a *last* resort and would require great care, if you did it wrong you could destroy the cylinder fairly easily. Also it would have to be a sturdy high quality modern steel cylinder not something made 100 years ago with mild or case hardened steel or some other metal.

[longbow]

Super Sneaky Steve:

Yes, you try it. If it worked then don't you think our ancestors would have done that?

They cast lead into moulds because that's what worked and worked best. Yes, there were soapstone moulds and other things much less accurate and sophisticated than what we use now but they also had smoothbore guns they were shooting those projectiles in. It is not hard to cast swan shot (look it up) or reasonable round balls in a fairly crudely made mould. However, I will challenge you to roll lead "noodles" cut them up and get a semi auto to feed and shoot them accurately enough to be useful and yes, there is little point in making ammunition that just goes "bang" but you can't hit anything past 15 or 20 yards.

Some of my first small bore cast boolit shooting was with a Mauser converted from 7mm to 7.62 x 51. I was using a modern made Lyman boolit mould 31141 which is a gas check mould but I didn't have gas checks. I loaded with IMR3031 from the Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook using mild load data and I couldn't hit a man sized object dependably at 25 yards. There was enough gas cutting and blowby that the boolits were keyholing and I am not kidding, I couldn't hit much but air. Add a gas check and all that changed rather dramatically.

Go try your noodles because you did say this was a mental exercise so you just might want to test out a few of the ideas so just in case this becomes reality you are not scrambling because you "thought it might work".

Read some history and learn what has been done and what worked, and what didn't work. Don't repeat mistakes or try bad ideas in an emergency situation. Test, prove, record and go with what works.

I better get outa here.

Longbow