"Rook Rifle" powered with nail gun blanks

[Traffer]

A while back I bought a case of cheap nail gun loads off of eBay for cheap money. I think I got 5 thousand rounds for $40 or something like that. That was back when 22lr was hard to get and I was experimenting with reloading and developing other ways of shooting rim fire. The cartridges I got were 25 Caliber and are just a tiny bit bigger in diameter and the head, than a 22 WMR cases. I figured out how to "attach" bullets to the blanks so they could be fed into a gun without doing it by placing a bullet in then the cartridge, but never did build the gun to shoot them.
That brings me to the present. The charges are still in the closet. I ran across this article on the web and thought BINGO. Now there is a place to use these charges.
It appears that people have drilled out center fire cartridges so the rims of the nail gun cartridges would intersect the very middle of the center fire case, providing a lower powered charge for a "cat sneeze" round. Since there has been a resurgence of interest in rook rifles I thought I would share this info so others could have fun with this:
Cat's Sneeze.pdf

[JBinMN]

Interesting!


While I have used those "blanks" quite often when doing construction jobs , I had not ever considered making/adapting a centerfire cartridge that would take one of them to fire a projectile... The velocities in the .pdf file were a bit surprising as well, as I thought they would be a bit slower than that, although considering I have used them to drive a hardened nail into concrete, I should have reckoned that they were going to produce enough pressure to launch a .30 cal "boolit" like that at those velocities. Just not ever considering them for launching boolits would explain that thinking though.

Interesting indeed!


Thanks for sharing!

[uscra112]

I suppose it's a way of using up a large supply of nailgun rounds, but gee whiz, a normal case, primer, and a few grains of Red Dot or Bullseye will do the same thing.

Don't mistake me - I've done the Ramset trick in adapter cases for old .32 rimfires, but even there I've stopped using the Ramset charges, and gone over to using acorn blanks as the primer for a pinch of Bullseye. Much easier to punch the spent acorn blanks out of the drilled-out adaptor cases.

[rbuck351]

Traffer
I read your post about the case of 25cal ramset #4 blanks a year or so ago and bought a case to see what I could do with them. I have a TC barrel in 256 Win and a mini lathe so I made a chamber adapter to fit it with the #4 blank and a 52gr 258 boolit that I have a mold for. I haven't checked MV yet but they are a bit more than cat sneeze loads and fairly accurate at 25yds. Primers now are about 2.5/3 cents each and the ramset blanks were .8 cents each. I also have a Ruger SS in 22mag and can laod a 40gr boolit in the cyl followed by a 25cal ramset charge for better than 22lr MV but the accuracy is only so so. Fun to play with. Wish I would have bought more of the blanks.

[Traffer]

Traffer
I read your post about the case of 25cal ramset #4 blanks a year or so ago and bought a case to see what I could do with them. I have a TC barrel in 256 Win and a mini lathe so I made a chamber adapter to fit it with the #4 blank and a 52gr 258 boolit that I have a mold for. I haven't checked MV yet but they are a bit more than cat sneeze loads and fairly accurate at 25yds. Primers now are about 2.5/3 cents each and the ramset blanks were .8 cents each. I also have a Ruger SS in 22mag and can laod a 40gr boolit in the cyl followed by a 25cal ramset charge for better than 22lr MV but the accuracy is only so so. Fun to play with. Wish I would have bought more of the blanks.

Thanks for that info. I had considered using them in a 38 S&W but thought they may be too hot for that. Now I am sure they are. I will probably make a gun for the rounds that I can make then I will at least have a single shot rifle for them that will be probably somewhere between a 22lr and a 22WMR in power.

[uscra112]

Ramset charges are about $0.07 to $0.10 per these days. Less than a penny a round was one heck of a deal.

[Traffer]

Ramset charges are about $0.07 to $0.10 per these days. Less than a penny a round was one heck of a deal.

Yeah, When that batch first hit eBay they were selling for $20 for 5K rounds. But then they realized they were selling them too cheap and raised the price to $40. Now $0.004 per round is a real bargain.