Last time I bought .22LR ammo, it was around $7-8 for a brick of 500 (Remington and Federal promo loads). It seems that .22LR ammo is just not to be found at Wal-mart these days and when it is found, it's probably 3 times that price.
So, what if there was a way that you could still shoot some of your .22LR firearms, but with just a bit more effort, but quite a bit cheaper than buying commercial ammo these days? Would you be interested?
I've done a bit of research and spoken with a distributor for the powder loads that are manufactured for things like shooting nails and fasteners into concrete, starter gun blanks, or retriever dog device launches. These are the same as a .22LR piece of ammo, but do not have a projectile. Instead of a projectile, the end is crimped. They look like this:
http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pro...4bd253_400.jpg
I had noticed that even though .22LR has not been readily available over the last 8 years, the powder loads have still been available at Home Depot and such. So, I did a bit of searching and found a company that manufactures those powder loads. It took a month of going back and forth and being transferred from one person to another and long delays between sending an email and receiving a reply, but FINALLY, I got a quote on what the powder loads would cost if bought in 50K quantity (i.e. 500 boxes of 100 each).
It works out to be a $2.65 per box of 100.
So, that's $26.50 per 1000 which is about what we pay for just primers for our centerfire reloadings. That's $13.25 for the 500-round brick price, so it's a little more than what we used to pay, but with how much the dollar has decreased in value over the last 8 years, that's probably not unreasonable.
If you figure $1 per pound for lead, then 500 40gr bullets would be an additional $2.86. So, now we're up to $16.11. If you were shooting 55gr bullets, it would be $3.93 per 500 bullets or a total of $17.18.
Some people have bullet traps, so the effective cost of the bullets themselves would be pretty close to ZERO for them.
These powder loads come in various load numbers/colors -- #1 - #6 (gray, brown, green, yellow, red, purple).
http://www.ramset.com/portals/0/Imag...oads/graph.jpg
Some of these might be a bit much for some .22LR firearms. On the other hand, I think it would be possible to build an adapter for a firearm chambered in .223 that had an offset hole (because of the rimfire primer) for one of these powder loads in the base and still allowed a cast bullet to be inserted between the neck and the rifling lands. This could easily handle even the highest (i.e. purple) powder loads.
If you had a .22LR revolver, I'm thinking that you could load it like a cap and ball revolver and you would have a full cylinder of rounds that you could fire as fast as you could pull the trigger.
Now, there have been a few people on YouTube who have experimented with these powder loads in firearms, but they have been using them with .22 airgun pellets. Although they are getting impressive velocities out of them, when they exceed what the pellet can handle, the result is often the skirt of the pellet remaining in the barrel with the rest of the pellet exiting. Subsequent rounds usually don't chamber.
So, what do ya'll think? If you could get these powder loads in that quantity for that price, would you consider using that for your .22 shooting? I haven't decided yet, but I'm tempted...