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