Hi, I'd like to discuss sources to make expedient ammunition. There's a video on the YouTubes where the ammo channel takes a razor blade and shaves several matchbooks worth of material and reloads a .38 cal bullet with 6 grams of this propellant. The bullet fired using a standard primer and went 560 fps, and cleared 16" of gel before embedding into a 2x6 piece of wood. With over the counter powder his .38 travelled at 990 fps using the same wadcutter. So my question would be whether using match propellant be a good substitute for smokeless in a shtf scenario and whether there'd be any possibilities of increasing performance. I'm also interested in learning from reloading people on cheap sources of lead. So far I'm stuck on loads of the shit from junkyards. Preferences on bullet castings and tips and anything else you can think of would be within the purview of this threda.
Expedient Ammunition Threda
ask around at marinas and boatyards to see if anyone has an old junked sailboat they're gonna scrap. you're gonna be looking at a few hundred pounds of lead from the keel and ballast, if you have the equipment to haul it off. check out your local range as well to see if you can sift old bullets from the dirt. either bring a wooden box with mesh on the bottom to separate out the lead from the dirt, or do like this guy in this video.
as far as propellant, it may be possible to use match heads, but you're looking at less powerful, less reliable ammo, and it may dirty up your gun. i'm also not sure how good that kind of residue is for your gun. it may be corrosive like black powder.
if you're worried about SHTF, stock up on good, reliable powder. matches would be too useful as regular fire starters to waste like that in a survival situation.
another tip: save your spent primers, corroded/cracked cases, and any .22 cases you find. you can't use them for reloading, but they're valuable. sell them to your scrap yard guy or trade it to him for tin and maybe some high antimony lead alloy.
finally, go ahead and scour youtube for videos on casting, reloading, and powdercoating bullets. download as many as you can before youtube purges them.
a legit DIY smokeless powder would be doable, but super difficult and stupidly dangerous. you'd need to make your own nitroglycerin and highly nitrated nitrocellulose, then bind them with some sort of wax or grease. you'd have to do all of this on a very very small scale, and you'd likely still blow yourself up.
for DIY powders, you'd be better off making black powder and just staying away from semi-automatics, and clean the guns religiously.
post toturial
If it took several books of matches for one round it's no good in a chaotic SHTF scenario. Maybe doable in a stable post-gungrab regime though.
What are options for igniting it? I don't see anyone talking about how to make mercury fulminate. Are the only practical choices either flint or electrical, once you lose access to manufactured priming compound?
Cordite is 58% Nitro-glycerine, 37% Guncotton and 3% petroleum jelly.
Cody'sLab had videos on how to make nitroglycerine and guncotton, but he got his channel shut down until he removed them, so here's a russian making nitroglycerine.
here's a Cody producing his own nitric acid which can be used to make the nitrocellulose and also the nitroglycerin. it's not as efficient as the process used by modern industry, but you can whip it up with just some sort of generator, or even solar power, and just let it sit and accumulate.
and here's a guy making nitrocellulose, aka guncotton.
you dissolve the guncotton in the nitroglycerine, then use the petroleum jelly to hold it all together.
all of the steps in this process are suicidal dangerous. if your solutions or products are impure, which they will be, they will be incredibly unstable and kill you. it is so much cheaper, easier, and safer to just stock up now that even knowing how to do all of this is mostly useless.
in general, the only part of a round of ammo i'd be comfortable making myself is the bullet. if you run out of primers, cases, or propellant, you're fucked.
The touchy part is the sulfur. Not everyone has a ready supply unless they live neer a current or former volcano. I've heard that sulfur can be replaced with something else but I don't remember what or if that's even true.
never give up, even it means a high chance of death
Without primers you're better off making a long bow and some arrows and taking ammo off of fallen enemies.
You could also build a cannon to avoid having to worry about primers or cases
You can make a primer with match head powder and the striking strip as well.
Dude, you're going to get more HNO3 for your time/money by just purifying the H2SO4 out of some drain cleaner and reacting it with stump remover. It's worth doing it this way instead of pulling from the air since you're going to need H2SO4 to drive later reactions.
This Canuck is a pretty good chemist and I've learned how to do some useful stuff from him in the past.
I used sulphuric acid and a nitrate salt in an ice bath back when I was making nitric acid. I got 69% concentration pretty easily.
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You realize an electrical charge from a piezoelectric lighter would be enough to trigger a round? A lot of modern muskets use it to directly ignite gunpowder, no primer needed. I have fired one such weapon and they are as accurate and powerful as any 30.06, just less convenient. Gunpowder can also be used as a primer to set of cordite, or as in a completely primerless weapon similar to electric muskets. In general both cases and primers are obsolete unnecessary technology, we keep it around because it's all anyone has ever known.
My opinion of this thread is a bit low, it's important to know these things but not to discuss them ad nauseum. Knowing how to smuggle them in and having connections in the criminal world is a hell of a lot more important than reinventing every nut and bolt to arm ourselves. All of this information is only ever going to be used if every government on earth simultaneously collapses, every gun factory and stockpile is blown up, and the people that know how to make weapons are killed. I can't imagine what situation could cause this series of events to take place to completeness, maybe a very thorough alien invasion… in which case we're better off making homebrew WMDs not homebrew muskets.
The Ammo Channel did a video on match head ammo. Results were it was turbo corrosive but was functional.
Someone needs to archive this dudes work.
Can't you make guncotton with cotton, nitric and sulphuric acid? Can't you just use that as propellant? If you have niggers and Arabs in your country cotton and acid should be plentiful
why don't we see cordite being produced today?
Destroys barrels. It burns way to hot.
yes but not in small arms. it used to be used in cannons.
why is cordite hotter than modern ammunition? Isn't it made from the same base materials?
Direct ignition is possible without needing black powder as a primer, though I have to wonder how much more energy is required, and whether current lithium batteries can provide juice fast enough for semi/automatic fire.
Fucking millennials i swear.
High nitroglycerin content leads to high temperatures.
Sage for doublepost.
Nitrocellulose guncotton can be made easily at home. To improve it see the patents on French Poudre B. Ether can be purchased at good purity in decent quantities from model airplane and photographic development supply houses. The rollers and cutters you can improvise with a little creativity. It's a perfectly suitable single base propellant that does not require messing with the potentially volatile nitroglycerin. Care should still be taken of course as small batch production lends itself toward non-uniformity and the potential for untoward pressure development from particularly "hot" lots. Be conservative in your usage. I am not sure how one can test how energetic a lot is in the home environment except by the very indirect usage of a chronograph. Velocity can give some indication of power, but there are instances in which high pressures do not generate excess velocity making at an overall unreliable and unsafe method. It's something for those of use without access to pressure testing equipment, and if you're at the point where making your own smokeless is the best option you're deep enough in the shit that whatever application you need it for is probably more likely to lead to loss of life than an accidental kaboom will. Don't fuck with it if you don't have to, stockpile smokeless powder now.