Grump
07-12-2014, 01:44 AM
I really did try some searching but so much stuff came up not on-point...
I've noticed that a lot of this swaging stuff for J-words involves just buying jacket (called blanks?) material and then doing your own magic to finish assembling and fabricating the projectile. If not buying jacket blanks, .22 RF brass seems the most common alternative. And sensible for the calibers it works in.
Anyway, years and years ago before you had to sort out the zinc core pennies and before .22 case jackets caught on, I *thought* I remembered reading/hearing about some heavy-duty rolling equipment being used to thin down US copper pennies for jackets (used in .30 calibers mostly IIRC). It was considered barely break-even back then because the very few jackets available then were about the same price, and people this dedicated to DIY understood that equal materials cost + more time making the stuff = really more expensive under the "my time is worth $X.XX per hour" rationale.
I also remember that penny jackets were okay for hunting bullets but thinner jackets were almost always more accurate.
So, what's the present state of the art on penny jackets? You can "buy" them at face value at the bank or out of what's circulating, but the copper content is worth about 3 cents apiece these days.
If I were to ever take the plunge into swaging, I would be most interested in making .355, .357, .400 and .451 projectiles.
My college years included time served at a high-volume Pizza Hut. Their thin crust then was rolled from a genuine ACME machine in two stages--first one came out about 3/8 or 1/2 inch thick, then the second stage below that took the prepped wad down to 1.8-inch or so. That dough is simply too stiff for me to roll than thin by hand in less than 15-20 minutes, so my home made is softer, but I digress. I am wondering if pennies could be easy enough to work with for swaging if we ran them through two or even three+ progressively thinner rolling operations. That of course would make the cupping process and the rest of the jacket operations much easier.
Just wondering.
Thanks!
I've noticed that a lot of this swaging stuff for J-words involves just buying jacket (called blanks?) material and then doing your own magic to finish assembling and fabricating the projectile. If not buying jacket blanks, .22 RF brass seems the most common alternative. And sensible for the calibers it works in.
Anyway, years and years ago before you had to sort out the zinc core pennies and before .22 case jackets caught on, I *thought* I remembered reading/hearing about some heavy-duty rolling equipment being used to thin down US copper pennies for jackets (used in .30 calibers mostly IIRC). It was considered barely break-even back then because the very few jackets available then were about the same price, and people this dedicated to DIY understood that equal materials cost + more time making the stuff = really more expensive under the "my time is worth $X.XX per hour" rationale.
I also remember that penny jackets were okay for hunting bullets but thinner jackets were almost always more accurate.
So, what's the present state of the art on penny jackets? You can "buy" them at face value at the bank or out of what's circulating, but the copper content is worth about 3 cents apiece these days.
If I were to ever take the plunge into swaging, I would be most interested in making .355, .357, .400 and .451 projectiles.
My college years included time served at a high-volume Pizza Hut. Their thin crust then was rolled from a genuine ACME machine in two stages--first one came out about 3/8 or 1/2 inch thick, then the second stage below that took the prepped wad down to 1.8-inch or so. That dough is simply too stiff for me to roll than thin by hand in less than 15-20 minutes, so my home made is softer, but I digress. I am wondering if pennies could be easy enough to work with for swaging if we ran them through two or even three+ progressively thinner rolling operations. That of course would make the cupping process and the rest of the jacket operations much easier.
Just wondering.
Thanks!