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??? Fmj epoxy bullet ???

7K views 14 replies 9 participants last post by  unclenick 
#1 ·
I've never done any reloading so I apologize if this is a stupid question but I recently read about a guy that melted the lead out of a fmj and filled the copper jacket with epoxy. He claimed that an epoxy 45acp left the muzzle at 2200fps. Iam curious if any reloaders here have ever tried such a thing. Or any other experimental cartridges. What if you could center a steel rod in a copper jacketed 44mag for example and fill rest with epoxy. Would you end up with a super fast and light round that might penetrate more steel than a standard 44? As I said I have no experience.with this sort of thing so for all I know you can by these over the counter. Or maybe you could cast an epoxy bullet without a metel jacket. What do you think?
 
#2 ·
epoxy is very, very light and melts at a low temperature. So replacing the lead with a light material would make for a low penetration round. And since the light epoxy is in the center of the bullet (where the heavier material should be) it would be very, very unstable in flight probably spinning end over end, tumbling.
 
#3 ·
Somebody already beat you to it. Magsafe, I think, or Glaser - forget which - makes or used to make self-defense rounds that were a bullet jacket filled with a mixture of birshot and epoxy.

Your favorite search engine should find it.
 
#4 ·
I just learned what "SABOT" means and Thule that's what I might be picturing. Glaseer rounds are epoxy and therefore do achieve much higher velocities but lack a steel penetrator. They are meant for minimum penetration. Iam after Max penetration. I also read about some 30 06 ammo called accelerators that fired a 223 in a nylon sleeve/Sabot. What if that 223 was replaced with green tip armor piercing round. I read that those accelerators left the muzzle at 5400fps. That may penetrate a lot of steel if you put a AP round in there. So what might happen if I wrap the same AP 223 in a custom made, properly sized, sleeve/Sabot and fired it from a 416 rigby? Might it penatrate alot of steel? In my original question the fmj and epoxy would have acted as the Sabot except it wouldn't have shed the epoxy at the muzzle it would shed on impact. The idea is to penetrate the maximum amount of steel as possible.
 
#6 ·
It's difficult to get over 5,000fps M.V. because of the physics of gas acceleration. The Accelerators that you reference were probably a little over 4,000fps. Not over 5,000. Close to the same as a .220 Swift. If you just want to play with AP bullets you can load up some surplus bullets in a Swift or .22-250, maybe one of the improved versions.

There's lots of stuff written about high velocity experiments that can be found by search engines. This forum really doesn't gravitate toward that so you may find better info elsewhere. Just an FYI.
 
#7 ·
Why not just melt out the lead core and fire the jacket? Most rifled firearms (the .303 is the one I know about for sure) will stabilise an empty jacket quite well. I think the .45 would work quite well with whatever powder charge it takes to get enough pressure to cycle the action, but you must life with the possibility that no load the case can contain will do that. Probably it would work best with the closed-front jacket of the GI round or similar. Or if you have a lathe with a really accurate chuck, you could drill out most of the lead.

One of the very early automatic pistols was the Danish Shouboe, which in an effort to keep down pressure and give high velocity, used a jacketed wooden bullet. .45 ACP load cou
It wasn't disastrously bad, but you will notice that nobody else has done it. I would be surprised if any .45 ACP load would give over 2000 ft./sec., and if it did, the killjoy question "Why?" creeps in. If you want it for some practical purpose, existing bullets have quite a lot going for them.

If I wanted improved penetration of a hard object by a pistol bullet, my first thought would go to something like an improved, straighter bodied version of the .22 Jet. I should think a couple of hundred wildcat cartridges of this description have appeared and disappeared by now. An advantage of a revolver is that you don't have to worry about cycling the action, and it doesn't have that little bit of unsupported case-head of the 1911 pistol as usually constituted.

An alternative would be pressing a hard steel ball bearing into the mouth of a hollow-point bullet. It might even be useful for something, who knows? But there is an important fact to remember with any improvised compound bullet. It takes a very slight offset of the bullet's centre of mass, from the bore axis, to produce quite a bit of inaccuracy.
 
#8 ·
The OP of this thread was intrested in penitrating steel? .223 standard ball loads do that well and a contender with those rounds would work. The main reason they do so well is the speed and type bullet but then you are looking at half inch plate or so. I don't understand the fixation of penitrating steel though. Heavy cast linotype bullets penitrate large animals, refridgerators, cars and almost any other common target well and deep. Guess I don't understand the question. Pistol rounds will never be as powerfull as the rifle rounds for a whole lot of reasons. Lou
 
#10 ·
I've experimented with steel core 223s and 30 06s and they work on 1/2- 1in steel. That's fine, but in my line of work I have almost unlimited access to scrap steel and would like to extend my current capabilities. I've considered putting a Sabot on a 223 steel core and firing it from a larger case. Maybe a 30 06 or a 416 but this is likely beyond my loading abilities. Also I thought people on this forum might enjoy a topic that seems to me a little more fresh than the usual reoccurring conversations.
 
#12 ·
I don't know about this particular set of components, but i'v read tha tit get's really hard to push any projectile above around 4000 to 5000 FPS. Even NASA has some Really Expensive custom Cannons to try to simulate micrometeorite impacts.
The Warthog cannon rounds get a boost by being fired form the moving aircraft so could move fast over the ground and their DU rounds reportedly got into low level fission area, leaving the target tanks 'radioactive'.
 
#13 ·
If memory serves me correctly, NASA or someone like that played with a rail gun that would launch a depleted uranium projectal at something like 15,000 FPS. Someone please correct me if I am wrong here but it seems right. They usd a very long (half mile?) barrell that increased the FPS in stages. Quite impressive and just as impractical for normal folks. Guess you could Google Rail gun and see what comes up. Lou
 
#14 ·
I find this obsession with steel penetration you keep bringing up in all your threads disturbing. Could you enlighten us with your intentions?
 
#15 · (Edited)
Please note that armor piercing ammo is legal to purchase and possess in rifle ammunition but not in handgun ammunition. The law does this by outlawing armor piercing ammunition, then defining "armor piercing" by relating it only to handguns:

The term "armor piercing ammunition" means—
(i) a projectile or projectile core which may be used in a handgun and which is constructed entirely (excluding the presence of traces of other substances) from one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper, or depleted uranium; or
(ii)
a full jacketed projectile larger than .22 caliber designed and intended for use in a handgun and whose jacket has a weight of more than 25 percent of the total weight of the projectile.
That's not what AP means to real people or the military, but that's what it means under the law.

Second, while you can greatly increase velocity by lightening a bullet and using a fast burning propellant, you cannot guarantee penetration by velocity alone. Indeed, most studies show maximum penetration occurs only after a projectile has traveled far enough to settle initial yaw from that occurring at the muzzle. For a rifle this is usually around 200 yards. Handgun rounds are typically overstabilized by rifle standards, so the distance may be reduced to 50 yards or so, but there will be a maximum penetration impact range. Range short of that sees the bullet enter at a very slight angle, and fluid resistance at high velocity is so great that a small angle easily turns into tumbling, which greatly reduces penetration.

Hatcher's Notebook (pp. 406-407 1961 ed.) has photos illustrating the above. They show a 150 grain flat base spire point .30-06 fired at 50 feet penetrates solid oak just under 1 foot. At 200 yards the same round penetrates solid oak almost 3 feet. The difference is that at short range the bullet turns sideways, presenting much more profile to the oak for deceleration and fails to penetrate far.

A friend who was an engineer working on government projects told me they'd found the same thing trying to shoot steel rods into concrete as anchors. Up to something like 1700 fps they penetrated deeper with increased velocity. Above that, the ends would bend over and form a hook shape and turn in the concrete, penetrating less, not more.

The limit to velocity is imposed by the maximum velocity a propellant gas can accelerate its own mass to. When you additionally burden it with pushing a bullet mass, too, that number is lower. It seems to me the government experimented with firing bullets from guns using 20mm and maybe even 37 mm cases necked down to do .30 or .50 caliber in hugely thick guns, but couldn't get past around 6,000 fps. Someone may know the actual number, but the mass of the heavy gases is the limit.

My friend also took me on a tour of a lab firing the meteorite simulations. This consisted of a 40 foot gun that was separable into two parts in the middle. It was about 10 inch diameter steel all the way, resting on air bearings so operators could manipulate it. A 40 mm casing was loaded with about a pound of powder with a 40 mm plastic piston for the first half projectile. At the halfway point, 20 feet down the barrel, the bore necked down to .50 caliber. At the narrowing they placed a 1/4" aluminum ball into a two-piece Nylon .50 caliber sabot. Behind the sabot they placed a 60,000 psi rupture disc. They bolted the two halves of the barrel back together. They loaded the breech with the 40 mm piston sabot round, and then evacuated the space between it and the burst disc and filled that space with helium, which is much lighter than propellant gases and will move much faster under the same pressure. They fired the piston to compress the helium. When it reached the burst disc pressure, 60,000 psi helium drove the Nylon Sabot to 17,000 fps. At the muzzle it separated and hit an piece of armor plate drilled to pass the 1/4" aluminum ball and stop the sabot. The ball then was the meteorite simulator.

Rail guns don't use propellant gas. They charge a bunch of capacitors to high voltage and discharge them to create a plasma arc at the base of the projectile between two rails that have the voltage applied across them. The plasma short circuits the discharge and the reaction of the plasma to the magnetic field created by the current drives the projectile forward. No propellant gas mass limitations are involved.
 
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