Brass bullets?

[mdenz3]

I run a small machine shop, and we have about 50 12' bars of .25" brass that has been sitting around extra from a job that hasn't been done since before I was born.

I have gotten the idea to turn it into some .223 rounds for my AR.

My question is will making bullets from solid brass be dangerous or harmful to my guns?

I have a small furnace that I could use to heat treat them to dead soft if it would help with barrel wear.

If it would work, I'll also need some help with the bullet design.

[John Taylor]

When I was working for a smith in north Idaho we were making bullets for the 50 BMG from solid brass in an automatic screw machine. We had a bit of metal fouling the last 8" of the 45" barrel so started coating the bullets with teflon ( heat the bullets in an oven and sprayed with Triflow). Tried naval bronze but it left a smoke trail all the way to the target. Bullet weight was 615 grains and we were pushing it at 3400FPS.

[JeremyV]

For design look at the barns X bullets.

[mstarling]

Be careful here!

Brass and bronze projectiles may fall afoul of Federal law when made for chamberings that can be found in handguns as they are considered to be armor piercers.

Good to do your homework first.

[W.R.Buchanan]

mdenz: definately just copy a Barnes .224 bullet. The problem with just making any old design is that solid metal bullets that don't "Obiturate" or turn fluid at firing, will spike pressures due to their larger surface area.

In order to get around this you must design grooves into the bullet to reduce the surface area and keep the pressures down.

Making bullets out of solid brass is not new by any means, and I have been looking at doing it for several years now but just haven't got off my ****. I however am more interested in larger bullets like .44 and .45 cal, and I also have a use for .30 cal.

I can buy .22 and 30 cal bullets for .11-.12 cents apiece so unless you can make 4-6 a minute on your machine (which is very doable on a bar-fed CNC lathe) it is wasting time (unless you have nothing else to put on the machine and are bored.)

I have a friend who makes Solid Brass 6MM bullets on a B&S #00 Screw Machine at the rate of about 20 per minute. He shoots them in Bench Rest Matches at my club, and they work really well.

He is also very very good with his machines.

With the larger bullets which can go $1.00 a piece or more, that gives you a little more room in the pricing before you are shipping money out the door. However I doubt I persoanlly would shoot more than 50 bullets like that in my life time, so I might as well just buy 50 Barnes bullets and be done with it. With .30 cal bullets I can easily see shooting 300 a month so that size could be useful. If I couldn't get cheap .22 bullets then making them would certainly be an option, if I was going to them alot.

Virtually all of the bullet makers are making brass solids nowadays, but most are being made for the big boomers used in Africa. .40 cal and above. They're capable of serious penetration on large dangerous game. I was told by Dave Scovill of Rifle magazine that he shot one thru a female elephant and the bullet went in the face and came out next to the base of the tail, 11 feet total, and kept right on going !!! Another guy shot a Cape Buff and the bullet went thru and killed a cow on the far side as well.

Rather than try to reinvent the wheel if you just copy a Barnes solid copper or brass design you'll be fine.

Randy

[W.R.Buchanan]

mstarling:

CA is trying to outlaw them for that supposed reason, however they have already made hunting with any other kind of bullet illegal in the majority of the state. So if they determine that these bullets fall out side of the law then they effectively shut down hunting in the State of CA.

This would be political suicide!

Randy

[zuke]

Those 1/4 inch rod's would make great cleaning rod's,and a lot less work by doing so.

[mdenz3]

They will be done on a bar fed CNC lathe, and with free machine time and free material I'll save money for sure. ;)

I know there are various makers of solid brass bullets, however they are all tight lipped on the exact alloy they are using. This makes me concerned that the 360 alloy I have may be to hard.

Here is a quick drawing I made up with the design I had in mind: ( it would weigh in at ~59grains)
http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g60/mdenz3/223brass.jpg

[zuke]

AHHH to be young and have access to a machine shop again!

[W.R.Buchanan]

Mdenz. Barnes uses a "Homogeneous mixture of Copper and Zinc" I almost puked when I read this, as that is exactly what brass is! Also it sounds much cooler than saying these bullets are made of common brass.

As far as the alloy,,, 99% of the all brass that is available is 360.

The reason why they are so tight lipped is because it ain't nothin' special. They just want you to think it is so they don't have you as competition. Any machine shop with the right machinery could make zillions of these. But don't get any ideas about producing these commercially because you don't have a Ballistics Lab to test this stuff, and you couldn't afford the liability insurance either.


As far as your design,,,I would have the ogive terminate just before the front groove at about .001 under your "bore" (lands) dia so the bullet is a bore rider, but that is just me. That would keep the pressure down as well as widening the grooves to about .060 which would give some room for the metal displaced by the rifling. Your design looks just fine except for the groove width. Look at a Barnes solid copper bullet and you'll see what I mean.

On a solid bullet like this you have to have a place for the metal displaced by the rifling to go, and the place where it goes is into the grooves. Also the grooves should be a few thou in dia less than the bore dia.

If your bore is .218 or there abouts the grooves need to be .002-4 under that .

Otherwise I think it will work just fine.

As a safety precaution,,,, do get a Barnes Loading Book and take notice of the loads. Solid bullets are not like a regular jacketed bullet and adjustments need to be made to compensate for the fact that they don't get squished down by the rifling like a regular jacketed lead core bullet does. The metal must be physically displaced by the rifling. This creates more pressure, because there is more friction.

Randy

[Cap'n Morgan]

With solid brass bullets you don't need much material for gripping the bullet. Since you will be using a CNC swiss machine, I would use small driving bands on the bullet, combined with grooves to hold any displaced material. Like someone suggested, design the body/ogive to match the bore size.

This is a drawing of a 105 gr .277 bullet I use for practice. It shoots like a dream. The (less than perfect) picture shows it along with some .375 bullets:

http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/553/277turnedbullet.jpg


http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/6838/img0428pj.jpg

[mdenz3]

Finally got around to making these today.

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g60/mdenz3/IMG_9956.jpg


Thanks for all the help.

[Cap'n Morgan]

Looking good! What weight did you end up with?

[mdenz3]

Looking good! What weight did you end up with?

They ended up at 59 grains.

[hunter2]

Looking pretty good....How do they shoot?

[mdenz3]

Looking pretty good....How do they shoot?

I mostly just do plinking, and they seems as accurate as anything else.

[SquirrelHollow]

...
But don't get any ideas about producing these commercially because you don't have a Ballistics Lab to test this stuff, and you couldn't afford the liability insurance either.

...
Liability Insurance isn't as pricey as most people think. And it's cheaper, when you don't intend to publish load data.

If he was making these commercially, on a bar-fed CNC lathe, he could pay for most of the year's premium with one day's work. All he has to do is feed the machine. It's a pretty efficient process. :wink:

[mdenz3]

I've shot over 200 of them now with no issue and they are as accurate as any other bullet I shoot.

Now I need to get some 5/16 brass rod and get to work on some .308's, .311's, and .284's.

[johnson1942]

to mdenz: a few years back a proto type .40 cal was made fore the u.s.navy. the bullets were machined from solid brass and weighed 400 grains. they had needle points but i cant tell you the bases shape. it out shot a .50 bmg for accracy a long range and shot 16 ft. higher. i cant give you any more detail . i got that info from the gun smith that built it, and thats all i remember. im sorry to say the gun smith who built it passed away one year later. it may have been a .416 rigby but im not for sure. he was very well known for his long range guns. also i remember him saying the bullet left the barrel at 3200 ft. per sec. johnson1942

[W.R.Buchanan]

squirrel: he also has to sell them, and whereas that is not impossible, it will be difficult.

He would have to have a zillion different bullets on hand cuz customers ALWAYS want something just a little different than what you have already.

I tried desperately to get the Cheytec guys to let me make bullets for them at a SHOT show a few years ago, I could have gotten $2 a piece for them, and the quantites were huge. During the discussion they figured out they could buy a machine and make them themselves for the money they were going to give me, which is exactly what they did.. This worked for them simply because they only have one bullet design, and they only one customer. Themselves..

As far as Liability Ins is concerned I do have it, and the amount he would spend on the insurance would easily eat all of his profits. Going to market without it would be suicide for you and anyone associated with you. All it would take is one idiot shooting someone with one of your bullets and you'd either be out of business if you were lucky or in jail for along time.

The only way that you can make money in the bullet making business is to make and sell zillions of them, like the big outfits do. Only then do the profits exceed the expendatures. As a start up business it would be a long time before you saw a profit.

Believe me he is not the only machine shop to consider this. There are literally tens of thousands of machine shops capible of producing bullets, including mine. And all of them are looking for work everyday, and a good portion of the owners also shoot guns, and read magazines and see articles on turned bullets. It is NOT a new idea by any means. I have a lathe sitting idle right now and I could be up and running by Tuesday, and it would only take that long because it is Saturday right now and I would have to order stock on Monday. If I had the stock in house I could be making bullets in 2 hours.

If it was really that easy more outfits would be doing it. Making them is not the issue. The myriad of BS that goes along with making them and trying to sell them is the problem.

For personal use I say go for it. As a business it becomes "first you take a million dollars, and then you try to get your money back before someone else finds out what you're doing and steals it from you."

Randy

[HollowPoint]

I think they look pretty darn cool myself.

I thought of casting brass bullets using a jewelers furnace and iron bullet molds to cast them in.
I figured I could simply melt down some of the empty casings in my Junk-Brass barrel. Every time I've gone out in the field to hunt, plink or just to walk around there's always brass laying around that the original shooters never pick up; especially 22 RF brass.

I'm sure there are those who can find the negatives in such an endeavor but, for my own usage it perfectly logical. Sure beats paying thirty or forty bucks for a miniscule amount of store-bought brass bullets.

mdenz3, is there any chance of posting a close up photo of your bullets? I'd kind of like to see if they look as good close up as they do in the photos you've provided already.

I have a partial box of the Barnes Bullets in 30 caliber that when viewed up close have signs of having been cast rather than turned on a lathe. This is what gave me the idea of trying to cast some of my own rather than turing them on my lathe. (I don't own a CNC Lathe; just a manual lathe and a CNC mill)

When viewed up close, the surface of the Barnes Bullets are far from perfect. I guess those imperfections get ironed out -for the most part- as they travel down the bore.

Well done Mr. mdenz3, I like the way they turned out.

HollowPoint

[bowfin]

I go along with the sentiment that solid brass rod is best utilized as cleaning rods and rods to slug bores. However, if you have an itch to make brass bullets and you have the means to do so, then you absolutely have to do it. Life is too short not to do something you want to do when the chance falls right in your lap. If I had any 5/16" brass, I would figure out a way to get it to you, just to hear how the project came out.

We ran literally tons of 1" copper bar stock. I wish I had some of that for you to try some 12 gauge slugs, but all of that manufacturing went to Mexico.

I regret I don't have all the screw machine guys saving me their bar ends any more and the people isn stores having me haul away the twisted pieces...

...but I don't miss the noise and the heat and oil when it's been 95º and above for the last month. I also don't miss the flash fires when someone put in a 1½" lefthanded drill in without realizing which way the spindles were turning.