Lead Bullet Weights
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Has there ever been experimentation with GOLD bullets?
Now I know this wouldn’t be the least bit cost effective. Wouldn’t make any sense cost wise, but they’re always them people that got more money than they know what to do with…
I was watching a movie the other day that mentioned SILVER bullets, and this got me thinking, what about GOLD for bullets? Lead is used for two main reasons: malleability(for fragmentation) and weight(for maintaining momentum for deeper penetration). GOLD is also very malleable and is almost as heavy as lead. It is also said(by GAMO USA for their Raptor GOLD plated air rifle pellets) to have a lubricating effect(helping it slide through the barrel easier), and also is noncorrosive unlike lead.
Does anybody know of any documented experimentation with SOLID GOLD bullets???
This is nothing serious, and trust me I would never try it even if I had too much money... Just curious!
I do not shoot gold bullets although I have some I cast and loaded for conversation pieces. I have a place near me with a placer deposit that I get a far amount of gold from each year. But there is no way in hell with gold over $1000 an ounce that I will shoot gold bullets anymore!
I have tried it in my indoor handgun range but made damn sure to recover them. Talk about expansion! Soft gold expands like mad on impact. In a super high velocity round it can come apart in the air and disintegrate on impact with a semihard surface.
EDIT;
I gave a hurried answer so let me explain better.
My buddy and I were running a sluice box and talking when we joked about making some gold bullets. So the next day at my place we melted down some gold nuggets and some gold dust (not pure) and poured them into a Layman .430 wadcutter mold and weighed them. I don’t recall the exact weight it was 15 years ago but it did weigh over the 240gr that a cast lead bullet would weigh. But not THAT much difference. So we reduced the powder charge to compensate for the added weight in the .44 special casing. This was a light cowboy action load and we shot it at a bucket of sand. The bullet had deformed some but nothing radically so. We then loaded up a .44 magnum casing with a light load and shot the sand bucket and it expanded big time. So my buddy tries loading a 30-30 and it worked and expanded big time! He then tries to use a gold cast bullet in a .243 with a stout charge (at his place) and he said the bullet fragmented before it hit the target. The paper target had a bunch of tiny holes in it.
None of what we did was remotely scientific. We never used pure gold. We didn’t keep records or try it more than a few rounds; it was just for the hell of it.
Pure lead can come apart at super high velocities this is why they add tin to make lead harder and even so limit the velocity and use a gas check to prevent lead building up in the barrel. This is why high velocity ammo has a copper jacket to keep the lead inside intact and to control expansion. We never used any protective jacket on the gold bullets.
We ended up loading a few rounds for conversation pieces and still have them today.
Would we do it again? No! The price of gold 15 years ago was far less than today. It was a pain getting the gold out of the rifling and retrieving it. Shooting bullets that are worth several hundred dollars don’t jive with my pocket book and sure as hell doesn’t sit well with all the hard work we put into getting it!
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