Making Tin or Zinc bullets.

Z

Zorro

New member
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?
 
Zorro said:
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?
Click to expand...
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.

I do not know about pure Zinc, but a little Zinc in the casting alloy for bullets will ruin a whole lot of alloy. Do a little internet searching on Zinc and cast bullets and you will see what I mean.
 
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.
 
People have done it, tough to get it to fill out the mold. And have size issues as well. From some I've read it's tough to get anything close to decent bullets, plus they weigh less so weights are different. BUT given the long winters here and the buckets of wheel weights i got i may dabble in it one day.
 
If I remember correctly, in the early sixties Lyman made a mold that was intended to cast a Zinc washer around a Lead bullet. If memory is correct, that system was a left-over from years earlier but it soon disappeared from Lyman's listings of molds.
Note: yes, I am that old.
 
Last edited:
5whiskey said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Last edited:
Tin is low melting. A solid tin bullet would likely "tin" your barrel, like preparing a solder joint.

Zinc bullets can be made. As said, zinc is a contaminant for lead, also lead is a contaminant for zinc. If you want to cast zinc bullets, you need a dedicated melting pot and bullet mold.
 
At 2-5% in typical bullet alloys, that was a long term gift.

A friend got a Deal on some hundreds of pounds of bagged shot at a dealer's going out of business sale.
He loaded the 7 1/2, 8, and 9 for Trap and Skeet.
He melted the rest for cast bullets, adding tin for good mold fill.

By the time he got me into BPCR, he was running low on shot, so we bought some foundry 5% which cast very nice but rather soft bullets. Fine at 1200 fps.
 
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.
Click to expand...

I remember that, vaguely. As I recall, there were other issues beyond just the cost of the silver. Melting point, not filling out molds well, shrinkage compared to lead, and of course bullet weight compared to lead. Lots of issues getting good bullets using standard molds made for casting lead.

A few thousandths difference in what drops from the mold isn't a big deal if you are casting a spoon. Casting a bullet, it is.

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. :D

Silver for werewolves, its wasted on ordinary human bad guys. :rolleyes:

Zinc bullets? no thanks, not as long as there is still lead in the world.
Solid tin? also a poor idea.
 
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 as 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, they would be 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.
 
Bob Willman said:
Before Covid showed up a friend gifted me a factory tin ingot weighing over 60 pounds.
I thanked him profusely.
Click to expand...
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.
 
Unclenick said:
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.
Click to expand...
Yes... you convinced me. I am hereby switching to Gold for bullet casting. :)
 
Silver would be doable at a couple bucks per shot. Gold would be pushing $500 a round. You'd better be able to reclaim those bullets!
 
None of the precious metals can be cast id lead moulds. They require lost wax casting techniques. That's why those old tests didn't work (beside silver being way too hard.) Lost wax casting is very precise.
The only precious metal that might be good for casting real bullets would be 24K gold.
 
I played around with zinc bullets about 40 years ago. Using a 158 gr 38 caliber mold you get a bullet of about 90 grains. Load data used to be in the Speer and Lyman manuals for 90 gr bullets in 357 mag (.380 ACP bullets weigh about 90 grains). We sized and lubed the zinc bullets in my Lyman Lubri-Sizer (more like just lubed them, zinc shrinks a lot more than lead).

We loaded the zinc bullets using Unique powder (heck, we loaded EVERYTHING with Unique).

We did not see metal fouling in the barrel, zinc in pretty hard. We also did not see great accuracy, casting zinc presented certain temperature control challenges as we did not want to use our lead casting pots so we just heated the zinc in a pouring ladle and poured it into the molds. As I said above, zinc shrinks a lot more than lead, so most of the bullets were undersized.

It's a fun experiment making zinc bullets. Do it! Play around! You'll learn something in the process.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top