the steel jacket is very thin, at least compared to copper-jacketed bullets. Also, military arms intended for firing steel-jacketed bullets usually have hard chrome-lined bores.
I have a few ounces of silver I saved up from large DC electrical fuses. I just might cast a few round balls.
The problem will be with sprue cutting. I won’t be able to use a Lee (aluminum)mold.
And as to the silver shrinks more would not be a bit of a problem with a round ball as I cut my own patches anyway.
Will have to shoot where I can re-claim the balls.
Those pre-lubed patches the shooter was using in the video do not work well in my rifles. I have used them but I only get 2-3 shots before I will not be able to reload.
And if (IMO) one has to use a short starter to load, the wrong size ball or patch thickness is being used. The patch resistance should only be enough to hold the ball from moving after it is seated on the powder. The ball will tighten during the fireing and the patch will show how well it worked when found 30<> ft. out front.
A pure lead round ball reclaimed will also show cloth imprint and sighns of riflings depending on groove depth.
A couple of hundred years ago people wouldn’t be using silver bullets against werewolves. From what I’ve read, the silver bullets and werewolves thing only dates back to the 1930s (!)
Before that, Silver Bullets were the preferred remedy against witches. I first learned this while reading the bio of Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers – one future convert related how she’d originally wished she’d had a silver bullet to shoot her with, since she was convinced AnnLee was a witch. I’ve since found other citations. The link with witches seems to go back to at least the 17th century.
Obviously because scientists didn’t discover silver’s anti-werewolf properties until then!
This is, of course, why Hitler’s Werewulfkorps never saw battle, as the Allies had stockpiled silver ammunition during the lead-up to war.
Years ago when silver was much cheaper I had the same question. The end result in both a TC and a Hatfield was “pretty much the same as the lead”. The lighter weight and less smooth surface made them a little more influenced by wind but the groups were not very bad. Copper (why I tried it is too long to get into) did poor but I believe that was more due to poor casting traits than anything else; they really came out of the Shiloh molds looking really bad. Casting – that’s where the real problems come in.
I have to ask. What show was this?
“Today on Mythbusters were testing how effective silver bullets really are against werewolves, and later Kari finds out whether witches really do float”
Seriously who thought this was a reaonable hypothesis to base a show around. I have to see this just for the WTF factor.
“They pointed out that silver shrinks more than lead when it cools. That would mean that a silver bullet would not fit the barrel (and the lands and grooves) as well as a lead bullet would; and that would cause accuracy to suffer”
Why not adjust the mold to give the needed final size?
That is why we build molds " steel safe". Meaning they are undersize on purpose, then after sampling and the exact shrink rate is determined, the cavity gets the final machining.
I think it was The Real Wolfman. The show was not ‘testing the werewolf myth’, but was about deducing what really happened in a French village.
Hell, just use a shotgun and cast a slug or a bunch of buckshot. Problem solved, and in a pinch you can use a handful of pre-1965 dimes for when things get up close and personal in the local coin shop.
Some years ago, when the Lone Ranger TV series was popular, one of the gun rags had Dean Grennell cast some silver bullets for cartridge revolver and test them for accuracy. They had a hell of a job to get the mold hot enough to cast properly (don’t recall what the accuracy result was). Even then silver was valuable enough for them to have to dig up the dirt in the backstop and find them afterwards.