Pure Tin is very expensive compared to Lead and hard to find. If one should be lucky enough to find pure Tin he would be better off alloying it with pure Lead to make cast bullets.Anyone ever MAKE you own Tin or Zinc Bullets?
Not much information about that.
Like can you just cast them?
And will the Zinc or Tin up your barrels at high velocities?
There was also a gun writer (early sixties), in one of the gun rags that had an illustrated article about using pure Silver to produce a bullet. He would shoot it into a sand bank and recover the bullet, re-cast and experiment some more. It was to test the veracity of the Lone Ranger Silver bullets theory. As I remember the Silver did produce a useable bullet, albeit at a high price.There was a guy who played around with aluminum projectiles for gallery loads... he discovered that aluminum was too brittle and hard. As said tin is too expensive. I’m interested in seeing a trial of just raw zinc. Thing is I’m quite sure it’s been done, and probably found to not be useful. After all, it would’ve caught on.
It was to test the veracity of the Lone Ranger Silver bullets theory. As I remember the Silver did produce a useable bullet, albeit at a high price.
His retired Texas ranger friend, Jim.44 AMP said:If I remember the stories right, the Lone Ranger had a secret silver mine of his own, though I'm not clear on who did the mining.
In the "old days" there were several items made from pure Tin including the pipes/plumbing for soda fountains and squeeze tubes like tooth paste tubes. But and replacement materials became available for those applications, Tin became ever more rare.Before Covid showed up a friend gifted me a factory tin ingot weighing over 60 pounds.
I thanked him profusely.
Yes... you convinced me. I am hereby switching to Gold for bullet casting.Pure silver is about 7.5% less dense than pure lead, but at 10.49 gm/cc is about the same as the net density of typical jacketed bullets. The issue is the melting point is more than twice that of lead, so the mold will expand. If you have unlimited resources, pure gold is a better choice at it is about 1.7 times the density of pure lead, so you'll get a BC about 1.7 times higher and since they would be heavier without being longer than their lead counterparts, some very easily stabilized bullets. But the melting point problem is the same as with silver, and even a little worse and most hot molds would be throwing bullets two or three thousandths bigger than they would with lead alloys.