Casting Silver Bullets (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Casting Silver Bullets (2013)

patriciabriggs.com

57 pointstjalfi16 comments

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> However, prior to the industrial revolution, there was insufficient sulfur in the atmosphere to tarnish silver.

Note, this is a contested idea:

https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/236275/a-tarnished-h...

she should have talked a jeweler. for this size its most convenient to cast in a centrifuge. that a-voids the issue.

As a former goldsmith by trade, I agree. We mostly use vacuum casters or centrifugal casters and vestment casting.

I've often wondered if there were a market for silver bullets on say Etsy. Minus the gun powder and primer of course.

Yeah I was surprised by the article. I had thought silver bullets were fairly common, at least as novelty items for shooters, rather than for actual werewolf hunting. I guess not, though: the ones I see now all seem to be replicas unsuitable for actual shooting.

I also don't understand the casting headaches: I've seen some videos of Alec Steele making gold rings by lost wax casting and not having such trouble. Is the difference that he was willing to do a lot of hand finishing of the cast rings?

Here is one of Alec Steele's videos showing him making a ring. It's a very romantic vid for the right kind of nerd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb2ZCoiOe3k

https://www.google.com/search?&q=buy+silver+bullets

https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+gold+bullets

Evidently there are people who know how to make them. And they look pretty good, too.

Yeah I tried some searches like that, and couldn't find any silver bullets that were actually be made to be fired from a gun. What I saw was many chunks of silver shaped to look like cartridges, nice for display or as conversational novelties, but not usable as projectiles. I didn't look at every single search hit, so if you have a link to any silver bullet being sold as usable in ammo, I'd certainly look at it.

Oh, hmm, sure, I didn't really look far. But I figure anyone who can cast whole "cartridges" in silver, with such precision and detail, and so pretty, can probably cast just bullets in silver too. If no one does, I bet it's because reloaders don't care to load cartridges with silver bullets -- it's just too expensive!

Could they be made the same way coins are, by stamping them?

For bullets, you'd probably want to swage them, but I've never worked with silver so I'm not sure how troublesome that would be. The OP actually mentions this in part 5, though not by name (it's under the section "elastic modulus"). They want specifically to cast instead of swage and while I think swaging is technically superior, it's understandable because you have to be a confident enough machinist to make dies and other swaging paraphernalia vs just a bullet mold and what's more likely to be available in a werewolf novel, really?

Yes, but then the metal would be work hardened. Ideally, if it were to act as a bullet and deform to the shape of your rifling you'd want the silver to be in an annealed state.

I'm sure this information will be useful as I've just purchased Bloodborne for the PS4 and shall be firing many silver bullets.

This was the hobby project of Patricia Briggs' Husband Michael, who sadly passed a few years ago.

Is there a reason these couldn't be turned more accurately on a lathe? Never seen anyone do lathe work to make bullets, but it seems like it'd be fairly well suited, especially since silver isn't as soft as lead.

I think it would be easier to cast a cylinder bigger than the required round, and machine it down to size. This would remove the surface imperfections, and let you make any arbitrary outer diameter.

Keep all the chips for the next casting run.

> If the silver had actually filled the mold it would have been a perfect pour.

So call it a hollow-point and deem it a success.

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