can zinc be used instead of lead, for bullet swaging into gilding metal cups?

[dbosman]

Or copper cups?
Just curious.

[JimB..]

Zinc is hard and brittle, I doubt it can be swaged without heating it considerably.

[Valornor]

Yes, it’s been used before and is currently used in Barnes Range AR ammunition.

It’s much harder to swage, and you need pure zinc. You can’t bleed off the zinc core like you would a lead core so you need some way to keep a tight control on core length.

Obviously the bullets are light for weight, but the zinc fragments readily on steel. More so then lead, so it’s considered “Soft” on steel. It also leaves a bright white mark which is nice.

However it also wears more on barrels.


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[dbosman]

Ah, thanks.
I expect we'll see a lot of experimentation coming out of California in the next couple of years.

[Valornor]

Yeah, there was some experiments with expanding zinc bullets but there’s some performance and corrosion difficulties there.

There was also some talk about heating zinc core prior to swaging to reduce the forces needed to swage the cores.


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[ReloaderFred]

There have been bullets made from pure zinc in the past. The old .38 Special, and later .357 Magnum, "metal piercing" rounds made for police use on cars come to mind. During the Great Depression, when gangsters were robbing and killing, the police needed something to penetrate the getaway cars, since they were made from real steel in the 20's and 30's, not plastic like today. I had a couple of the .38 Special rounds for many years, but I've misplaced them during one of my moves.

I don't know the method used to form them, as they appeared to be a round nose bullet. The later "metal piercing" bullets in both calibers consisted of a lead bullet with a metal cap in the form of a truncated cone. I do still have samples of those bullets. The samples I have and had were made by Winchester and I believe Remington, so they had the know how and machinery to make them.

Hope this helps.

Fred

[Optimist]

Die casting zinc pot metals is a pretty mature technology. It can be done with a clean (read new...) lead furnace. You don't want lead in your casting metal. The castings shrink a bit more than lead does, and for sure don't try casting in aluminum mold blocks.

A 150 grain lead slug comes out weighing around one hundred grains cast in zinc.

[john.k]

Zinc is brittle and crumbly as cast....but so is brass......when zinc is drawn and redrawn into wire and annealed,it can be quite soft and bendy......this kind of zinc wire is used in metal spraying ,where it replaces hot dip galvanizing......the wire has similar tensile strength to brass wire as drawn,some 60,000psi yield,and is hard and springy...........so you could easily form zinc into bullets with no jackets needed...in fact jackets would be a nuisance......but you are not going to form zinc in reloaders machine........you would need an industrial machine capable of exerting hundreds of tons.,then you throw them out at ten thousand an hour.