Making silver bullets

[nancylebov]

Recently, I was given the homework of building some silver bullets. Mercy is supposed to cast her own, and we needed to work through the process. I've cast my own lead bullets -- how hard can it be? As it turns out, the high melting point of silver would ruin conventional bullet molds, it's far too hard for a normal resizing die, and achieving the precision needed for bullet making would be difficult with the methods usually employed for making silver jewelry. In short, silver bullets aren't nearly as easy to make as we had supposed. Suddenly a minor detail in the book has me calling machine shops, silver founderies and our resident circle of hard-core reloading friends. Stop and imagine these conversations for a minute:

From Hurog.com, the website of Patricia Briggs, writer of intelligent fantasy which isn't nearly as well known as it should be.

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Machining will work. I used to machine pure silver rods for use in spectroscopy in a lathe and it's quite easy. Silver cuts like brass, pretty much.

Lost wax casting will also work quite well. Use the reloading dies to make wax bullets, coat them in powdered ceramic, cook the moulds to sinter the powder and burn out the wax, then fill the hot moulds with liquid silver. When cool, crack the mould material off the bullets. They can be sized in a tungsten-carbide die before going into a reloading press.

[redknight.livejournal.com]

I find myself wondering if silver bullets will actually work properly in a gun. Will metal that hard seal against the barrel properly and/or damage the barrel?

Are silver bullet still effective (against whatever sort of supernatural being one is hunting/defending against) if you alloy them with another metal to make them softer or jacket them with copper?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that alloying would work if there's enough silver. After all, silver jewelry and such isn't 100% silver. I don't know how much of what you'd need to add to the bullets to make them soft enough.

As for copper jacketing, it's clear that you need to get the silver into direct contact. Would the silver come through the jacket when you hit the werewolf?

[whc.livejournal.com]

How about a silver plated lead bullet?

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I find myself wondering if silver bullets will actually work properly in a gun. Will metal that hard seal against the barrel properly and/or damage the barrel?

The military uses steel bullets, which is much harder than silver. More info in the (http://hurog.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=308ce42f4604722f30ae71266341b35a&topic=607.msg23547#msg23547) forums (http://hurog.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=308ce42f4604722f30ae71266341b35a&topic=606.0).

[freyas-fire.livejournal.com]

You can get silver and casting equipment and supplies through Rio Grande, but you need to have a tax ID in order to open an account. http://www.riogrande.com/

[sgsguru.livejournal.com]

I suppose it would be cheating to drop molten silver in a shot tower and then use a shotgun?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yup! That's totally cheating, and so Not Allowed(tm).

(as long as you're not trying the insipid "silver nitrate" bullets, though, I'm tempted to let it go)