by bladeracer » 05 May 2022, 12:10 pm
If you have a supply of free lead, like recovering your own bullets, you can cast and coat your own bullets for virtually nothing at all. An hour of gas or electricity and $25 of powdercoat. And the equipment cost is negligible - a mould, a ladle and a source of heat basically. If you want to get fancy, get a pot for melting the alloy in and a $50 toaster oven to bake the PC. You can make very effective and reasonably accurate bullets for almost nothing, just keep recovering your lead and recasting it. But even if you have to buy your alloy it's still only around $12/kg, enough to make about 200 60gn bullets at about six-cents apiece. The cheapest bulk commercial .224" copper-jacketed bullets are around 12c apiece (for the excellent Gamekings). Buy a different mould and you can make different bullets.
But getting cast bullets to shoot as accurately or consistently as commercially-made jacketed bullets is difficult, even more difficult at longer ranges. And I think still impossible at velocities above about 3500fps. If you need higher performance then you probably want to buy a heap of copper or brass rod and machine your bullets on a lathe or CNC machine. Probably the worst price you'll pay is about $20/m for 6mm copper out of China via Ebay, which will make you about 40 bullets at 50c apiece - assuming you have the equipment and the basic skill to make them yourself. You can also cast your own rod if you have a source of free copper (tube or wiring). If you have to pay somebody to turn them out for you you'll probably be paying a dollar apiece at least, if you order a few thousand. Brass is a bit cheaper and easier to machine. I just bought some tungsten rod to play with, but it's harder than steel so you need to jacket the bullet with something, like paper, copper, brass or powdercoat. But its density enables .224" bullets over well over 100gn that will still shoot in the average 8"-twist .223 barrel. I haven't tried machining it yet, that may be a chore for me and it may be easier to grind it to shape. Just something to play with some time.
Or you can swage your lead bullets into jackets, either using .22LR brass, or buying or making the jackets. You can make very good bullets this way, but the equipment is expensive to buy or make. You need to either do a lot of shooting to make your own bullets cheaper than buying them, or you need to sell some of your output (which adds further issues) for a small margin to reduce the costs. If you only use 1000 bullets a year it's not worth the $1500-$2000 up-front cost of the equipment, on top of the cost of the lead if you don't have a source of pure lead. You're pretty much up for the same cost as casting your bullets (buying lead wire or actually casting bullets that you then swage into the jackets), plus the cost of the jackets. .22LR brass is very thin, much thinner than conventional copper jackets so it does have limits - spinning it above about 275,000rpm is very likely to tear the bullet apart as it exits the muzzle. This makes them best for slow-twist barrels that prefer short bullets, so under about 60gn. They still shoot fine in faster twist rates, but you have to reduce the velocity - 3000fps or less in my 8"-twist is good. Commercially-made jacketed bullets will offer better accuracy and consistency for significantly lower cost. In the really big calibers, like .400" and bigger, people use empty centrefire pistol and rifle brass for jackets.
As for quality, it can vary. Not many people have bought a variety of dies to make different bullets to determine if one is better than others. Most people buy one setup and just make those bullets, not always with optimal results, but generally with usable results. I can't recall off the top of my head ever reading about somebody that couldn't make usable bullets out of it. I don't think most people that make this investment are making bullets as good as commercial manufacturers do. Commercial manufacturers have enough output to put in place very close-tolerance quality control with little to no human intervention. Most people using swaging dies are relying primarily on human intervention at every step, which means some variation in every bullet. This is fine for you own usage I think, you can tolerate some fliers or put in time batching your bullets. But when you start selling your product to other people for money, they aren't making any saving or getting the enjoyment of making them, so the fliers are not tolerable to your customers. Are they going to buy your bullets and then spend the hours measuring and weighing them to batch them, or just go and buy higher-quality bullets that are cheaper than yours and don't need batching? If you're going to sell them to recoup the outlay then you need to add significant quality control, or man hours, which then drives your selling price up even further, making your product even less enticing against cheaper higher-quality bullets.
So, if you want a lifetime supply of reasonably high-quality bullets and never have to rely on outside sources, or if the bullet you want is simply not offered by any manufacturer then the investment is probably a good one. Likewise if you just want to enjoy experimenting and making your own bullets, go for it. I wouldn't go into it expecting to save money though.
But if you just want a lifetime supply of high-quality bullets, weigh up how many bullets that will be, and just buy them now. You'll have your lifetime supply locked away, with no further effort on your part. In twenty years you'll still be shooting the same excellent twelve-cent Gamekings, all from the same batch, while your mates are paying $200 or more to buy the same bullet by the hundred, when they can even find them. And when they can't, you can always sell them some of yours. I bought a hundred 75gn Hornady .243" hollow-points in 1984 for $16, and that was off the shelf of my local Elders. I don't know if you could even order bulk bullets back in those days.
Practice Strict Gun Control - Precision Counts!