ballistic tipped hollow points

[vinny1892]

Question does any one know how to make or where to buy the plastic inserts found in hollow point bullets such as hornady vmax.....? They will be for homemade waged bullets.

[guywitha3006]

I do not have a direct idea where to get pre-made ones, but thinking outside the box a bit, if you plan on using a bunch, a cheap 3-d printer may be worth it. You can get a small one for a few hundred dollars. If you are able to print them you self you could get an almost perfect match for your particular bullets. It also give you a lot of different options. ...this is all hypothetical as I have no first hand experience with 3D printers but i keep coming up with ideas of stuff to print ...may be when the come down in price a little more. lol

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

I think someone was experimenting with plastic air-soft BB pellets.

[vinny1892]

Ok cool ya I don't have the coin or time to mess with learning how to run a 3 d printer. Question with the air soft be I know at one point .hornady had problems with their ballistic tipped bullets melting at supersonic speeds. I wonder if a air soft be strong enough so they don't melt.

[Mica_Hiebert]

midway usa sells the optional tips for the raptor bullets but at about 50 cents each you can have them

[vinny1892]

Ill have to do some snooping around and figure out what the temp is at a bullets tip and see if there is a plastic that can stAnd up to the giving temp.

[Sasquatch-1]

Don't know if these will work for you, but I picked them up at the local craft store. They are the little beads that you lay out a design and then use an iron to melt together. They really don't do anything for the bullet performance but I told the grandkids that I got them from Krytonite.com and they were used on zombies and super hero's.

Also, these are .44 cal. bullets. Don't know how they would work in smaller bullets.

[Hickory]

There is a plastic company near me. About 12-13 years I got an appointment with a production manager there about having them make these plastic tips for me. I was thinking a small batch (50,000). Maybe a $1000- 1500.
Bottom line was this;
To be worth their while for mould cost and machine setup $9,500, along with the cost of a minimum of about 1.5 million pieces for them to break even. But they expected you to buy (contract) 5 million a year. I was looking at a single run of cost of $26,000.
In other words, they didn't want to do it very bad. And neither did I.

[mckenziedrums]

If you're doing it just for the BC increase, just get a bullet tipping die and be done with it. You can point them up nice without the need to fiddle with plastic in there. Of course you can also go the corbin route and buy the fancy metal tips and the dies to do those I suppose. Some testing I've seen (it was on the internet so.... must be true right?) showed that tipping up the bullet had a pretty drastic result on the BC. To the tune of 18" less drop at 1,000 yards in one case. That's the route I plan on taking here once I recover from all the initial expenses I've put into swaging. Whidden makes one and then bullettipping.com is another one. Supposedly the Whidden is aluminum where the other one is steel. However, the Bullet Tipping one has a LONG list of inserts and they apparently don't reply to emails when you ask them which one to use with a 10s 6mm bullet.

[Sasquatch-1]

So you plan on waiting 15 to 20 years to start doing this.

That's the route I plan on taking here once I recover from all the initial expenses I've put into swaging. Whidden makes one and then bullettipping.com is another one.

[mckenziedrums]

Well I didn't say recoup costs... Just recover a bit I jumped in with the walnut hill and 3 different calibers lol

[jcren]

Check out a member here called btsniper. He makes his own brand of swedge dies and I seem to recall he was pointforming asbb's for this purpose. If nothing else, pm him, he seems like a Heck of a nice guy and I am sure he could help.

[bfuller14]

Try this in a search here.

MakeMineA10mm

I'm A Honcho!


Join DateApr 2007LocationCentral IllinoisPosts2,399

Soft plastic tips

So has anyone discovered a good material for swaging into the nose of a HP bullet a soft-enough-to-not-set-off-a-primer but firm-enough-to-hold-pointed-shape tip, such as Hornady's FTX?

I've seen the airsoft pellet mentions, but I'm not familiar with them at all. They appear to hold their shape, but will they flex (after forming) so as to not set off the primer ahead in a tube magazine?

I know Hornady is selling the FTX as component bullets now, but I want one they don't make...

In fact, another bullet company makes a perfect bullet (although for a completely different application), but without the tip. So, my thought is to swage a tip into the already-made bullet. How practical would this be??

[Alex_4x4]

http://www.swagedies.com/mm5/merchan...ry_Code=BBALLS

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Ok cool ya I don't have the coin or time to mess with learning how to run a 3 d printer. Question with the air soft be I know at one point .hornady had problems with their ballistic tipped bullets melting at supersonic speeds. I wonder if a air soft be strong enough so they don't melt.

I think that was at very supersonic speeds, and I wondered whether it would have been seen as serious if the plastic tip market wasn't a competitive one.

I'm not altogether surprised at the economicnd this of plastic injection moulding, although it doesn't seem to have deterred Cap'n Morgan in various threads on his updated Brenneke type shotgun slugs. For the amateur the trouble is the injection equipment, rather than the mould. I can think of a couple of possible ways around this.

I once worked adjacent to the research lab in a desalination plant where they prepared small metal samples for microscopic examination. They embedded them in thermoplastic powder (which means thermosetting plastic), and converted it to a solid by hot pressing before milling and polishing smooth. It got used for a good many private projects. Most electrical fittings are thermoplastic, because they resist heat better than the meltable ones.

There were aluminium bullet tips before there were plastic ones, which may be why Nosler couldn't keep Hornady out by patent protection. A repetition machinist firm with automatic machinery might be able to make small runs of those a lot more cheaply than injection moulded plastic.

[runfiverun]

some here used to just use the tips they use on ski's to fill in the holes.
they look just like a bullets plastic tip with the little stem and everything.
ski-tips i think they called them.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

That might work well at moderate velocities, but from my limited and mostly unfortunate experience of skiing, it doesn't seem like they would have to choose their material to resist frictional heat.

[marten]

Ok cool ya I don't have the coin or time to mess with learning how to run a 3 d printer. Question with the air soft be I know at one point .hornady had problems with their ballistic tipped bullets melting at supersonic speeds. I wonder if a air soft be strong enough so they don't melt.

Hornady made some advertising claims regarding 'melting'.

Forgot to add, have printed and used SLA printed tips.

[vinny1892]

ok thanks im goin to try the bbs first

[BT Sniper]

One of our members here that stands out in my memory made some very good looking red tip plastic 22 cal bullets I think it was. I might have saved a pic.

In searching my pics I found these bullets made by another member here. Pretty awesome!