pistol bullet making: the fast way.

[Mauser 98K]

****....... just spent about 5 hours making all new punches for my drawing dies for the thinner aluminum jackets im going to be making.. im going to step down in aluminum thickness from 0.025in to 0.015in aluminum. im doing this so that they will fragment a lot better in a liquid environment.. the 0.025in thick is ok, but the jacket stays intact too well when doing the wetpack testing and still penetrates over 8 inches if there is cloth in the way. im gonna try to get that down to about 5in with the bullet becoming nothing but shards at 4 inches to eliminate 90% of the possibility of over penetration and get it to transfer 100% of the energy into the target.

im thinking the next test will be about 1/8in of cloth followed by an inch of wet paper followed by 1/2in of wood board and then 5 more inches of wet paper. the wood board should give me some idea of what will happen after the bullet travels through the sternum or a rib of the target..

[Traffer]

****....... just spent about 5 hours making all new punches for my drawing dies for the thinner aluminum jackets im going to be making.. im going to step down in aluminum thickness from 0.025in to 0.015in aluminum. im doing this so that they will fragment a lot better in a liquid environment.. the 0.025in thick is ok, but the jacket stays intact too well when doing the wetpack testing and still penetrates over 8 inches if there is cloth in the way. im gonna try to get that down to about 5in with the bullet becoming nothing but shards at 4 inches to eliminate 90% of the possibility of over penetration and get it to transfer 100% of the energy into the target.

im thinking the next test will be about 1/8in of cloth followed by an inch of wet paper followed by 1/2in of wood board and then 5 more inches of wet paper. the wood board should give me some idea of what will happen after the bullet travels through the sternum or a rib of the target..

That looks like about the optimum bullet for that caliber. Great work...thinking out of the box there. The whole process is very ingenious. Thanks for sharing.

[Mauser 98K]

here are the newest rounds for my CZ52..


85gr semi jacketed hollow point.. these are a lot prettier than the last ones i made and are a different alloy of aluminum.. im not really sure what the other aluminum was, just something i picked up out of scrap pile. it would transfer as powder, and you could scrape it off like powder.. it was weird.. this here is a lot different and doesn't seem to transfer aluminum to other things and doesn't turn to powder if you scrape it or rub it... after i do the trimming step i then take them up to annealing temperature and this burns the plastic coating off of the aluminum and they come out shiny. but now i get to do the wetpack test tomorrow and see how they do..

[EMC45]

Looks like an old school Winchester Silvertip

[Mauser 98K]

Looks like an old school Winchester Silvertip

Yep.. Kind of what I was going for. They always did pretty well as far as deformation..

[Mauser 98K]

this is a test of my new design of aluminum jacketed SJHP. the jacket is 0.010in thinner than the last jackets and is a better alloy. jacket thickness is 0.015in thick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmX2i3jU-c

there are two test here. one has several layers of cloth to simulate shooting through thick clothes. i know a lot of commercial bullets have trouble with thick clothes and it will pack the hollow point full of cloth and they will then not deform or mushroom too well.. these do not seem to care about several layers of cloth.

under the cloth there is also about 1in of wetpack to try and simulate the flesh under the clothes and then after 1 inch there is a piece of wood to try and simulate a bone or sternum.. then there is an extra 8 inches of wetpack to simulate the flesh behind the bone..

the first test did better than i had hoped.. the round went through the cloth and into the 1in layer of wetpack and started to open up a bit b4 it hit the wood. after it hit the wood it blew a hole an inch in diameter in the wood and a slightly bigger hole behind the wood and the bullet started to fragment and leave pieces in the wound channel and also shoved wood slivers about 2-3 inches into the wound channel.. if it were a sternum that got hit the slivers would have been forced inward toward the heart or lungs along with the shrapnel of the bullet causing catastrophic damage to the heart or lungs.. the bullet continued on for another 3in-4in after it went through the wood and stopped at around 7in in..

the second test was spectacular. it was done to simulate missing bone and hitting only flesh.. the hydrostatic forces blew the top layer of wetpack paper outwards like a grenade went off in it and created a wound cavity inside the wetpack about 3inches in diameter and several inches deep. any organs that got hit by that would be rendered hamburger. the bullet then went in and also stopped about 6inches-7inches in.. so far i am happy with the results.... but what i hoped would happen happened, the score marks created by the rifling creates stress risers in the jacket and this is where the jacket would split and fold back.

[Mauser 98K]

i finally settled on the final design for my 7.62x25mm defense bullets, so i went through the entire manufacturing process from drawing to polishing and this is what i come up with.. the ones above were just testing, these are the finished product after all steps are done. . i have seen commercial bullets that didn't look this good. but now i feel bad about shooting any of them, almost too pretty to shoot.

i really like this design, they make 3 inch holes in wet newspaper when pushed hard. the standard soft points would only do a 1 inch hole to 1.5 inch hole at the most.

[Traffer]

I have been wanting to get a 7.62x25 since I got my Norinco 213 which is a 9MM. Great gun but would be a lot better with the other caliber. Looks like you have developed a bullet that a lot of people are going to be wanting for that caliber.
Thanks for Sharing

[Willbird]

My dad had a little punch press like that when I was a kid, lots of shops scrapped them because there is no way to stop the cycle once it is started. IMHO I would never put a finger UNDER that punch. Just like putting a finger over the muzzle of a loaded gun. Do not want to sound like I am lecturing but everything mechanical can fail and I'd hate to see you lose a finger. I'm darn glad I never did. The parts I ran for my dad were steel so we could pull them out with a magnet...we were bending a 90 degree angle on a 1/2" x 1/2" 20 gauge steel part.

Worst case if hands need to go in a blocker could be made so the press cannot cut your finger off ??

All meant in the nicest possible way to say this .

Bill

[Willbird]

That said...nice setup though, nice work .