1

The

WorldDirectory

of

CustomBullet Makers

D. R. Corbin

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The

World Directory

of

Custom Bullet Makers

© Copyright 2004 D. R. Corbin

Reproduction or publication of the contentin any manner, without the expressed writtenpermission of the publisher, is prohibited. Noliability is assumed with respect to the use of

the information provided herein.

Published byCorbin Manufacturing & Supply, Inc.

Po Box 2659White City, OR 97503 USA

http://www.corbins.com Printed in the United States of America

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Table of Contents

Introduction ........................................................ 4

Who Are Custom Bullet Makers?................... 10

What Are Custom Bullets? .............................. 16

What Can You Specify? ................................... 24

The Custom Bullet Market .............................. 32

Bullet Testing ..................................................... 42

Business Issues ................................................. 62

Sources of Bullet Material .............................. 74

Listing of Custom Bullet Makers ................... 91

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IntroductionThis book is intended to serve three audiences:

� People looking for sources of custom bullets

� People who want to make and sell custom bullets

� Writers, editors, and firearms researchers

If you are looking for bullets that are not found inthe “mass market” channel (distributed to your localsporting goods store or through mail order from themajor high volume producers), this book can be usedas a guide to the custom bullet makers who may helpyou. If you’ve ever asked one of the large mass pro-ducers, such as Sierra, Hornady, Winchester,Remington, Nosler, or Speer, for a small quantity ofanything other than what they already produce in themillions, you probably know that mass producers sim-ply cannot help you.

Quantities less than a million are typically not prof-itable to produce on the high volume equipment theyuse. Their markets are well defined, low margin andhigh volume channels. To stop the presses and makea few thousand specials is so costly that they don’teven want to quote a price, and you’d be unlikely topay it if they did. Sometimes, they may weaken andmake as few as 50,000 bullets, but they usually regretit and vow never again unless the price was fairly steep(and possibly even then, since the cost of tooling up,shutting down, making all the test runs and wastingthe scrap that comes off a high speed production pressline until everything is tuned in might not have beencovered by even a rather high unit price).

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Custom bllet makers produce an existing exotic lineof bullets that fills the gaps left by mass producers,but they can often customize the product to suit yourneeds, or even develop new bullets to match your re-quirements, at a far lower volume and total outlay thanyou’d have to pay at a mass production firm.

The price per bullet is usually higher, but the totalcost of getting twenty, fifty or a couple of hundredcustom bullets is far less than the minimum quantityof much cheaper bullets you’d need to buy to get theattention of a mass producer. It’s usually quite afford-able, in fact. Nearly anyone can come up with twentyto a hundred dollars to invest in their hobby or fire-arms related business interest. That might only buy afew bullets, but the total out-of-pocket cost is in therealm of possibility.

Hardly anyone wants to pay for a million bullets fortheir own use, even at wholesale cost. You are stilltalking about a very large total bill, even if each bul-let only costs you a dime. The cost could be raised byrefinancing your home, for instance. Big differencebetween that and giving up a dinner out, or a coupleof nights at the movies, to satisfy the urge to knowhow some new bullet design might work in your gun.You’d have to be a very curious person indeed, in bothsenses of the word.

Custom bullet makers are here to serve you, andthis book is here to show you who they are, wherethey can be reached, and a general idea of what theymake. It lists the last reported diameters of bullets forwhich each bullet maker has the dies, but not the stylesand weights because those can be almost unlimitedeven with a single set of dies. If a bullet maker isn’tlisted as having the diameter of bullet you want, call afew of them anyway and ask if they’d be interested in

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getting the tools. Most of them would do it if you wantto either buy enough bullets so they can pay for thedies (which may be a few more than you need, butcertainly not in the tens of thousands or millions) orperhaps work out some other way of helping themcover the cost of the dies.

Some folks buy the tooling and then the bulletmaker pays for it by manufacturing a certain quantityof bullets against the price. Dies can run anywherefrom a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dol-lars, depending on bullet complexity.

Others buy the tooling and find a custom bulletmaker with the press and the time to use it, and paythem for material and labor to use their dies. Howeveryou want to do it, there’s always a way you can haveanything you want in a custom bullet so long as youdon’t mind paying a reasonable cost for either toolingor bullets that will cover the tooling. Custom bulletmakers are usually individuals, with a few exceptionswho have become big based on very successful de-signs and marketing.

The smaller the firm, the more likely it is that youcan work out a deal to make things that are not listedin this directory as part of their existing capability.Larger outfits usually have their hands full just fillingtheir own product design orders, even though they arefar more accomodating than true mass producers.Some of the firms listed enjoy the challenge as muchas the income and will take on nearly anything. Oth-ers are trying to develop a specialty line to the exclu-sion of completely custom work. The best way to findout is to ask them!

If you are a custom bullet maker, or think you mightlike to be one, this book can help you avoid choosinga company name that is already in use, point you to

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the sources of copper and lead that you need to manu-facture bullets, and help with other aspects of decid-ing what to make and how to sell it.

If you are good at reading between the lines, youprobably will recognize that this book serves as amarket study for the custom bullet field as well as aguide for potential clients. If you would like to be listed,all you have to do is request a listing form and fill itout, sign and return it to Corbin, and your firm will belisted in the next edition. Because we use a loose-leafformat and assemble these books in small batches, itisn’t long between editions, and we can revise just thelistings without having to re-write the entire book. Youcould be in print within a few days after submittingthe information and permission to publish it.

Without the signed permission granted by the re-turned survey form, we cannot list you. Phoned in re-quests and casual notes to “put me in the book” donot give us enough legal grounds to risk invading yourprivacy by publishing your address and phone num-ber, and we need clearly legible written informationso that if we get your number or address incorrect, it’sreally our fault and not yours for scribbling somethingthat looked like a “3” and was meant to be a “4”.

A major secondary benefit of being listed here isthat we also publish this information on our web siteat www.corbins.com/bmakers.htm. Thousands ofpeople every week look at this site, searching for bul-let makers. It is still free, although the day may comewhen it isn’t. Get your name in now if you have anydesire to sell bullets. Free advertising is a rare thing.

If you are a writer, publisher of gun magazines, re-searcher in the ballistic field or just need to be awareof what is happening at the real cutting edge of bulletdesign, this book will point you in directions that mightotherwise not have been apparent. Very few general

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interest gun writers know enough about bullet swag-ing to even realize that it is the driving force behindthe custom bullet market, and that isn’t surprising: themakers of custom bullets can easily become swampedwith work and decide they don’t need to promotethemselves very much, especially after the first coupleof years.

They are as busy as they want to be, and start tobecome hard to locate. If you didn’t catch their adswhen they first were building up, you probably won’tsee any indication they exist. The majority of custombullet makers are individuals who are retired, had an-other line of work or career that became boring oroppressive and decided life was too short not to havemore fun. They are not necessarily chasing maximumincome, and therefore are content with the fact that alittle more effort could be applied on their part to bringin more exposure in the firearms press. If you writeabout them, they’ll appreciate it, but it’s not too likelythey will seek you out if they have not done it already.

Some of these people are very interested in moreexposure, especially those who are not necessarilyretired and are seriously interested in supporting theirfamily with custom bullet making, rather than just pay-ing for their hobby and maybe supplementing their401k checks. These people often have the most excit-ing bullet designs you’ve ever come across, certainlymore interesting than the two-hundred year old de-signs constantly being revamped and retouted by massproducers. Some of the designs may be a little on thefar side of impractical, but remember, they are capableof shifting weights and styles around the way a black-jack dealer shuffles the deck: if you could provide alittle input from the practical side of the business, itmight help them fill a niche and feed the family all at

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the same time. You could get a warm and fuzzy feel-ing about doing some good for a struggling new busi-ness and at the same time help the rest of us get somenew bullets to try, on top of producing a story youdon’t see every day in gun magazines.

If you are an editor, you might consider showingthe list of bullet makers to your advertising manager.It’s nice to smooth the sometimes rocky path betweenthe editorial staff and the financial department, andcustom bullet makers need to buy advertising just likeanyone else. They may not be the biggest accounts,and in fact on average they tend to buy ads by thecolumn inch rather than page, but look at how manydifferent businesses are listed! Just tracking down andcalling all these people will keep the ad guys out ofyour office for weeks...

If you have some regular stringers writing for themagazine, it wouldn’t hurt to let the ad man send thelist to these custom bullet makers so they could, inturn, send samples for testing and possible write-ups.There are only so many ways to write about the con-ventional jacketed or plated lead bullet. Readers mightenjoy seeing what unconventional bullets can do.

Researchers, you have a vast army of allies when itcomes to information about unusual bullet develop-ments. The list of custom bullet makers is a treasurehouse for finding people with special experience indeveloping and testing bullets which stretch at theseams of one’s imagination. If your purpose is to finda prototype design for some new project, or havesomeone build the design you have already workedout, you could not find a better place to start.

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Who Are Custom Bullet Makers?Custom bullet manufacturing is one of the fastest

growing and most exciting branches of the firearmsfield. Around the world, thousands of individualsswage special calibers, weights and designs of bul-lets, far advanced from the standard mass producedofferings. The operative word here is “custom”.

There are bullet makers listed in this book who canfill nearly any need for a special caliber, style, weightor design of bullet for almost any purpose. If it doesn’texist yet, a dozen or more of these craftsmen can buildit for you.

The day when only conventional, standard bullets—made for everyone in general and no one in particu-lar—were all you could get, is long gone. Mass pro-duction firms may still turn a deaf ear to requests forsmall lots of special sizes or weights, as well theyshould: they are in business to move large volumes ofidentical products and cannot afford to spend timemaking a box of fifty or even a special shipment often thousand bullets.

But custom bullet makers are in business to do justthat. They have the tools and techniques available thatlet them make short runs of nearly design of bullet.Even as few as one box of ten or twenty bullets isn’ttoo small for them to handle. They thrive on the kindof order most shooters of twenty years ago onlywished they could place. Got a new idea for a bullet?Want to try it out without spending your life savings?Contact a custom bullet maker, and the product canbe in your hands at a price that is far less than nearlyany other alternative.

Custom bullets are not “cheap” when comparedwith mass produced ones. The quality of a custombullet is, of course, up to the person who makes it, but

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most custom bullet makers don’t stay in business verylong unless their quality is high. The average cost of acustom made bullet is in the area of $37.50 for a boxof 25, or about $1.50 each. But where else in the worldwill you be able to get exactly the weight, caliber, andstyle you want, made to your order, in a single box of25 bullets?

Some of the custom bullet makers have discovereda unique design that fills a need so well, in some spe-cial niche of the shooting field, that they specializeonly in that style of bullet. You might argue that theyhave really become “specialty” bullet makers ratherthan “custom” bullet makers, and there is merit in yourarguement. But regardless of what you call them, theyusually offer bullets far advanced over the factory prod-uct, when used for the intended purpose.

What keeps the mass producers from simply dupli-cating one of these ideas, putting it on their high speedproduction machines and turning it out by the mil-lions (which would bring the cost down considerably)?

The market for such advanced bullets is simply notbig enough. Only a few expert shooters understandand appreciate the benefit brought by these new de-signs. Most average shooters are perfectly matchedwith average bullets: the price is right, and the perfor-mance is good enough for them. They are by defini-tion average product buyers.

At the top of the curve there are people who un-derstand some particular area of shooting so well thatthey have begun to question the usual bullet designs.They want something better, because they have ex-perienced situations where average isn’t good enough.

There are not millions of such people. But thereare millions of average shooters who at one time oranother see the need for something special, and want

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to try it. Just for a brief time, they join the ranks of theexperts in toying with the cutting edge of technology,in a very special field. Some elevate their interests andactually become experts. Others are content with togo back to the average product again.

Regardless, the custom bullet maker exists to servethem as well. A good example of a “temporary ex-pert” user might be a person who loves to shoot biggame, but has never used anything other than factoryor cast bullets. Then one day, he gets the opportunityto take an expensive guided hunt that may not be histo try again in this lifetime. For that brief period, hewants the best bullet available at any price. Cost is notimportant in this situation, comparing a twenty centbullet to a dollar or even a two dollar bullet. Who cares,so long as it gives him the edge that might make thehunt a success?

After it is over, and the success fades to a fondmemory, he’ll probably go back to his old ways andnot ask for more than the average bullet again. But forthat moment, when the sun was glinting off the waterand the record eland or Cape buffalo was barely vis-ible in the morning haze, the custom bullet maker’sfinest effort was exactly what that person wanted andneeded. It worked. A lesser design might have failed.A lifetime opportunity might have turned into agonytracking and losing a noble trophy. But it didn’t, be-cause the best possible design was selected, regard-less of cost. The typical guided hunt might cost $5,500today. A two-dollar bullet would be cheap insurance!

Custom bullets are also made for special guns thatdon’t use standard diameters, lengths, or shapes.People who would like to shoot their antique firearmsmay need a few custom bullets, but not enough to in-terest one of the big ammo makers. Law enforcement

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and military special operations may use bullets thatare tailored to a specific circumstance, such as areaswhere penetration of walls must be avoided (airmarshalls, for instance, or guards in a building wherethe next room might be filled with dignitaries or sci-entists).

Unless there is a large enough market to sell at leasta few hundred thousand bullets a year of a specificweight, shape and caliber, the only source may be thecustom bullet maker. But that is nearly the same assaying the only source of air is the atmosphere, be-cause there are hundreds of custom bullet makerswilling to develop new designs, or already makingsomething far beyond the ordinary.

Custom bullet makers, unfortunately, do not receiveas much publicity as mass producers, because theyare primarily one person shops and don’t spend muchon advertising. Since it is just a fact of life that thosewho pay the bills get the most editorial coverage, weshould not be surprised to learn that so many custombullet sources around the world have escaped ournotice for decades.

The fact that we might not have known about themonly underscores the nature of their work in narrow,special areas where they are free to do their very bestin pursuit of a tightly focused idea. They may be bepreceived as having “mass appeal” to the average read-ers of gun magazines, so they don’t get front page cov-erage even though their product may be worthy ofgreater technical praise than the usual magazine coverfare. Custom bullet makers may be forgiven for qui-etly chafing a bit when they see a minor modificationto a seventy year old design touted as the next revolu-tion in bullet development, especially when they havebeen offering the same idea for years as an after-thought to their more innovative products.

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In an interesting development, the mass produc-ers have been purchasing bullets from some ofCorbin’s custom bullet clients and marketing the am-munition loaded with them as a “premium” grade. Un-doubtedly this is more of a mind-share market strat-egy than an attempt to meet the market demand.

None of the old line firms want to be seen as massproducers of standardized, old-time products. Theyprefer to be known as the leaders in cutting edge tech-nology, without actually giving up the mass market.Making bullets for the average buyer is what produceshigh volume, competitive low margin income and paysfor the high speed presses, the huge volume buys ofcopper and lead, and keeps the wheels of commerceturning (as they have for two hundred years, with someof these firms).

The only thing wrong with this picture is the slightlymis-focused cutting edge image: study what is reallyhappening and you will discover that most of the in-novation has been with small custom shops, not themass market behemoths.

For over two decades, Corbin has been at the heartof custom bullet development by working on the tools,materials, and techniques that nearly all custom bul-let firms put to use in making their products. Corbindevelops tools in a modular way: you can pick andchoose from a wide variety of features, combining alittle of this and a bit of that, and in the process, de-velop a new bullet that no one else has put togetherthe same way.

Custom bullet makers develop their products inseveral ways. Some have specific design they alwayswanted to try. Others know the kind of performancethey want, but don’t know how to get the bullet to doit. Corbin provides whatever part of the design, ma-

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terials and equipment that is required, while the cus-tomer provides the goal, and builds a company basedon achieving it.

Still other potential bullet makers only know theylike the idea of producing custom bullets for a living,but don’t know what product to make or where to mar-ket it. This is actually the easiest assignment, sincethere are so many niche markets unfilled as yet.

Custom bullet makers sometimes come into thefield almost by accident, through a hobby interest orperhaps a need to obtain a bullet that no one else ismaking at the time. Then they decide to sell their bul-lets, and the entire firearms field is better for it.

Regardless of how a custom bullet maker getsstarted, the important thing is that so many of themexist. Having a large number of places to look for spe-cialty bullets helps keep the quality up, and assures usall of being able to try a flow of new designs that mightnever appear in the mass market.

By making themselves commercially available, thecustom bullet makers help assure us of a supply ofbullets even in troubled times, when production of themass producers might be diverted due to political de-cisions, or curtailed altogether as far as civilian mar-kets are concerned. It happened during both WorldWars. It could happen again. But this time, you havemany other sources.

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What Are Custom Bullets?Custom bullets fall into three categories. They can

be bullets that are...

� designed to your specifications and ideas

� offered with a series of optional features

� designed by the bullet maker to fill special needs

The most “custom” of these is the first, where youhave an idea and tell the bullet maker what you want,and he develops the bullet the way you want it, in-cluding the caliber, materials, shape, weight, and spe-cial features. This kind of bullet may require sometooling investment other than what the bullet makeralready owns, so there can be arrangements to helpcover the cost of the tooling directly or by buying acertain minimum quantity of bullets.

The most common of the custom bullets is the sec-ond, where a bullet maker has invested in tools to builda certain caliber of bullet, and offers the variations inthis caliber and shape that are easily done withoutbuying more tooling. This keeps your cost down be-cause there is no additional investment needed tomake the variations or optional features. In theory youcould buy one bullet. Some bullet makers will sell oneat a time if you really want to pay the shipping onsuch a small order.

The least “custom” is the bullet that simply isn’tavailable from mass producers, so the custom bulletmaker worked out a design and series of weights thatfills the need, as he and hopefully most of his custom-ers perceive it. It is custom in the sense that it is madeby hand in small quantities compared to the typical

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mass produced bullets, to work in a limited specialsituation or with a firearm that is just not popularenough to justify wide distribution of bullets for it.

The custom features or differences that custombullets can offer include:

� Obsolete or unusual calibers

� Special weights and lengths

� Unusual materials

� Interesting jacket designs

� Shapes not found on factory bullets

� Enhanced performance characteristics

� Variations in the center of balance versus length

� Multiple projectiles in one bullet

...and other differences from conventional bulletsthat are limited only by imagination.

The most obvious two needs in a custom bulletwould be for unusual diameter and weights. Diametersthat are not readily available from standard sourcesmight include obsolete or discontinued calibers forantique firearms, hard to find foreign calibers, or anycaliber that is either so new that supplies are hard tofind or so limited in market size that few mass pro-ducers offer it.

Special weights can be needed in the most com-mon calibers. There are a limited number of verypopular weights in each caliber, yet nothing is wrongwith trying lighter or heavier than those the factoriesarbitrarily decided to build. Some guns simply do notget their best performance with the standard weights.Others would recoil far less and be more pleasant to

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shoot year round at targets and small game, when usedwith a bullet that was half the weight of a conventinaloffering.

The custom bullet maker balances the length, twistrate of the rifling, and the weight of the bullet so thatultra light and extremely heavy bullets can still be shotaccurately in guns not designed for them. The con-ventional bullet becomes longer as it is made heavier,shorter as it is made lighter. The rate of spin of a givenbarrel, in turns per inch, is set for the average weightof bullet intended to be fired, but really it is set for theaverage length of bullet.

Weight and length only march together in lock stepso long as the material density remains the same. Ifbullets are only made from lead, and copper alloy jack-ets, the old ideas about spin rate and stability varyapply whether you are talking about weight or length.But change to a core material like powdered tungsten,which has 1.7 times the density of lead, and now youcan make a stable bullet of exactly the same length asa conventional weight, having 70% more weight!

The spin rate is set by length of bullet, and the cus-tom bullet maker can separate the weight from thelength almost at will, by using combinations of leadand tungsten on the heavy end, and combinations oflead and polymer “bullet ball” fillers on the light end.Whereas a standard lead or jacketed bullet would be-come too short to be stable if you made a 50 grain.357 Magnum bullet, fill a half-inch long jacket withpolymer balls and top it with a little lead nose for bal-ance, and you have a bullet that might go 3,000 fpsout of a snub nose revolver, and still hit in the black at50 yards! (You’d need to use one of the faster burningpistol or shotgun powders, such as Unique or Bullseye,in order to get enough pressure before the bulletpopped out the end of the barrel.)

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On the other end of the spectrum, a custom bulletmaker might assemble a jacketed rifle bullet that hada core of powdered tungsten, topped by a small capof pure soft lead. This bullet might look exactly thesame as a soft point 180 grain .30-30 WCF factoryslug, but when you picked it up, you’d notice it weighedfar more. A scale might prove that it actually weighed250 grains!

Normally, a 250 grain .308 diameter bullet wouldbe rather long, over 1.25 inches, which might not feedin the mechanism of some rifles or fit the magazine.And even if it did, guns with a 1-12 twist rate (oneturn in twelve inches) probably would not stabilizesuch a long bullet and it would tumble in flight.

But the custom tungsten core bullet would be thesame length that normally is stable in a conventional.30-30 twist rate, so you could fire it confidently. Thebalance of the bullet could be set exactly where itneeds to be, by using a combination of lead and tung-sten sections in the core.

That is, if the bullet tends to maintain its attitude(retain the launch angle) instead of following the tra-jectory with its nose, the weight can be shifted to therear by using more lead in the nose. If the bullet tendsto wobble and wants to turn over in flight, the weightcan be shifted more to the nose by using a short pieceof lead core in the base before the tungsten is put in,or by using less lead in the nose.

There are many fine old .40 caliber Winchester,Remington, Ballard, Marlin, and other brands of riflesstill in good shootable condition. Nothing prevents amodern rifle from being built to shoot the .405 Win-chester cartridge, for that matter. The firearms hobbyhas room for people who enjoy using the early cali-

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bers of cartridges. Cases can be made by reformingmodern cartridge cases. Powder and primers are uni-versal. But the bullets may not exist.

Custom bullet makers can specialize in providingthese sizes of bullets, either in nearly exact replica-tion of the orginals for the history purists, or in vastlyimproved modern designs for those who like to showwhat can be done with the older designs. It is amazingjust how good a .348 Winchester will perform withmodern metalurgy and a well designed bullet.

From time to time, political decisions create a de-mand for custom bullets. This can happen when a banon certain styles of guns is passed, and suddenly thereis a big demand for that style before the rules go intoeffect. Often, a foreign government may release a sup-ply of obsolete military guns to take advantage of thesudden interest, and the only problem is finding bul-lets that bring out the best results from the gun andcartridge.

Military surplus ammunition can have at least threeproblems that translate into opportunity for the bulletmakers and their clients:

� Corrosive or hard-to-reload Berdan primers

� Military FJM style bullets that don’t expand

� Deteriorated chemistry that gives erratic speed

For these reasons, a custom bullet maker mighthave good success offering expanding soft point bul-lets or high performance hollow points, in weights thatfunction the action but offer improved performance(less recoil, more speed, better accuracy are a fewpoints of improvement).

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Custom bullets often find their best markets, how-ever, in applications where the quantity of rounds firedis low, the peripheral costs are high, and the time spentin the activity is short. In other words, the stakes arehigh and the number of bullets needed are few, pro-vided they work exactly as expected. The two bestexamples are:

� Big game hunting

� Personal defense

In the field of big game hunting, custom bulletsdominate the market now. You can hardly flip thepages of popular gun magazines without seeing adsfrom several of Corbin’s clients, offering high perfor-mance hunting bullets.

The specific kinds of improvements in these bul-lets include the usual special weights and materials(tungsten, polymer, and so forth) but one of the mostnoticable improvements is the use of Corbin’s CoreBond flux to create a bullet where the core won’t sepa-rate from the jacket, and the use of heavy walled, purecopper tubing for bullet jackets.

In the field of self defense, the market divides intothe professional and home users. Civilians protectingthemselves legally against break-ins and muggings (inthe “right-to-carry” states) shoot very few bullets butwhen the need arises, it is a life and death matter. Noprice is too high for a bullet that will work reliably un-der trying circumstances. The special designs used toachieve this include the ultra-light high speed expand-ers, multiple projectile bullets, fragmenting designs,hydraulic or pneumatic expanding devices designedinto the bullet, special cuts, slits and teeth (such as the“saber tooth” design of hollow point) for better ex-pansion.

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In the high power hunting bullet area, some cus-tom bullet makers offer solid copper bullets, but thesolid copper bullet typically has these problems com-pared to a lead or tungsten core:

� Only 3/4 the weight for the same length

� Less stable in the same weights

� Petals break off at high speed after expansion

� Expansion may be too limited

� Over-penetration can be a problem

� Pressure may be higher for the same weight

� Increased stress on the barrel

Not all designs of solid copper bullets have everyproblem, but all of them are lighter for the same lengthas a lead-filled bullet. That is just basic physics. Com-bining this lighter slug with a big enough hollow pointto allow good expansion in solid copper can shift thecenter of gravity far toward the rear, requiring a fastertwist to stabilize it. When fired from conventional guns,the solid copper bullet may become less stable than awell-made lead core bullet of the same weight.

For a target bullet, the problem may be overcomeby using a lead plug at the tip or by eliminating thehollow point entirely. Tungsten powder (available fromCorbin as EZ-Flow Tungsten) can be put into a hol-low point cavity, to maintain the “lead-free” design.

The benefit of the solid copper bullet is that thereis no jacket to separate, and also no possibility of im-balance because of differences in jacket wall thick-ness from one side to the other. These are strong pointsto consider for a target bullet.

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For big game hunting, the level of accuracy that isachieved by jacketed bullets with a bit of wall thick-ness variation is normally quite acceptable, althoughof course if all the other performance factors can beachieved with the maximum possible accuracy, it isall the better. The point is, using solid copper for in-creased accuracy over a better performing bondedcore bullet is solving a non-problem and picking upother problems that are more important.

Corbin is providing custom bullet makers with pow-dered tungsten and atomized copper powder in ex-perimental quantities (as well as production volume),so that a bullet maker can experiment with swagedpowdered metal bullets affordably. With suitable binderand lubricant coating the grains, the powder metalsflow more easily and swage together to form semi-solids (which can be handled or inserted into jacketsbut not loaded and shot without first “sintering” orfusing the grains at a temperature short of meltingthem). The powdered copper or tungsten bullets cansolve certain problems, such as the need for lead-freeprojectiles in indoor ranges.

Custom bullet makers have among themselves gen-erations of experience in solving bullet design and per-formance questions. What seems true at this point maysoon become yesterday’s situation; a new solution isjust around every corner, with so many bullet makerstrying ideas that range from the ridiculous to theingenius, as fast as bullets can be swaged. The sheervolume of digging brings a gem into the light now andthen.

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What Can You Specify?Although each bullet maker has a unique plan that

determines what can be customized, in general it ispossible to specify these parameters when you ordercustom bullets:

� Weight (within broad limits)

� Nose shape (from a specific selection)

� Tip design (open tip, hollow point, soft point, FJM)

� Jacket thickness (sometimes, up to two or three)

� Exact diameter (sometimes to 0.0001 inches)

� Construction features (such as bonding)

� Materials (such as brass, copper, tungsten)

The easiest thing to specify is a different weight.Bullet swaging, which is the technology used to makecustom bullets, is extremely versatile about weight.That is, the same investment in equipment can makehundreds or even thousands of different bullet weightssimply by adjusting the depth that a punch goes into adie.

There are some designs where a change in weightmeans a change in tooling. Very light bullets mightrequire different punch lengths to reach further thanusual into the die, or a die with relocated “bleed” holesto extrude the surplus lead at a different column heightof the core. Very heavy bullets might require a longerdie to get all the materials inside. But within a vastrange of weights, you can get what you want withoutrequiring anything other than a change in settings.

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Some bullet designs don’t look very good if youchange the weight in a certain direction without do-ing some other things to compensate. For example, abullet maker has a stock of inch long .45 caliber jack-ets that make a nice looking open tip 350 grain bullet,and you order a 400 grain bullet. Now those jacketsmight be too short to make an open tip, since the ad-ditional lead core will project beyond the jacket, mak-ing a lead nose. If you want a lead nose (soft point),this could be fine.

In order to make your 400 grain open tip bullet, thebullet maker would have to make longer jackets, oruse a more dense material than lead (such as tung-sten powder) in the bullet. Either way, some additionalcosts would be involved beyond just the 50 grains oflead. If the bullet maker builds copper tubing or drawnstrip jackets himself, and the tooling was designed toallow longer jackets, there might not be any signifi-cant expense in tooling. Perhaps he might need a dif-ferent punch to do the final length draw and trim step.

But if the jacket making tools are already buildingtheir maximum jacket at one inch, and your bullet re-quires an inch and a quarter length jacket, it mightmean starting over with a different set of jacket dies,perhaps a thicker or wider supply of metal strip also.

For this reason, you might have no problem gettinga heavier or lighter bullet from one bullet maker (whohas the equipment for the required jacket) but anothermight balk unless you pay some tooling charges. Somemay have no trouble at all up to a certain limit, andthen you’d have to change bullet styles to get theweight (or pay for tooling to make new jackets).

Generally, though, a change in weights does not costmore than a possible new punch, from twenty to fiftydollars depending on the kind of press being used,

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and often not even that (depending on whether thejacket is tapered or straight inside, and where thepunch contacts it at the new core height).

It is not possible to state absolutely that you can orcannot make something without new tooling, until allthe factors are taken into consideration. Each time youmake a change in the bullet, it affects other param-eters. The bullet maker uses his experience and skillto determine what is possible on his equipment (nor-mally, if it is Corbin equipment, he has a good sourceof information to rely upon).

That is why dealing with a custom bullet maker issomething like going to your tailor for a new suit. Yourpersonal tastes are taken into consideration, and ifyou work with the materials and tools your bulletmaker has available, you will get a far better deal thanif you are adamant about specific features and weightswhich, in reality, could shift a bit and not affect any-thing enough to matter.

Diameter is far more important than weight, whenit comes to determining performance. A few grainsone way or the other really isn’t significant in control-ling accuracy or trajectory compared to the changesin ogive shape, base design, and diameter.

Bullet swaging dies are very diameter specific. Adie set makes precisely one diameter of bullet with agiven material and pressure. The pressure used to as-semble the bullet can be varied a little, and the diam-eter of the resulting bullet may change slightly as aresult. For smooth operation, the pressures are keptto a minimum that will do the job. Ejection from thedies usually is easiest at a certain combination of coreseating and point forming pressures, so using pres-sure to control diameter is a limited option.

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Materials that are used can have a far greater ef-fect on the final diameter. Every step in making thecustom bullet expands it slightly larger. Pressure isapplied to the core of the bullet, through a punch. Thepressure flows through the malleable lead or powderedtungsten core or combination polymer/lead/tungstencore materials, and expands the jacket like a balloonskin.

When the pressure is released, the bullet jacketshrinks very slightly back toward original diameter.This releases the tight grip on the die walls, so thebullet can be pushed out of the die. Some materialsspring back more than others. If you ask for an alumi-num jacket or a steel jacket, instead of soft copper,the bullet maker may or may not be able to swage it inthe same dies. But if he is able to get the new materialto work correctly, it is almost guaranteed that the di-ameter will not be the same as it would be the mate-rial for which the die was designed.

Some bullet makers are surprised at the resultswhen they order a set of dies for a given caliber, suchas .512, and don’t mention that they plan to machinesome jackets out of solid Kryptonite instead of usingthe copper that was in turn used to develop and testthe dies. OK, no one has yet done that, but there havebeen many instances where dies designed for tubingjacket were used with drawn strip jackets, which aremuch harder and spring back a different amount.

There is nothing wrong with this, provided the partsdon’t stick on the punches or in the dies. But the bul-lets will probably change diameter from .512 to .5119or .5121 inches. Does it matter, in the real world? Prob-ably not. Most guns have more variation than thatalong the length of their bores. Having a bullet thatfits at one point does not guarantee it fits so precisely

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an inch further down. Obviously it must not matter, asrecords are set every year with guns that have morethan .0001 inch “waviness” in the bore size.

What might matter is the reaction of the custombullet buyer who owns a micrometer and feels the needto use it instead of firing a few groups. Testing bulletsis best done in a gun rather than on a bench, becausethe results can be at variance with what appears to belogical evidence. Excellent groups have been fired withbullets having as much as five grains variation out ofa possible 168 grain total weight (provided the weightdifference is not caused by a variation that is eccen-tric). How does one know that a .309 bullet might notoutshoot a .308 bullet in a given gun, unless tests arefired?

You can order different diameters from some bul-let makers because they purchase a slightly larger thanstandard swage die set, as with the .309 bullet example,and then push the finished bullets through various re-duction dies to give you precise parallel sided bulletdiameters.

As long as the reduction doesn’t exceed about .005inches, the effect is not noticable. No significant changein accuracy is caused by reductions of .003 or lessinches, even in a laboratory test situation. That is notto say that the bullet might not shoot better or lesswell in a given gun and load, but only that the me-chanics of reduction do not significantly impact theaccuracy by causing a “loose core” or “banana shape”stress change.

If you do exceed the .005 inch reduction, then theeffects start to compound. The bullet may begin tocurve, as the metal springs back slightly more on oneside than on the other. The lead core may be left

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smaller while the jacket pops away from it, so that thecore does not spin as fast as the jacket and the bulletis not stable.

This figure of .005 inches is empirical in nature;nothing happens suddenly at that level that is not hap-pening at a greater rate as you reduce further. Theelastic modulus of the jacket material effects the re-duction allowed. One thing will nearly solve the re-duction problem, however: bonding the core.

If a bullet maker bonds the jacket and core (meltsthe core in the jacket, in the presence of Core BondFlux, and then lets it cool, boils it in a solution of so-dium bicarbonate and water, and then seats the coreas usual), drawing down the bullet cannot affect thetightness of the core and jacket. Only the curvatureof the jacket wall remains as a potential problem.

The custom bullet maker, then, can offer you some-thing no factory will: a series of bullets that are iden-tical in every way except diameter, for the same cali-ber. This lets you determine for yourself, with no sec-ondary influences, exactly what diameter of bulletshoots the best in your gun with a given load, case,and primer.

Why does this matter? It only matters if you careabout accuracy. When you are attempting to put bul-lets into the same spot with every shot, knowing thata .3085 diameter 168 grain bullet with an 8-S ogive isthe one that comes closest to perfection with your fa-vorite load can be a comfort. You can order .3085 di-ameter bullets from someone who either has a pre-cise .3085 diameter die set, or has a larger .3090 setand a reducing die.

This technique does not extend to reducing a .338bullet for use in a .318 rifle, by the way. That is far toomuch. The accuracy will be absent by definition. How-

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ever, you can use a .323 (standard 8mm today) andreduce it to a .318 (smaller bore German military 8mmof an earlier time). The accuracy is still acceptable.

Bullet makers can also “bump up” your existingbullet a little bit. But if you try to go too far with this,the bullets will become so tapered or shortened thatthey are not useful. For instance, a .308 bullet can be“bumped up” in the point forming die of a .310, .311,or even a .312 diameter die set. It would be better tomake the bullet using a core seating die and apply pres-sure to the lead core, expanding it and the jacket to-gether.

When you “bump up” a bullet, pressure is appliedto the outside and the bullet is shortened. The inter-nal pressure to expand it comes from this externalforce and does not properly shape the parallel shanksection. You get more of a tapered shank, which workswithin reason.

Like bullet reduction, as you go beyond a smallchange to a larger one, the bad effects on accuracy goup rapidly until the bullet becomes unusable. But withsmall differences (which some wit with an engineer-ing background once symbolized with the Greek let-ters “mu” and “delta” placed side by side, which readsas “micro-change”) both external pressure processeswork well enough to be useful.

You may draw the conclusion that custom bulletmaking is a process that requires getting inside thebullet to form it, before it is really a bullet, whereasthe more compromising techniques all are performedon a finished bullet by trying to form it from the out-side. And that would be correct.

Design parameters such as whether or not the coreis bonded, where and how many cannelure groovesare placed around the shank, and whether or not a

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rebated boattail, cup base, soft point, hollow point,open tip, or full metal jacket is part of the design, areusually listed in the custom bullet maker’s brochureand price list, but not always. If you want somethingspecial, ask about it! Just because the bullet makerdoesn’t list it now, does not mean he wouldn’t do it foryou. Perhaps no one ever asked before.

Usually, a custom bullet maker won’t be able to of-fer different core hardness, various jacket materials,or arbitrary jacket wall thicknesses, because these fac-tors are designed into a given set of tools and are noteasily modified without buying additional equipment.

Some bullet makers build their own jackets fromtubing stock, which is commonly available only in cer-tain mill runs of diameter and thickness. These stan-dard diameter tubes are then reduced by drawing in-dividual cut lengths to correct diameter for a givencaliber. Not only does the material have to be avail-able from the mills in a thickness that will develop intothe desired jacket wall, but the bullet maker needs tohave a fairly sophistocated set of precision tools madespecifically for the dimensions.

Other bullet makers draw flat strip into complextapered wall jackets, using high precision Corbin jacketmaker kits. This kind of tooling is more versatile, start-ing with a specific mill thickness of strip but drawingthe jacket walls to whatever thinner measurement isdesired. Relatively inexpensive punches are all thatmust be changed, but there can be several suchpunches matched for a given jacket design. Thismeans a tooling fee or minimum order size for specialwall designs not “in the catalog”.

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The Custom Bullet MarketCustom bullets are sold in a far different way than

mass produced bullets, and certainly in a different waythan most cast bullets. Because the equipment for cast-ing is relatively simple, hundreds of people make castbullets for resale. Some of them discover the exist-ence of equipment for swaging jacketed (or lead) bul-lets, and want to know “how many can I make anhour?” with swaging equipment.

This is the wrong question. The right one is, “Howmuch profit can I make an hour with swaging?”

Unlike mass production and casting, where theprofit margins are quite thin and only high volumescan bring in enough to support the business, the cus-tom bullet market is a botique business. By that I meanthat it caters to very sharply defined segments of themarket, rather than attempting to generate a widegeneral appeal. Price is not a major factor: perfor-mance is most important to the buyers.

Swaging custom bullets means building the prod-ucts that have little or no competition from mass pro-ducers. This means there is room to for a very healthyprofit margin, and the customer will not go away be-cause of it. Those who would not pay the price werenever serious potential customers in the first place. Itdoes no good to try to attract them. They will buymass produced and cast bullets, at a very low margin.So long as there are either (1) very efficient mass pro-duction businesses or (2) people willing to work forlittle or nothing per hour, the high volume, low profitmarket will not want for lack of products.

The problem with the high volume market, for acustom bullet maker, is the low margins and tremen-dous amount of competition from people who may ormay not have very good business ability. Although they

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eventually go broke or give up, while they are spend-ing their savings down trying to make penny bulletsto beat the next fellow’s price (or to compete withbanks of high speed punch presses run by the majorfactories, some of which were originally paid for bypublic taxes during wartime emergencies and are long-since depreciated), they are selling bullets below whatit costs to stay in business.

To compete with these people on price alone isworst than standing on the street corner and handingyour money out to every passing stranger: at least youget it over with quickly that way, and can start oversooner with something that pays! In an isolated in-stance, where one or two morons were selling belowwhat it cost to survive and didn’t know it, you couldjust wait until they went broke, step in and offer a goodbullet at a reasonable price. But there is an endlessstream of people who think they know all about bulletcasting, and want to throw themselves into the bot-tomless pit of unprofitable business practices basedonly on price competition.

There are only a few, limited things you can do tocompete reasonably. You can lower your costs by in-vesting larger amounts in machinery and supplies,shop smarter and cut transportation costs for the heavyraw materials and delivery of finished goods. You cantry to offer a higher quality product. But the productsare all very much the same today. With casting, a bul-let is a frozen piece of lead with various kinds of lubri-cant applied. Other than different diameters, shapesand weights, there is little to differentiate one fromanother. The basic construction and design are thesame. Price is one of the few things left for competi-tive advantage.

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Swaging, on the other hand, can use materials thatdo not have to be melted. That opens up a vast arrayof new designs, any of which can by itself present adistinct marketing advantage. Relatively few peopleswage bullets outside of the mass production plants(where nearly all bullets are swaged, but on very ex-pensive high speed machinery that is not at all versa-tile, and must be used to make millions of identicalbullets to pay for the equipment).

This is because until Corbin developed the widerange of swaging tools available today, the field wasbarren of equipment except for (1) very cheap hand-gun swages sold over the counter, for making half-jacket style bullets and (2) very costly benchrest rifleswages made in miniscule quantities by craftsmen whowere not primarily in that business, but did it as a side-line. There was no single source for presses, dies, sup-plies, chemicals, information, and consulting services.Certainly no one was available to advise individualsabout the business of custom bullet making. Anyonewho tried it, did it alone.

Twenty-five years ago (at this writing), the largestmanufacturer of swaging equipment in the world con-sisted of a shop with two people, one of them part-time. Theodore Smith ran the old S.A.S. dies companyin North Bend, Oregon. He invented a number of tools,including the powder trickler (“Little Dripper”) thatwere copied and marketed widely by other firms. TheS.A.S. motto was “If you want a die, we can help you!”which could almost be a mafia offer one couldn’trefuse! S.A.S. stood for “Shooters’ Accessory Supply”.

About that time, I had just sold my first successfulelectronics company, Teletron Communication Elec-tronics, Inc., and I was “between jobs”, doing a littlewriting, some photography for the local businesses,putting together small businesses based on little elec-

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tronic inventions that I’d build virtually on a kitchentable and then market for a few months to get somehistory, package the whole thing and sell it as a ready-made small business opportunity.

John Amber was the editor-in-chief of Gun Digestat that time. I had a number of firearms articles, evena column in one of the magazines, and John had askedme to write a story about Ted Smith and his swagingbusiness. I had no idea such a thing was even beingdone, or how it worked.

When I found Ted, he was recovering from a verybad situation: he had been using gasoline as a cleanerto remove the cutting oils from his swage dies, and hisbig barn-like shop had wall-mounted electric heatersthat sparked when their simply open-contact thermo-stats operated. His over-alls were saturated with oiland the gasoline vapors set him afire like a torch. Hispart-time helper did the best thing he could think of,which was to grab one of the big fire extinguishers offthe wall and spray Ted down with it.

Unfortunately, it was an old baking soda and sulfu-ric acid fire extinguisher. The mixture did almost asmuch skin damage as the fire. Ted spend about a yearin the burn ward, he told me. His face and hands werespared, but he had scars over the rest of his body. Hewas tough and survived it so well that one could notsee any after effects in his manner or activity. But thebills had piled up during that time.

Ted’s wife had really been overwhelmed with themail that kept coming in, ordering more swage dies.Around the corner from the kitchen was a little office,and I could see the corner of a desk sticking out fromunder a mountain of unopened mail. As I got to knowTed better with more visits, I became more and more

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intrigued by the bullet swaging idea. Obviously, I wasn’talone: those letters were full of orders with stale-datedchecks!

Ted agreed to teach me how to make swage dies,and I agreed to help him get out of debt and sell theproducts in return. We did this for about a year, withme working for him without pay in order to learn. Thenhe worked for me, in essence, by filling orders while Iwrote catalogs, ads, and handled the shipping, andworked on new ideas to expand the product line. Itwasn’t long before he was tired of it, and offered tosell the business. I bought it, and expanded the “D.R.Corbin Manufacturing Co.” into a full time bullet swageequipment venture, incorporating later with mybrother Richard, and my friend N. Bradford Pritchettas the other stockholders.

By the time “Corbin” had become a famous namein the field of swaging, we had seven books to explainthe various aspects of the field, including Ted Smith’soriginal “Bullet Swage Manual”, kept in its manuscripttext to preserve the history and viewpoint of the in-teresting gentleman, who passed away a few years ago.My interest in bullet swaging has only grown greaterwith the passing years, because of the constant dis-covery of new techniques and solutions to challengesthat only swaging can provide.

Swaging provides a solution to the challenge ofpaying for a shooting hobby, for hundreds of shoot-ers. It can do this because of a unique paradox, whichI have not seen often in business: the higher the pro-duction, the less profit is made!

Of course, if all other factors were equal, this wouldbe patently untrue. You can’t sell more and make less.But the factors are locked together with logical barsof iron: when you move one, the others move in uni-son, and not always in the same direction.

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Custom bullets are made to fill the gaps left by massproducers and bullet casters. That is, they provideanswers to the botique buyers’ needs. Obsolete cali-bers, special purpose, high performance, experimen-tal, unusual imports, all the special situations we’vementioned in this book that make custom bullets dif-ferent, are linked to a high profit margin. It must be so,because one cannot hand-build just a few of anythingfor the same price as millions can be stamped out.

Now, suppose you decide that instead of seekingthose special markets where people are willing to paymore for small lots of unusual bullets, you want tomake a copy of a factory bullet. To sell it, you have tocompete with the factory price. They have machinesalready paid for that cost hundreds of thousands ofdollars, in order to get the cost per part down topennies.You can buy similar machinery, or you canwork for nothing. Even working for nothing, the mate-rials you buy will either have to be purchased in hugelots, to factory pricing, or they will cost you more thanthe finished factory product.

It does not sound feasible to compete with the highinvestment in marketing, production tools, and expe-rience that the factory has built over the years, doesit? So, what if you decide to raise the volume of spe-cial bullets sold, by making a unique design in a verycommon caliber, and lowering the price so that evenif you are not exactly competitive with the factory,you are barely charging more than a standard bullet?

This is not an either/or situation: it is a sliding scale.As you charge less for the bullet, you may get morebuyers. But in order to make the bullet fast enough tosupply them, you have to spend more money for ma-chinery speed. As you invest more in machinery, youhave a larger overhead to pay back, perhaps a loan toservice or at least the return on your higher invest-

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ment to consider. That means you need more custom-ers, and since you are not seeking the botique crowdbut are going after the average consumer of bulletswith a better quality product, you may find (as mostpeople do) that the average consumer is mostly inter-ested in price.

Factory bullets are reasonable in cost and perfor-mance, in the standard applications that most peopleuse. The casual deer hunter, the plinker, the averagetarget shooter all think that factory bullets are just fine.If you want to get their business, you not only have toovercome the tremendous investment in brand loy-alty and recognition that millions of dollars in adver-tising have created, but you have to offer some eco-nomic incentive. In other words, make the price bet-ter. Doing this brings more sales, but less profit.

To get enough profit to pay for the machinery, youmay need to invest in even higher speed machinery,and that will begin to include packaging machinerytoo, since high volume handling has its own specialproblems that a low volume operation does not haveto consider. Now you are heavily invested in both pro-duction and delivery, and will need more people tohelp you get those millions of bullets into the handsof buyers. More volume! Turn up the treadmill!

It isn’t long before you are competing with the fac-tory at some level. The point where you stop will bethe point where your bullet’s technical advantage andthe marketing edge you can milk out of it do not influ-ence the remaining potential clients. The ones whowould have bought your bullet at ten times the pricehave long been adsorbed into your customer base. Theones who would buy it at a modestly profitable amounthigher than standard factory bullets have bought all

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they can use. Now you run into the hard wall of real-ity: the remaining people don’t care about better per-formance if it costs them anything at all.

How are you going to weather the dips in sales nowthat you have your house and future mortgaged to payfor that high speed, low volume business? More salesby lowering the price? At what point do you give awaybullets just to keep the machinery turning and yourpeople from going away, in the hopes that the dip isonly temporary and better days are around the cor-ner?

Because there is a limited, but viable, market forspecialty bullets, price elasticity is quite limited. If yougave away all the .600 Nitro bullets you could make,you’d find no takers after the first month! Obviously,there is an upper limit to what the few .600 Nitro Ex-press gun owners will pay, too. But it isn’t nearly aslow as what a target shooter will pay for another 9mmclone bullet.

Most custom bullets sell in the $1.50 price range.That is far too high for most target shooters, becausethey use far too many bullets and there is nothing atstake except the winning or losing of a match. Thebest shooters win using fairly standard, but good, bul-lets. The worst shooters will never win no matter whatbullet they use. If you offered these people a bulletthat cost ten times the standard price but guaranteedthat they would win any match when all else was equal(their competition using standard bullets but being nobetter shooters or having no better equipment other-wise), it would still be a hard sell. That is because atarget shooter might fire several hundred bullets in thecourse of a match, and hundreds more getting pre-pared for it. Even if he really wanted to win badlyenough to pay your price, he probably couldn’t affordit.

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On the other hand, if this same person were goingto hunt elk in Montana, and the trip was going to costhim anywhere from five hundred to ten thousand dol-lars (certainly in the ballpark for guided hunts thesedays), he would be foolish not to buy at least a box ofyour bullets, if they were designed specifically to takedown a trophy elk cleanly and humanely at the rangeshe planned to hunt. At ten times the standard factoryprice, they are still nearly the cheapest part of the trip.

If this same person were licensed to carry a con-cealed weapon and felt the need to do so in order toprotect his life, or that of his family, he would not onlybe foolish but would feel humiliated if he passed upthe chance to use the very best self-defense bullet onthe market, and his standard factory bullet failed towork. He might, in fact, feel much worse than that. Ornothing whatever, including a pulse, depending onwhen and how the lower cost bullet failed to perform.

Those who simply cannot obtain the bullet style,weight or caliber they want from the factory eitherdon’t shoot their guns or they pay what it costs to makethe special bullets. Making the bullets faster andcheaper usually has little or no effect on the sales, otherthan making them less profitable.

There is a relationship between sales volume andprofit margin that people without business experiencesometimes overlook when they start their first busi-ness. As you increase the price, those people whowere just on the edge of buying usually back off anddon’t buy, but those who were a little further into theireconomic comfort zone are not affected. So, you losea few sales but the ones you have become more prof-itable.

At some point in the curve of sales volume versusprofitability, a point is reached where any further lossof sales reduces the over-all profit. But until you hit

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that point, you can make more money on less sales.And that is the entire point of custom bullet makingas a market segment: as long as you go after the nar-rowly limited areas where the factories do not find itprofitable to work, you will be able to operate free ofany serious competition, and can make a very niceprofit on your work. But as soon as you decide thatthe volume is too small, and rather than looking formore of these niches in the market, you turn to theplaying field of the mass producers, you are headedfor a real fight.

Working with people who know you are making thebullets by hand, one at a time, and doing the very bestpossible job on each one, means that your customersrealize that your price must be high. They are willingto pay it, or they wouldn’t be your customers! The big-gest mistake a custom bullet maker can make is tothink in terms of “bullets per hour”. Always considerwhy you are doing it (other than the satisfaction, ofcourse): the bottom line is “dollars per hour”. Keep-ing that in mind makes it easier to seek new nichemarkets instead of lusting after the mass producers’clients.

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Bullet TestingIn order to know if a certain bullet design has merit,

either for production or for your personal use, it isimportant to know how to test it. Gun magazines pub-lish many tests of bullets, but the circumstances un-der which most gun writers operate virtually precludesdoing a very meaningful test.

I say this, having been a gun writer myself. Fortu-nately, I had other income and could do a little morethan if I had to depend on the salary from writing tosupport my family. At that time, I had no family to sup-port, and had other business income to buy the gunsand supplies needed. Time wasn’t a major problemthen. Even so, the tests that I did of bullets consumeda vast amount of both time and money. The standardfees paid by magazines for articles did not leave muchfor the work: I figured I would make about twice asmuch pumping gas as doing good gun articles thatinvolved bullet testing.

A fairly standard technique is to fire a few bulletsinto wet newspapers, clay, a plastic milk jug filled withwater, or some other target material, and recover thebullets to photograph and measure. Anywhere fromthree to twenty bullets might be fired in groups of threeto five shots to check the accuracy, using a favoritegun fired from whatever rest the author has found sat-isfactory. And that’s the basis for the article.

I’ve read a few articles where the author fired oneor two shots and pronounced judgement on the per-formance based on what happened at that particularspeed and range when the bullet hit a stack of wetphone books. And I fully understand why this is passedoff as a bullet test. If I were trying to make a livingtoday writing gun articles, I’d probably have to dosomething like that in order to stay solvent.

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I don’t blame the writers or the magazines for notputting enough time and money into the tests to bemeaningful. But I do think it wise that a person who iscounting on the right bullet design, either for a busi-ness venture in making custom bullets or in using thebullet for some important purpose, should conduct amuch more thorough testing before making any suchdecision.

Before discussing the test methods that actuallyprovide meaningful information, I must say that re-gardless of what artificial target materials are used,there is a large error factor introduced in real life hunt-ing and defense situations which cannot truely besimulated. We are forced to conduct a scientific ex-periment in which the simulation of reality is far moreexact than the reality itself.

No matter what you use to simulate a Cape Buf-falo, it probably won’t charge you head on and makeyou take two or three more quick shots at a bobbing,weaving, and rapidly closing menace of horn and skullso thick that full metal jacket military bullets are bentand can be turned to come back at you! That CapeBuffalo has large areas of soft tissue that are similarto a big leather bag full of water, and other areas inchesaway that are as tough as a five-inch thick oak.

Depending on how it stands, or runs, you may onlysee horns and head, or you may see any angle of itsbody. It may be docile one moment and running asfast as it can to gore you in the next. How do you simu-late all of that?

Game hunting has another target factor besides themechanical physics of the materials: the spirit or willof the animal to continue, or give up, regardless ofthe severity of its wound. Sometimes it will drop likea rock with the same hit that, in another animal of thesame species, would allow it to run away.

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People are similar in their response to being shot: Ispoke with a gentleman who was shot in the leg andonly realized it when his boot filled with blood, and hecould hear it squishing as he walked. I’ve read aboutpeople who died of non-fatal wounds, from shock andfear, and others who were so emotionally wound upthat they were able to survive a fatal wound far longerthan anyone would logically presume possible.

I’ve never been shot, fortunately, so I can’t writeany personal impressions about it. Speaking with ex-perts in the forensic ballistic field and people who havesurvived gunshot wounds, though, has given meenough insight into the results of shootings that Iwould not count on any particular bullet test as beingexactly indicative of what would happen.

You would think that being shot point blank in thetorso with a .44 Magnum would result in immediatedeath, would you not? Yet, a woman in Chicago pur-chased a .44 Magnum for protection against muggers,was mugged while carrying it home from work in apaper bag, pulled it out and shot him point blank, andall he did was stand there looking at the tear in hisarm and ribs, and then run away!

If you fired that round into a large block of clay, itwould make a most impressive hole. Yet, there youhave it. At least one criminal was still on his feet afterbeing hit with one of the most powerful handgunrounds on the market. Testing has severe practical lim-its, no matter how well we do it. But we must do itanyway, because we can at least rule out some miser-able failures, and point in at least a tentative way to-ward some potential successes.

Before we test anything, we need to establish a baseline for what is normal. This is one of the most glaringomissions in so many articles: the writer fails to dupli-cate the test using a “control” bullet fired at the same

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speed, range, and from the same gun into the samemedia. The control bullet should be one that is com-monly available and familiar to most readers or usersof that particular caliber. Otherwise, firing two obscureand different bullets doesn’t really tell us anything.

The control bullet is used to tell us exactly what a“normal” bullet would do in the same circumstances.But because there are variations in high energy physi-cal impacts (not to be confused with high energy phys-ics, which deals with much lighter projectiles goingmuch faster speeds!), a single round isn’t enough. De-pending on the amount of variation between rounds,a person should average the results of at least tenshots. If the ten all seem to give nearly identical re-sults, then perhaps the next time, you could get bywith five. But never just one.

In an ideal world, you could fire enough rounds bothof your control bullet and your test samples to be sta-tistically meaningful, perhaps several hundred. But thereality of the bank account steps in, and insists thatfive to ten shots probably won’t miss that many op-portunities for a very different performance. That iswhat we are looking for: a wildly different result thanthe previous few shots. If we find it, we have a prob-lem to solve in firing enough more shots so that wecan determine if that was just a strange anomoly orpart of a pattern. We can’t ignore it. So we rather hopeit doesn’t occur!

Having tested the standard bullet at exactly thesame speed and range, into the same material we planto use for our “unknown” bullet, we have a writtenrecord of the penetration depth, the diameter of theentrance cavity, the shape of the cavity, the remainingweight of the bullet and its expanded diameter, andany other factors we are interested in comparing. Then

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we fire the “unknown” bullet, so that we might knowit better, under circumstances duplicated to the bestof our ability.

Immediately a problem is apparent: if our custombullet is the world’s lightest or heaviest for that cali-ber, or if it simply cannot be matched in velocity orweight with any standard mass produced bullet, whatdo we use as a standard? What happens if the testbullet is the only brand available, and that is why weare using it?

Creative logic has to be applied. You have to de-cide what the closest standard bullet would be to theone you are using, even if it is a different caliber. Thething that is different about the custom bullet is whatyou are testing, so that thing will not be duplicated inthe control bullet. Everything else, as far as it is pos-sible, should be.

If you are testing the world’s lightest, fastest bulletin a .38 pistol, then you want to see if it penetrates,expands, holds together, gives more or less pressurewith the same loads as the nearest standard bullet withwhich everyone reading the article or considering buy-ing your product will have some possibility of experi-ence. If the bullet you are testing happens to be a roundnose shape, then you would probably want to get astandard round nose bullet of normal weight to com-pare. If it is jacketed, you’d want the control bullet tobe jacketed also. But if the special bullet is full of plas-tic instead of lead, you don’t necessarily want yourcontrol bullet to be the same construction, since thatis the main factor in making the custom bullet differ-ent: you are testing whether a plastic filled, light weightbullet that can go very fast is of any benefit when itcomes to firing under the same circumstances as aregular bullet of normal construction and weight, ofroughly the same shape.

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If the thing you are testing is the shape, then youwould want to try to get as close to the weight andvelocity with your control bullet as possible. You mayin some circumstances have to try more than one con-trol bullet or load it to different speeds in order to findout which factors are improved and why .

For instance, if the shape is like a football, and thepenetration is twice as great as your round nose con-trol bullet, you may want to find out if the reason isthat the base drag is reduced by the other end of thatcurve, and thus the bullet is simply hitting at a higherrate of speed. To do that, you might have to chrono-graph the downrange velocity, load a conventional bul-let to a higher speed and see if it penetrates the same.If it does, then the nose shape isn’t the reason for thesuperior performance of the new design.

But if the round nose penetrates less at the samespeed of impact, then the reduced base drag isn’t thewhole answer, and comparing the material hardnessand nose shapes may reveal the answer: perhaps thenew bullet is just harder and expands less, so it goesin further. Bullet testing isn’t just a matter of firing oneor two shots and proclaiming something about the ex-pansion.

Once you have established how the test bullet dif-fers in performance from the control bullet at onespeed and range, you need to repeat the test at sev-eral other speeds to see how the performance maychange. I usually test bullets at the lowest and highestspeed that would typically be loaded in that caliber,and then compare the results. Each test uses at leastfive shots, since variations can start to occur at onespeed that did not occur at another.

If there is a significant difference in expansion andpenetration, which there usually is, then I try a speedapproximately half way between them. If the penetra-

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tion and expansion are linear when plotted on a chartagainst the speed, I figure that any other tests will prob-ably fall close to that line, and can decide whether toshoot any more based on available time and moneywithout a great deal of fear that I might miss some-thing by stopping here.

But if the middle shot plots very far off the line, Ineed to split the difference on either side of it and fireat least five more rounds at those speeds, to see wherethe line moves. If it is a log curve, growing ever moresharply at one end and more slowly at the other, I’vediscovered something useful. If it jumps around, thereare mechanisms working in that design that don’t fit aconventional pattern, and probably bear further tests.

One interesting situation which comes to light withexpanding bullets is a situation where the penetrationin certain kinds of target materials changes in a non-linear manner with velocity. The results at first can bepuzzling but ultimately yield to logic.

Here is what happens: a given bullet may not ex-pand at all, or only a small amount, during a series ofshots where the velocity is increased from the verylowest practical values to the middle range of speeds.The jacket is maintaining the efficient shape of thebullet at these low energy levels, so it tends to pen-etrate in a fairly linear way with increasing speed.

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Penetration versus velocity: two bullets, oneexpanding (dotted) and the other solid, fired todestructive impact.

As soon as a certain speed is reached, the jacket isno longer strong enough to resist being torn back, andit starts to expand more rapidly, which increases thefrontal area and rapidly slows down the bullet, some-times expanding so fast with increases in velocity thatthe curve becomes level or even negative.

What is happening is that the increased speed isbeing converted to energy sufficient to rapidly expandthe bullet, and it offers more drag (friction), which re-tards its forward momentum, spreading the availableenergy over a wider area so it penetrates less, or atleast doesn’t seem to increase its penetration as muchwith each increase in speed as it did before expansionbecame so great.

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Then suddenly the curve becomes more sharpagain, and further increases cause even more penetra-tion. This is the point where the “petals” of expandedjacket and core material are folded back or broken off,reducing the frontal area of the remaining projectile,so it now has the ability to leave bits of itself behindand bore a deeper hole with the piece that is left.

With even further increase in speed, the width ofthe hole can be come greater but the penetration canonce again slow down or become negative, and finallylevel out at some maximum speed beyond which thereis no futher penetration. This is the point at which theenergy is so great at first impact that the bullet liter-ally explodes, scattering itself into so many smallpieces that none of them have enough kinetic energyto penetrate very far.

You can see that picking one or two velocities, in agiven target material, might give you an entirely erro-neous picture of what happens when you extrapolatethe results to other speeds. For instance, if you hap-pened to choose two speeds well into the negativepenetration curve, you might conclude that this bulletpenetrates best at slowest speed and less as you in-crease speed. You’d only be right for a very narrowportion of the curve, possibly for two little segmentsof it. Anyone choosing to load a lower or somewhathigher velocity would find just the opposite to be true.

You can see that it is important to try a fairly widerange of velocities, with a given target material. It isalso important to try more than one media for the tar-get, unless you are only comparing bullets that youknow will be used in nearly identical material. For in-stance, dry magazines or paper may make a conve-nient target, and you can tell quite a bit by comparingbullets fired into it, but hollow point designs usuallyplug up with dry paper and act almost like solids. If

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you fired the same hollow point bullet into a jug ofwater, it might mushroom to twice its size, and a solidmight not expand at all.

Both of the bullets fired into dry materials couldexpand nearly the same amount. This is because hol-low point designs usually depend on some kind ofhydraulic effect to generate pressure that is evenlydistributed in the cavity, and dry materials are oftenjust cut and packed into the cavity on impact, whichmakes them part of the solid bullet rather than an ex-panding force.

The Oregon State Police told me that they usedwater to capture bullets, and that it gives them fairlyclose approximation to bullets recovered from humanwounds (assuming of course that bone isn’t hit). Fir-ing into a water tank usually doesn’t expand most con-ventional velocity handgun bullets, and neither do theyseem to expand much after hitting someone. I can’tvouch for it myself except to say that reliable forensicexperts have told me it is true.

If so, then it means the idea of recovering a bulletin water to prevent any damage to it, is close to whatwould happen if it were used in defense. Conversely,if you design a bullet that expands well when firedinto water (at a specified range of velocities, of course),it probably will do close to the same thing if calledupon to defend someone against a violent criminal,assuming that the distance it has to travel is about thesame as it would in a person, and it did not encounterany other significant materials along the path.

By the end of the day, we have fairly well used up asupply of whatever target material adsorbed all thosehits. Some of them are quite renewable, as with watertanks having a pair of rubber sheets stretched overone end, or various kinds of book-binders’ glue thathas the consistence of old jello and melt in a double-

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boiler (lower than 212-degrees F). You can cast thisstuff in the plastic moulds that it comes in, and use itover and over, so long as you don’t over heat it andcause it to “carmelize” or turn stiff and brown.

Water-soaked phone books or tightly-bundlednewspapers soaked in water are fairly good test tar-gets, also, but their density can vary with the pressureyou use to pack them, the temperature and humidity,and how long they sit around waiting to soak up ordry out. I’ve heard of people buying a rack of ribs andshooting up perfectly good entres in an attempt tomore closely simulate real game, but the game animalis alive, and its bones and muscle have not nearly thesame resistance to a bullet as the meat in the butcher’scase.

I’m not outlining a specific way to test or designbullets, but only trying to illustrate how you would haveto think about your tests in order to make them mean-ingful. Always hold your assumptions at arms length.By that, I mean do not take what you think to be trueas fact, but only as one of the possibilities. A blindfaith in a certain kind of performance, or a given shapeor bullet feature just because it appears to have workedwell in a few instances, isn’t proof that it will alwaysbe the best.

Maybe you are assuming, for instance, that a boat-tail is more accurate than a flat base bullet, when inreality you were comparing some mediocre flat basebullets, with out of tolerance jacket walls, to some veryfine boattails with extremely well-drawn jackets. Theonly way to really find out is to try a number of ex-periments with different jackets, weights, loads, andcalibers, and see if boattails are always more accu-rate than flat base bullets. They may have less drag,but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily more ac-

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curate. Bullets can be shot on a very flat trajectoryinto a big group, or they can be lobbed high into theair and drop into nearly one hole.

Another common assumption is that hollow pointsexpand more than lead tip bullets. Sometimes the op-posite is true, if the hollow point uses a fairly small tipand thick jacket, and the lead tip bullet uses a thinnerjacket, or even the same jacket not closed down tosuch a small opening where the lead protrudes fromit. The main control of expansion in jacketed bulletsis the diameter of the jacket mouth at the time of im-pact. If two bullets are fired at the same speed intoidentical media, and one is nearly a cylinder while theother is closed down at the tip, it doesn’t matter verymuch whether soft lead protrudes or not. The cylin-der will expand more because it is already expandedmore when it hits. The pointed bullet has further toexpand just to catch up. And, generally, when you pointa bullet more, the tip tends to become thicker, whichresists expansion.

Another assumption is that tiny tip openings resultin more accurate target bullets. A small tip may con-tribute to a lower drag, up to some limit, but it alsocauses the jacket material to be stretched further andthus any differences in hardness or thickness betweenone side of the jacket and the other are exaggerated,and show up at the tip. I’ve fired absolute cylindersinto nearly one hole from a machine rest, doing justas well as a very pointed bullet, so I know that at leastunder some circumstances, the point shape doesn’tcontrol the accuracy.

When testing bullets, you do not need to simulatereality, because reality itself varies so much from shotto shot.The exact performance is not quite as impor-tant as a good comparison with a bullet that we allknow well. The fact that our favorite 30-30 bullet hap-

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pens to penetrate six inches of water-soaked phonebooks and makes a six-inch diameter hole while re-taining eighty percent of its original weight does nottranslate to any particular results on the next deer weshoot.

If we know that the bullet does a pretty good jobon deer, and it makes certain size holes in the phonebooks, that we can say that if another bullet does thesame or better in the phone books, chances are goodit will perform the same or better in the deer. We don’tknow it for a fact, but we can make a tentative as-sumption, or a working hypothesis, until it is provedotherwise.

Likewise, if we know that a certain standard bulletusually breaks up and damages a lot of meat at a cer-tain speed, and we fire it at the phone books or clay orbook-binders’ glue, and we find that it makes a won-derful textbook example of a perfect wound cavity,without breaking up, then we know that another bul-let that performs just like that in phone books mightalso break up when we shoot the deer.

We don’t know for a fact that it will, but we have anindication. We have to decide what kind of perfor-mance would translate to reasonable results in actualuse, and that isn’t always easy, unless you are surethat a certain design worked more than once, and cantry it in your test material to see what happens.

The concept of a control is basic to any scientificexperiment. There are some people who would saythat since there are so many “unknowns”, it doesn’tmatter if we have one more, and then do their testingwith one or two shots compared to... nothing! It maybe true that we have a tough job in deciding what isclose enough to be a valid control bullet, and exactlywhat kind of performance we are looking for in a tar-get material, as opposed to performance in actual use.

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But as with most things in life, if you can’t get all theanswers, the least you can do is get all the answersyou can.

I was once called to a Federal tax court as a rebut-tal witness to give “expert testimony” about bullet test-ing in a tax case. This was rather interesting becausethere were two main points the defendant had to provein order to keep the Internal Revenue Service fromcollecting fines and penalties of a significant nature.

Here is the background: a custom bullet maker de-cided to build bullets for hunting dangerous Africangame, and in order to test them, he went to Africa andactually hunted the game himself. He decided to waitto advertise these bullets until he had perfected thedesign, based on actual experience, which would givehim a very good advertising point.

But this meant spending quite a bit of money be-fore actually selling any products, and that is wherethe I.R.S. disagreed with his intentions, saying he wasjust using the business venture as an excuse to havefun and write it off as a business expense. Theyclaimed that he didn’t have a business because hewasn’t selling any bullets, and even if he did have one,it wasn’t necessary to go to Africa and actually shootCape Buffalo in order to advertise that the bullets weredesigned and tested for this purpose.

He had two claims to support this action. First, heclaimed that it was an ordinary, prudent business de-cision to invest in research and development, whichmeant testing and refining the product in actual use.Second, he claimed that product liability laws wouldrequire that he test the bullet in the same manner thathis clients were supposed to use it.

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He actually made more than one trip, because hesaid the first trip proved that the design he had tried inthe usual test materials, and thought was working well,didn’t actually perform well at all in a real hunting situ-ation. So, he adjusted his assumptions about the de-sign, tried different test materials for targets, changedthe design, and went back next year to try again.

The I.R.S. had a good arguement because he actu-ally had not sold any of these bullets, and therefore itwould be a legal question of whether, in two yearstime, he could actually be said to have had a business.But he brought forth these two claims for the tax courtto rule upon, and I was asked to rebut the testimonyof the prosecution’s expert witness, another custombullet maker, who said that you did not need to shootactual game in order to find out exactly what was go-ing to happen with a given bullet design.

This other bullet maker, a famous name in the fieldwho I will not identify, was very nice but also rather“bull headed”, I thought, about his contention that wetnewsprint or water-soaked magazines would tell youall you needed to know without actually shooting anygame.

During a break, I had a chance to talk with himabout it, but he was quite stubborn in insisting thiswas so. I contended that it was not, and that anyoneclaiming a bullet was designed to stop dangerous gameanimals had better test it on such an animal beforemaking that claim in print, or the widow and survi-vors might sue him when it didn’t quite work the sameway in the Zimbabwe brush as it did in his back yardwith a pile of wet phone books.

Who won? I don’t know! Both sides presented theircases, the judge accepted written briefs and said he’drule on it in the future sometime, and everyone wenthome! I never found out. But the idea that product

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liability requires the best possible testing, in as nearlyidentical conditions as the expected usage, so far as itis practical to do so, should prevail.

I wouldn’t advise trying to write off a couple ofsafaris, however, unless you had good legal and ac-counting advise before the event, and they said theI.R.S. wouldn’t mind. In fact, I wouldn’t advise any-thing remotely connected with law or accounting, notbeing a lawyer or accountant, and I disclaim any suchintentions! I’m just relating what happened. You bethe judge—but try to decide a little sooner, please!

This story is presented to show how important bul-let testing methods can become in some situations.Another time, I was asked to do some bullet testingfor a client who was trying to get permission to builda range, and the building authorities insisted that heprove the ability of his construction plan to stop bul-lets. The building was to be made of concrete blocksfilled with cement and reinforcement steel bar (re-bar),two layers thick at the target end.

The concern was whether a .44 Magnum wouldpenetrate this barrier. We built little sections of wallto that plan and fired many shots at it. Surprisingly,the concrete did fail at certain angles, when hit in thethin web section, but the solid concrete filler withstoodseveral more rounds, and a double row was very te-dious to penetrate. It could be done, but a personwould need to concentrate his firepower on one spotfor long enough to draw attention.

Of course, an adsorbent bullet trap such as theangled cut-up rubber tire bits or sloping sand shelf oreven angled steel plates would protect the wall, butthe building people wanted the wall alone to stop astray round, and it would. We sent our bill for cementand blocks and some ammo and time, along with ourindependent third party report and the building went

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forth. So far, I’ve not heard of anyone taking a strayslug in the alley during a match, so the tests must havebeen realistic enough.

Another time, we were asked to develop a bulletthat would not go through a conventional frame housewall (with a 3/8-inch drywall on both sides), yet wouldbe adequate to stop an intruder. We could not do it.Anything that was powerful enough to cause a crimi-nal to drop in his tracks was also strong enough toblast through the gypsum boards like they didn’t ex-ist. We tried very light, fast bullets that had so muchenergy that they would break up on anything, and veryslow heavy bullets made of powdered tungsten in abeeswax capsule or “jacket”. Regardless, there was noway to guarantee the safety of anyone on the otherside of the simulated room wall. Some goals are mu-tually exclusive. But if you find an answer, I’d be gladto hear it.

The “Holy Grail” of game bullet design is the bul-let that will expand to double diameter at nearly anyvelocity or range and won’t break up at the highestspeed nor fail to expand and penetrate to vital organsat the lowest speed. In this application, speed trans-lates to range. A hunter may not know exactly how farthe trophy will be when it appears.

If it steps from behind a bush 50 feet away, he’s agreat tracker or maybe just lucky, but not if the bulletblows to bits on impact with the hide, and the animalsruns off to die from the wound.

If it appears on the other side of the valley just be-fore dusk, on the last day of the hunt, and it’s a matterof taking a 350 yard shot or letting it go, some peopleare good enough (or dumb enough) to try it, but theirsuccess will then depend on whether the well placedshot is made with a bullet that can expand even afterlosing a good deal of its initial velocity.

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Rotational velocity, imparted to the bullet by therifling, varies with the forward velocity. It is always somany turns per inch of travel, controlled by the barrelused, but the centrifugal force is increased as the bul-let covers that inch in less time. However, the amountof energy that is released by the spin alone is not amajor factor in determining what the bullet will dowhen it hits. The bullet stops spinning almost as soonas it expands, since the leverage of those petals pro-jecting from the bullet exert a resistance that is greaterthan the rotational momentum.

After all, any given point on the jacket has the samemass that it did while the bullet was spinning throughthe air, but it normally pops out to nearly twice thedistance from the center of rotation when it strikes,while most of the rest of the bullet stays the samedistance from the center. If you think of a single lineof radius as a little lever, you can see that the expandedbullet has little levers that are twice as long as the maindiameter of the unexpanded portion, pulling on thethick material and trying to move it with them.

You can see the evidence of this by shooting bul-lets into an oil-based clay, where the tracks left by spin-ning are generally very short or absent. The claydoesn’t tend to shrink back to original size like gelatinor elastic bookbinders’ glue, so you can see the spintraces in the way the clay is pulled and twisted. Thereis just enough to show that it isn’t a very big effect.

What this means is that you can get a fairly goodidea of what happens at long ranges by loading yourcartridges so that the close-range impact velocity isthe same as it would be after the bullet had deceler-ated. You might think this would be obvious, but therate of spin doesn’t slow down nearly as much as therate of forward travel. A bullet that travels 2,600 feetper second, for instance, covers one inch in 0.000032

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seconds (32 millionths of a second). If it is spun at arate of one turn for every ten inches of travel, thatmeans when it goes ten inches, a little over 32 mil-lions times ten or 0.00032 seconds will have passed.The rate of spin, in revolutions per second, is one turnin 0.00032 seconds or dividing that fraction out, youget 3125 turns per second.

Sixty times that gives you turns per minute, a mea-surement we know and love because it is used moreoften. The bullet is spinning at 187,500 RPM. Themotor on your drill press probably turns at 1725 RPMor 3250 RPM, and a high speed rotary grinder like theMoto-Tool might get up to 10,000 RPM.

But the leverage arm from the center of that bulletto the jacket is only half the caliber. On a .308 bullet,which is the diameter of nearly all .30 calibers regard-less of what the manufacturer calls them, is .154inches. That’s a rather small arm with which to prysomething. Centrifugal force is the energy that isachieved by spinning a certain weight (or mass, re-ally) by a certain lever arm. The effective mass is thecombined effect of each point along the lever timesits effective speed.

Without delving into the math, the little spinninglever effectively generates a rather small amount ofenergy, and is slowed down almost instantly when itencounters resistance (actually, it slows completelywhen it meets matching resistance, which is suppliedvery soon after impact). This means that while spindoes have an effect on the terminal performance ofthe bullet, it can be ignored for purposes of testingbig game or defense ammo, since the most likely useof the bullets will involve field variables far greaterthan the error introduced in the tests.

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This does not mean there is no effect caused byspin, and that the results will be identical if you shoot1000 yards or if you load so that the bullet strikes upclose at the same rate it would be moving at 1000yards. It just means that for most practical purposes,the effect isn’t big enough to spend much time andeffort in an attempt to simulate it.

So it can be with any number of effects: first youmust determine if the factor you want to simulate issignificant, or just a minor part of the performancepicture. Bullet testing consumes so much time, whendone correctly, that anything you can do to reducethe work without significant risk of missing somethingimportant is a good thing to do. On the other hand,three shots at a watermelon doesn’t constitute muchof a test!

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Business IssuesYou can skip this chapter, if you have no interest

in the business of making and selling your own cus-tom bullets. If you are interested in selling bullets,maybe some of this will be useful when you are set-ting up your business. This isn’t legal advice, however.It is just my opinion, and I do not claim to be infal-lible.

Nondisclosure Agreements

Sometimes we are approached by a person whohas what he believes is a potential wealth-creating newidea for a bullet design or application, and the firstthing he wants is to have us sign a nondisclosure agree-ment so he can see what we think of it and have usproduce some prototypes to show investors. I haveto decline for these reasons, some to protect us, someto protect him:

1) We do not know if we may have already workedwith this idea until we see it, and if we cannot see ituntil we sign a nondisclosure agreement, we are say-ing we won’t do something that we may already havedone! In fact, if the idea is actually practical, we prob-ably have produced something like it before. After allthese years, thousands of inventors and ideas, andhundreds of successful businesses arising from themwith our help, it is highly likely none of us can evenremember if we saw the idea before or not. I can hardlyremember whether I saw my wife’s note to bring homea carton of milk or not (at least the handwriting stilllooks familiar...). After all these years of helping thou-sands of people with their projects and never stealingany of them, I can only say that if our reputation isn’tenough assurance, then our signature on that paperwould be equally worthless.

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2. A person looking for investors (which is nearlyalways the motivation behind the nondisclosure pa-perwork, the patent filings, and so forth) is attemptingto sell an idea in a mature (you could say “ancient”)market which has achieved a high level of successwith the ideas that have already evolved over the past200 years of firearms history. What we would ratherdo is help someone turn one of those ideas into a prod-uct, and sell the product themselves, proving the ideahas an actual market and is profitable in production.Then, if he is inclined to find investors, he has a muchmore attractive set of options, including selling a busi-ness opportunity rather than just a design concept. Agoing business is far more marketable than an ideafor a bullet, no matter how good the idea may be. Ev-eryone has an idea for a better bullet. The only profit-able ideas are those that get produced. Very few cus-tom bullets are unprofitable when marketed in a rea-sonable way, whereas very few bullet ideas—as ideasonly—are marketable at all. For us to encourage thewhole “intellectual property” marketability concept byparticipating in the trappings, such as nondisclosuresand so forth, is a bit of a sham and I’d rather not do it.

3. We specialize in the custom bullet market andhave so many clients who need our help that we can-not afford to waste resources in the field of mass mar-keting. Firearms is a very conservative, slow-movingfield at the mass market level, where the technical mer-its of a new bullet can be far down the list of desirablefeatures. At the top would be low-cost high-volumeproduction, which means not making significantchanges to the tooling or the marketing system. Massproducers have already spent over 200 years, in somecases, building a product line, distribution system, andbrand image. It works fine, so why buy outside ideas?(Products, maybe: you may sell a mass producer

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100,000 special bullets a year for a niche market, sinceit might be just the ticket compared to them develop-ing the idea and producing it themselves in such lowquantities.)

Again, getting involved in legal paperwork that isprimarily of benefit and concern in regard to the massmarket, when our specialty and reason for existenceis something else, would just complicate our lives un-necessarily and imply support or participation in anarea where we really have no expertise to offer. Ifyou think it is likely this idea is original with you, andwe’ve never seen it before, and if we did see it youwould need some kind of legal protection to keep usfrom disclosing it to others, then please don’t evenbother to bring it around. Take it to a mass producerstraight away and let them sign. If they steal it, youcan have all the fun of suing them, and your lawyercan have all the fun of billing you by the hour... foryears to come!

We don’t make bullets for a living: we help othersdo it, and most likely we have seen anything that islikely to work many times before. We have yet to stealany of them and get rich and retire in the Grand Cay-mans beyond the reach of the local attorney who drewup the nondisclosure paperwork. If that had hap-pened, would I be writing this now? Here’s a flash:people who make custom bullets seldom get rich. Theycan make a nice living, maybe even better than aver-age. But get rich? The incentive to steal your idea isnonexistent.

See that file cabinet, over behind the receptiondesk? Yes, that five-foot tall beige one with four draw-ers. Well, it is full of ideas of our own that have no riskof belonging to a client. I don’t have time to work onmore than a tiny fraction of them each year. What dowe need with more ideas? Give me more die-makers;

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those are worth stealing away from you if you hap-pen to bring one along! But ideas? Please, we’re over-stocked. We give them to clients, free. Here, take abag!

I have a term for people who put their faith in get-ting a patent and selling their idea, rather than sellingthe product itself. I call them “Patent People”. It is aterm of endearment, not ridicule. Sometimes they arelooking for the easy way to riches, but often they arejust earnest and misguided. I try to help, but they sel-dom hear my advice. I repeat: I am not a lawyer andmy advice is my opinion only. Perhaps they are rightnot to listen. Judge for yourself—here it is:

Patent People

I would prefer to work with a person to help themdevelop their idea. We want to make tooling that isaffordable, and can be operated in a profitable way byone or two people, filling the modest but steady needfor specialty bullets. The factories may someday pur-chase or copy the idea, but prospects of them doingso are rather low. Niche markets are fairly safe frommass producers.

I can honestly say the money spent on a patent usu-ally should have been put into advertising and pack-aging your own product. This is a field that, taken inits entirety, might come up to the financial level of afew McDonald’s hamburger franchises. It is an old,mature field with conservative buyers who are, for themost part, happy with what they have. Odds of anexotic idea being copied are slim, economic risk is nil,and if you sell the bullets for a few years before the

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idea is copied by someone who can make it farcheaper and faster on their high speed machinery, youare still money ahead.

The same mass producers who might copy yourbullet someday are unlikely to have purchased yourpatent in any case. It is too easy to prove prior art orjust thumb their nose at your limited legal budget whiletheir attorneys, who are already on the payroll, buryyou with procedural filings. They may dig up Civil Warpatents not in the computer records, which show theidea has long passed into government or public own-ership. Then your patent makes a nice den decora-tion but is worthless in court.

Yes, it could happen that you patent an idea andeventually find someone to buy it. Do you think it hasmilitary application? Guess what: if it does, and theywant it, they can get it. You may never see a penny foryour trouble. But even if everyone plays nice, unlessyou are first cousin to someone in procurement or playgolf with the general who happens to think his troopsneed a longer range bullet (or whatever you are sell-ing), the odds of making anything from patenting andmarketing the bullet to the military are, shall we say,remote? They are more likely to purchase small quan-tities of bullets from you for special projects than topay you for an idea. That actually happens, sometimes.

I would not be foolish enough to say that a patentis always a waste of money in the bullet field. Some-times you can get by with just a few thousand dollarsin attorney fees and searches and official drawings andapplication fees, and it so happens your patent hassomething in it that a third party with deep pocketsactually wants. But I’ve seen this happen very sel-dom. I’ve talked to many more “patent people” whowere still drifting in and out of offices with a tena-cious grip on their tattered briefcases, year after year,

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dragging their papers out for one bored executive af-ter another, who try to be polite and look interesteduntil their eyes glaze over.

It is sad: patent people want to believe in their idea,and they do believe that a patent is the key to wealth,but they do not understand how to make money withit. I tell them to take a chance, use some savings, andstart a little company to produce and sell your prod-uct. If it is done well, you can make a reasonable re-turn on your investment, usually two hundred to fivehundred percent a year (the investment is very smallcompared to the margins). If it doesn’t work out, thereis good salvage value and trying for a year or twoshould not cost more than a typical vacation or a sec-ond hand car.

Not trying means never knowing. I understand thatnever knowing could imply always keeping hope alive,and that in some people’s minds this is an unspokenand perhaps unwitting reason to pursue the infinitelylong road to “easy riches” instead of taking that im-mediate first step on the short path to harder workand revelation of the actual merit of the idea.

In other words, if you don’t try, there is no dangerof finding out your idea was not good. This is ego in-surance. If no one buys the untried idea, then it is“their” fault. If they do, you are out of it and they arethe ones who responsible for the success or failure.Either way, there is no ego risk. You are not the onebaring your soul, taking a hard-money, real-world capi-tal risk, making a product that must support your busi-ness. Maybe that is why so many inventors do not wantto try to build their product and sell it. If that is you,then you just saved years expensive therapy, for theprice of a small book! Please feel free to send meany part of the savings in large or small bills—I’mnot particular.

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Another reason could be that they are not busi-ness people, and feel no competence in running theirown business. That is a perfectly legitimate concern.It may be overcome by making up for certain weak-nesses through hiring help for those areas, and focus-ing on one’s strengths in other areas. But sometimesthe scope of skills required to run a small business isoverwhelming. A person might not know where tobegin. There is help for that, also.

A large number of self-help small business booksare available. The Small Business Administration haspublications basic enough for anyone to grasp. A friendor relative may have experience in the basics of set-ting up a small home business. And of course, when itcomes to getting customers, promoting and advertis-ing your business, Corbin is always here with free orlow-cost methods to get the message to the rightpeople, including publicity lists, free website ads, freeinclusion in our bullet-makers’ directory, a seven stepplan included in our Market Information Package (theMIP), and help with advertising, logo design, commu-nications issues, pricing, and much more.

If you start asking and reading, let me throw onewarning buoy into your newly found channel: I havefound that most college texts written about running abusiness are written by people who have never beensuccessful small business owners. Some of them haveat least been involved in business but usually at a levelwhere they did not have to start at the bottom andbuild it from nothing (a teaching career would tend topreclude such a business career: a successful businesscareer usually preempts one in teaching). More thana few business texts are written by people who hatecapitalism and everything it stands for, as evidencedby the tone of the writing and the nearly completelack of understanding of the role of profit in business.

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So, be wary in your reading. If the first thing theauthor tells you to do is a market study and casuallymentions that it takes a sampling of at least 10,000people to be statistically meaningful, get another book.This one was written for a much larger business modelthan we are talking about. In fact, most of the booksyou find in a college bookstore will be. Their methodsand advice probably work fine for General Motors oreven for someone who has a half million dollar warchest for starting a “small” business. But for the per-son working out of their home, preparing to do a mailorder business with no help other than a tax preparer,you can cross out entire chapters and write in “skipthis, go to next step” because the studies and testsand preparation they are recommending would costmore than the entire business will make in severalyears.

You can pick up good ideas, possibly faster thanfrom books, by reading some of the magazines writ-ten for home business operators. Even these tend tobe written for larger businesses, with more money tospend than you may have when starting. Still, basicaccounting principles and some knowledge of the waythe tax code works, especially regarding deductionsand reporting cost of sales, is a good thing to know.You can have someone else do it all (for a price), but itis better to know firsthand what is going on rather thanto hear about it after it has.

A great deal of what a small business person doesis like flying a plane without instruments. You just feelyour way, do the best you can with the limited re-sources available, and work smarter, harder and longerto get ahead, so you can start phasing in outside helpand marketing ideas. Little airplanes without instru-ments sometimes crash in bad weather, and manysmall businesses fail when the outlook clouds up. The

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authors of business books would say it is becausethey do not have the resources to pay for the researchto support the planning that a larger business woulddo.

Ah, but then, we have giant businesses filled withpeople sporting MBA degrees, supplied with huge re-sources, and these firms apparently get no benefit fromsome of their massive planning efforts. Otherwise, howdid the New Coke fiasco come about? Why are thereno current versions of the Edsel? How did the McLeantaste-free burger manage to get on the market? I’venever met anyone who said they liked it. I won’t evenwaste time discussing the “new business model” thatwas collectively debunked by the dot com crash (youremember the mantra: the “old” ideas of the “brickand mortar businesses” are dead and profit is of noimmediate concern, only “eyeballs measured by hits”represent the “market” capturing the “hearts andminds” of the new, hip “visitor”). People were willingto risk money just to advertise the vague promise ofgreat profit at some unspecified future time, rather thantaking the more traditional risk that an idea which hasalready been proven profitable on a small scale couldbe “scaled up” to make more profit. But at least thedot-com era had one thing right: you do want to showyour new ideas to as many potential buyers as pos-sible.

However, it is more practical to reach people usingfree publicity as frequently as possible, than it is tospend all your money on advertising. So you send outpress releases to the right people in the firearms me-dia, to writers, editors, publishers, and even to manu-facturers of guns that might benefit from their cus-tomers using your bullets (to make their gun performbetter). You scrape up as much as you can afford andput together a good color brochure that explains the

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benefits of your bullet, telling people why they willbe better off shooting it than a cheaper, mass pro-duced bullet. You use as many low cost or free re-sources to spread the word as you can find, such asthe internet, trades with other manufacturers in theirshipping literature, cross-advertising deals, whatevergets your bullet information in the right hands with-out costing too much. And you write, e-mail, call, andsend samples to the people who most influence yourultimate customers. That would be gun writers. Thisis in addition to the impersonal press releases.

Yes, it is a lot of work. But it isn’t difficult work.Some people even find it quite enjoyable. You get toread every gun magazine you can find, and locate morethat you didn’t know existed. You get to keep track ofwhat different writers seem to like in bullets, what theywish existed, what they lament about the current of-ferings, or what kind of guns and calibers they writeabout most often. After a while, you have a nice cardfile dossier on most of the popular writers and maga-zines. You know who is most interested in the calibersyou make, and what they like or do not like about ex-isting bullets. Then you can send them a sample ofsomething that you already have a good idea they willfind noteworthy.

Maybe someone wants a very heavy 308, andwishes there are more round nose game bullets in the200 grain and up range. Maybe someone else wants abullet that breaks up as soon as it hits the ground sotheir 224 caliber bullets won’t whine away over thenext hill when they are shooting ground hogs. So whatif your original idea was to make a fragmenting 308for police and a military 224 that would penetrate ar-mor? The equipment can do the opposite, as well. Andhere is an opportunity staring you in the face.

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Often, the key to business success is the ability torecognize such opportunities, and to use what youhave in a slightly different way than you originally in-tended. Perhaps you will get back to the original idealater, but right now, this is a way to bring in some freepublicity and probably some income. Yes, yes... youroriginal idea was to make the world’s fastest 308 for1000 yard competition, but who cares about it rightnow?

Here is an opportunity to sow the seeds of public-ity, which in turn may sell something you can makeright now, which in turn will bring income that letsyou do your own thing, later. How many people are sostubborn about what they intend to do, that they ig-nore these opportunities? Believe me, a lot of peopleare. It is nearly impossible to get them to deviate fromtheir original path. Too much ego is on the line, per-haps? You need a good opinion of yourself to haveconfidence in your ideas. But you have to balance itwith a little humility and reality, when it spells the dif-ference between going broke and making an immedi-ate profit.

On a scale that ranges from hopelessly timid toshamelessly arrogant, there is a middle section wheresuccessful people can find a comfortable mix betweenbeing too indecisive and being too irritating. Thereare people who fail in business because they can’t toottheir own horn, and others who fail because theydrown out everyone around them with their tooting,including the very suggestions and questions that theyneed to know and answer.

Like almost everything in physics and in life, youcan go too far either way. The right balance is hardfor some to find. But look for it and try to maintain it.You can be too strict or too lenient with credit, toomeek to close a sale or too overbearing in trying to

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make one. You can be too convinced of your ownrightness to learn or too lacking in self-confidence toeven try.

But you can’t be too honest, too polite, or toowealthy... like the song says, “I ain’t never had too muchfun”. Being polite doesn’t mean being weak, as bullieshave discovered to their ultimate sorrow. You can smileand say thanks when your competition gives you theshovel to bury them. And if you are always honest, it’sa lot easier to remember what you said.

Liability

Last, what about liability insurance? How risky is itto offer custom bullets, and what protection do youneed? To answer that honestly, I have to say that inany dealing with the public, you run a risk of some-one deciding you have caused them some real or imag-ined harm. You run the risk of dealing with a personwho is anxious to sue anyone for anything.

On the other hand, if you didn’t really do anythingwrong, you probably won’t lose in such a suit, otherthan the time and money to defend yourself. Can youget general business liability insurance? Probably, andit may be worth having. Can you get completed prod-uct liability coverage? Probably not for any reaonablecost compared to the true level of risk involved.

In 30 years, I have seen this many instances of alaw suit involving one of my custom bullet makingclients by one of their customers: zero.

Does that mean it can’t happen? Of course it can.But then again, just because an ice cream truck hasn’trun over you as you picked up the morning paper,doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow. To live is totake risks. I think this one is well worth taking.

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Sources of BulletMaterials

The following pages contain the names and ad-dresses of suppliers for primary and secondary (re-claimed) lead in ingot, powder, and wire form, and millsfurnishing copper tubing, rod, and sheet (strip) as wellas various alloys such as gilding metal, commercialbronze, and brass.

In most cases, the sources are primary mining, re-fining, or milling industries and will not sell small quan-tities directly to bullet makers, but they can direct youto distributors or sales outlets. Some of the world'slargest raw materials producers are listed even thoughthey do not sell the finished products. Don't be hesi-tant about contacting large mining or refining compa-nies and asking them for a list of "fabricators" for thefinished products you seek.

Some of the names are associate members of cop-per or lead industry associations, and may be end us-ers of the materials rather than producers, but arelisted because you may find them helpful in locating anear-by outlet that will sell small quantities. A purchaseof at least 2,000 pounds of lead, or 500 pounds ofcopper tubing or strip is generally the threshold fordealing with the smelters and mills.

Another good source of information is the yellowpages of any large city telephone directory. Look un-der "Lead" or "Copper", "Metals", or "Manufacturers".Please bear in mind that if you cannot find a suitablesupplier, you can count on Corbin for smaller quanti-ties of standard dimensions as well as reasonableprices on larger lots of special sizes.

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Lead FactsPrimary Lead. The world produces close to

6,250,000 tons of lead every year, mined in 48 coun-tries. In the USA, Missouri provides over 90% of thelead mined, with Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, NewMexico, and Washington supplying the rest. The DoeRun company is one of the largest lead mining firmsin the USA.

Secondary Lead. The largest percentage of leadis used in storage batteries. In the USA, about 78% ofthe lead consumed in 1988 (1,053,000 tons) went intobattery manufacture. Additional uses for lead includetelephone and power cable sheathing, glass coatingfor electronic components, leaded glass for crystal andfor video display terminal screens, medical and indus-trial X-ray shielding, roofing, solder, moisture seals,earthquake dampers for buildings, nuclear materialscontainers, and industrial scrubbers for removing sul-phur and sulphuric acids from exhaust gas.

Lead is also formulated with other elements to formchemicals used in corrosion-resistant paint and in ul-trasonic transducers. Stable memory chips for com-puters based on lead compounds are being suggestedas a replacement for silicon-based RAM. The com-mon forms of scrap lead are wheel-weights, batteryplates, telephone cable sheathing, lead pipe and sol-der, sheet lead used in radiation shielding, and nuclearmedicine shields, as well as fired bullets and shotgunpellets.

Chemical Symbol: PbMelting Point 327.5° C.Boiling Point: 1740° C.Atomic Number: 82Atomic Weight: 207.19Density: .4079 lb/cu.-in.

(11.35gm/cc)

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Sources of LeadThe primary information source for lead suppliers

in the United States is the Lead Industries Associa-tion, Incorporated, 295 Madison Avenue, New York,NY 10017. Call 212-578-4750, or send a telefax mes-sage to 212-684-7714, to obtain a current member-ship list, safety and health information about handlinglead, and the uses and sources of lead.

Lead is the most recycled metal in the world today,with about 90 percent of the lead in use coming fromsecondary (recycled) sources. Lead recyclers are ac-tually providing more new lead on the market thanlead mines. Your best sources for all forms of lead (in-gots, powder, and wire) will originate at a recyclingplant or smelter.

Lead prices typically vary from a low of about 19cents per pound in large quantities (tons) in pig form,to a high of over $3 per pound in specialized, extrudedforms such as lead came (for stained glass assembly).You would normally want either lead wire (for bulletcores) or pre-cast cylinders to fit your lead extruderbody. These range from about $0.70 to $2.50 perpound, depending on packaging, quantity, and quality(cleanliness, precision, and reliability of the source).

Straight or pure lead is typically 99.95% lead witha trace of silver. This is the best kind for bullet swag-ing. Harder alloys containing tin or antimony are of-ten used for casting, and may also be swaged usingsufficiently large dies to hold the extra pressure. Add-ing 3% antimony to lead can double the required swag-ing pressure, far exceeding the limits of the die wallsin large calibers used in smaller presses where the diediameter is under 1.5-inches. Any lead alloy can beswaged, however, if the equipment is specially de-signed for the job.

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ALLECO INCORPORATED17100 FRANCISMELVINDALE MI 48122

ALPHA METALS, INC.600 ROUTE 440JERSEY CITY NJ 07304

AMES METAL PRODUCTS CO.4323 SOUTH WESTERN BOULEVARDCHICAGO IL 60609

ASARCO INCORPORATED180 MAIDEN LANENEW YORK NY 10038

BRITANNIA REFINED METALS LT.BOTANY ROADGRAVESEND KENT DA11 9BG ENGLAND

CANADA METAL COMPANY, LTD.721 EASTERN AVENUETORONTO ONT M4M 1E6 CANADA

CARTERCHEM CANADA INC.1295 AVENUE DE LORIMIERMONTREAL QB H2K 3V9 CANADA

CHATHAM METALS, INC.P.O. BOX 534, 101 CHURCH ST.MATAWAN NJ 07747-0534

CROWN NOVELTY WORKS CORP.86-15 LIBERTY AVENUEOZONE PARK NY 11417

DELCO REMY2401 COLUMBUS AVENUEANDERSON IN 46018

DIVISION LEAD LTD. PARTNERSHIP7742 WEST 61ST PLACESUMMIT IL 60501 UAS

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DRESSER INDUSTRIES,INC.P.O. BOX 6504HOUSTON TX 77265-6504

EAGLE-PICHER INDUSTRIES, INC.P.O. BOX 550JOPLIN MO 64802

EAST PENN MANUFACTURING CO,INCDEKA ROADLYON STATION PA 19536

ETHYL CORPORATION330 SOUTH FOUTH ST.RICHMOND VI 23271

FEDERAL-MOGUL CORPORATIONP.O. BOX 1966DETROIT MI 48235

FEDERATED-FRY METALS4100 SIXTH AVENUEALTOONA PA 16602

GARDINER METAL COMPANY4820 SOUTH CAMPBELL AVENUECHICAGO IL 60632

HAMMOND LEAD PRODUCTS, INC.P.O. BOX 6408HAMMOND IN 46325

HOCHSCHILD PARTINERS250 PARK AVENUENEW YORK NY 10177

HORNADY MANUFACTURING CO.P.O. BOX 1848GRAND ISLAND NE 68802

INDIUM CORPORATION OF AMERICAP.O. BOX 269UTICA NY 13503

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AARVAL LEAD PRODUCTSINTERCHANGE TOWER, SUITE 875600 SOUTH HIGHWAY 169MINNEAPOLIS MN 55426

JOHNSON CONTROLS, INC.5757 NORTH GREEN BAY AVENUEMILWAUKEE WI 53201

K W BATTERY COMPANY3555 HOWARD ST.SKOKIE IL 60076

KENNETH LYNCH & SONSP.O. BOX 488WILTON CT 06897-0488

KESTER SOLDER COMPANY515 EAST TOUHY AVENUEDES PLAINES IL 60018-2675

LONE STAR LEAD CONSTRUCTION COP.O. BOX 24038HOUSTON TX 77229

M.C. CANFIELD SONSBOX 3100UNION NJ 07083

MASTER METALS, INC.2850 WEST THIRD STREETCLEVELAND OH 44113

MAYFIELD MANUFACTURING CO.P.O. BOX 19397BIRMINGHAM AL 35219

METALLIC RESOURCES, INC.P.O. BOX 177TWINSBURG OH 44087

NEW ENGLAND LEAD BURNING CO.P.O. BOX 607WOBURN MA 01801

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NORANDA SALES CORPORATION, LTDONE ADELAIDE ST, EAST STE 2700TORONTO ONT M5C 2Z6 CANADA

O & C CORPORATIONP.O. BOX 681380INDIANAPOLIS IN 46268

O.G. KELLEY & COMPANYBOX 660JOHNSON CITY TN 37601

PASMINCO METALSGPO BOX 1291KMELBOURNE VIC 3001 AUSTRALIA

PENOLES METALS & CHEMICALS INC80 BROAD ST.NEW YORK NY 10004-2203

QUENELL ENTERPRISES, INC.5909 EAST RANDOLPH ST.CITY OF COMMERCE CA 90040

REPUBLIC LEAD BURNING & EQUPT.P.O. BOX 05070CLEVELAND OH 44105

RSR CORPORATION1111 WEST MOCKINGBIRD LANEDALLAS TX 75247

SPORTING ARMS & AMMUNITION MFG555 DANBURY ROADWILTON CT 06897

STAINED GLASS ASSN OF AMERICASIX S.W. SECOND STREET, #7LEE’S SUMMIT MS 64063

SYNTHETIC PRODUCTS CO., INC.20600 CHAGRIN BLVD. SUITE 801SHAKER HEIGHTS OH 44122

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THE DOE RUN COMPANY11885 LACKLAND ROADST. LOUIS MO 63146

THE G.A. AVRIL COMPANYP.O. BOX 12050CINCINNATI OH 45212

TROJAN BATTERY COMPANY12380 CLARK STREETSANTA FE SPRINGS CA 90670

VULCAN LEAD PRODUCTS1400 WEST PIERCE STREETMILWAUKEE WI 53204

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Copper FactsCopper is mined in many parts of the world, with

the largest suppliers being Chile, the United States,the former USSR, Peru, Poland, Zaire and Zambia.There are more than 160 minerals known to containcopper. In the late 1990's, the annual world produc-tion was about 8 million metric tons.

Copper is used in electrical and plumbing applica-tions, where its high resistance to corrosion and ex-cellent electrical and thermal conductivity make it use-ful for wiring, pipes, condensers, radiators, and elec-trical components. The chemical uses include fungi-cides, textile dyes, timber preservatives, and as a cata-lyst in producing formaldehyde from methanol.

One of the largest open-pit mines in the world, theBerkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, was closed in 1982.However, an upturn in the economy starting in 1984caused a partial reversal of the trend: by 1988, cop-per consumption in the U.S.A. had reached its highestpoint in a decade. Nearly 50% of the copper is re-claimed (recycled).

"Pure" copper generally has less than 1% of otherelements, but even trace amounts can change the char-acteristics. Tough pitch ETP copper has a smallamount of oxygen, which makes it slightly tougher butcan cause it to become brittle when heated. De-oxi-dized copper, or silver-bearing copper, both withstandhigher temperatures without becoming brittle. Cop-per has a tensile strength of about 32,000 psi, nearly32 times greater than lead. The addition of smallamounts of zinc, to produce a brass alloy, can increasethe tensile strength to as much as 130,000 psi. Cop-per is made harder by mechanical work hardening(drawing, etc.).

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Sources of Copper AlloysCopper and its alloys are identified in North

America by the Unified Numbering System (UNS), afive-digit number prefixed by the letter C, and man-aged by the American Society for Testing and Materi-als (ASTM) and the Society of Automotive Engineers(SAE). There are two broad classes of copper alloys:wrought (meaning, mechanically formed by drawingor rolling, as with tubing and sheets), and cast (as withpipes and ingots).

The UNS numbers from C10000 to C79999 arewrought alloys, while numbers from C80000 to C99999are cast. Wrought products are those formed by me-chanical methods such as rolling or drawing, such astubing and sheet metal. These are the alloys used bybullet makers.

Copper No. C11000 (formerly CDA-110) or C10800(MIL-B-20292) is a good starting point for tubing tobe used for bullet jackets, although virtually any ofthe drawn tubing or rolled sheet products includinggilding metal (C21000) or commercial bronze(C22000) are routinely used for jacket-making.

Straight, half-hard lengths of copper tubing aremore easily cut to small pieces in a lathe, but annealed(soft) coiled copper tube can be used provided thatthe coils are large enough so the tubing isn't perma-nently kinked. Sheet copper should be the "non-earing" grade (an even, annealed temper with uniformgrain) to reduce waste in deep draws.

Tubing is generally purchased direct from drawingmills and specialty tubing suppliers, generally in 200to 500 pound lots, in 12 to 20 foot lengths, with wallsof 0.025 to 0.125-inch thickness. Sheet strip is gener-ally furnished in pancake coils, from 0.5-inch to 1.5-inch in width and from 0.030 to 0.080-inch thickness,100 pounds per coil, in 500 pound shipments.

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The Copper Development Association (CDA) is theprincipal trade association for the copper industry inthe USA. A Standards Handbook can be purchasedfrom the CDA at a nominal cost. Their address is:Copper Development Association, Inc., 2 GreenwichOffice Park, PO Box 1840, Greenwich, CT 06836,phone (203)-625-8210, fax number (203)-625-0174.

Chemical Symbol: CuDensity: .321 lbs/cu.-in.

(8.96 gm/cc)Melting Point: 1083.4° C.Boiling Point: 2567° C.Atomic Number: 29Atomic Weight: 63.546

A.J. OSTER COMPANY50 SIMS AVENUEPROVIDENCE RI 02909

ACCURATE FORGING CORPORATION201 PINE STREETBRISTOL CT 06010

ADMIRAL METALS SERVICENTER CO.P.O. BOX 349TAUNTON MA 02780

ALASKAN COPPER WORKSP.O. BOX 3546SEATTLE WA 98124

AMPCO METAL INCORPORATEDP.O. BOX 2004MILWAUKEE WI 53215

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ANCHOR-HARVEY COMPONENTS INC.600 LAMM ROADFREEPORT IL 61032

ANSONIA COPPER & BRASS, INC.P.O. BOX 109ANSONIA CT 06401

BRUSH WELLMAN INC.17876 ST. CLAIR AVENUECLEVELAND OH 44110

CAMDEN WIRE COMPANY, INC.12 MASONIC AVE.CAMDEN NY 13316

CERRO COPPER PRODUCTS CO.P.O. BOX 66800ST. LOUIS MO 63166

CERRO METAL PRODUCTS CO.P.O. BOX 388BELLEFONTE PA 16823

CHICAGO EXTRUDED METALS CO.1601 SOUTH 54TH AVENUECICERO IL 60650

COULTER STEEL & FORGE CO.P.O. BOX 8008EMERYVILLE CA 94662

CRITERION METALS INC.44 QUAKER LANEWARWICK RI 02886

EAGLE BRASS CO.R.D. #1, BOX 1377LEESPORT PA 19533-9605

ELKHART PRODUCTS CORPORATIONP.O. BOX 1008ELKHART IN 46515

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EXTRUDED METALS302 ASHFIELD STREETBELDING MI 48809

HALSTEAD METAL PRODUCTS300 N. GREENE ST., SUITE 400GREENSBORO NC 27401

HAMILTON PRECISION METALSP.O. BOX 3014LANCASTER PA 17604

HANDY & HARMONP.O. BOX 610FAIRFIELD CT 06430

HEYCO METALS INC.P.O. BOX 620READING PA 19605

HOWELL METAL COMPANYP.O. BOX 218NEW MARKET VA 22844

HUDSON INTERNATIONAL CONDUCTOR62 WATER STREETOSSINING NY 10562

HUSSEY COPPER, LTD100 WASHINGTON STREETLEETSDALE PA 15056

INCO ALLOYS INTERNATIONAL, INCP.O. BOX 1958HUNTINGTON WV 25720

KEARNY SMELTING & REFINING CO.936 HARRISON AVENUEKEARNY NJ 07029

LITTLE FALLS ALLOYS, INC.171-191 CALDWELL AVENUEPATERSON NJ 07501

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LUCAS-MILHAUPT, INC.5656 S. PENNSYLVANIA AVENUECUDAHY WI 53110

MCINNES STEEL COMPANY441 EAST MAIN STREETCORRY PA 16407-0901

MODINE HEAT TRANSFER INC.415 EAST PRAIRIE RONDEDOWAGIAC MI 49047

MUELLER BRASS COMPANY1925 LAPEER AVENUEPORT HURON MI 48060

NATIONAL COPPER & SMELTING CO.3333 STANWOOD BLVD.HUNTSVILLE AL 35811

NEW HAVEN COPPER COMPANYP.O. BOX 455SEYMOUR CT 06483

NGK METALS CORPORATIONP.O. BOX 13367READING PA 19612-3367

NIBCO INC.P.O. BOX 1167ELKHART IN 46515

NORTHERN WIRE & STRIP MILLS3333 SOUTH CENTRAL AVENUECHICAGO IL 60650

OLIN BRASS427 NORTH SHAMROCK STREETEAST ALTON IL 62024-1174

OUTOKUMPU AMERICAN BRASS CO.P.O. BOX 981BUFFALO NY 14240

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OWL WIRE & CABLE, INC.ROUTE 5, SENECA TURNPIKECANASTOTA NY 13032

PHELPS DODGE BAYWAY OPERATIONSP.O. BOX 648ELIZABETH NJ 07207

PLUME AND ATWOOD235 EAST MAIN STREETTHOMASTON CT 06787

PRECISION TUBE COMPANY, INC.WISSAHICKON AVE. & CHURCH ST.NORTH WALES PA 19454

RATHBONE PRECISION METALS, INC241 PARK STREETPALMER MA 01069

READING TUBE CORPORATIONP.O. BOX 14026READING PA 19612-4026

REVERE COPPER PRODUCTS, INC.P.O. BOX 300ROME NY 13440

SCM METAL PRODUCTS11000 CEDAR AVENUECLEVELAND OH 44106

SCOTT BRASS, INC.1637 ELMWOOD AVENUECRANSTON RI 02910

SEYMOUR SPECIALTY WIRE CO.15 FRANKLIN STREETSEYMOUR CT 06483

SMALL TUBE PRODUCTS, INC.P.O. BOX 1674ALTOONA PA 16603

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SOMERS THIN STRIPP.O. BOX 270WATERBURY CT 06720

TALCO METALS CO.5201 UNRUH AVENUEPHILADELPHIA PA 19135

THE DRAWN METAL TUBE CO.P.O. BOX 370THOMASTON CT 06787

THE ELECTRICAL MATERIALS CO.P.O. BOX 390NORTH EAST PA 16428

THE LINDERME TUBE COMPANY1500 EAST 219TH STREETCLEVELAND OH 44117

THE MILLER COMPANY99 CENTER STREETMERIDEN CT 06450

THE NIPPERT COMPANY801 PITTSBURGH DRIVEDELAWARE OH 43015

THE WILKINSON COMPANYP.O. BOX 4558THOUSANDS OAKS CA 91359

TROJAN TUBE CO., INC.P.O. BOX 496FARMINGDALE NJ 07727

ULLRICH COPPER INC.2 MARK ROADKENILWORTH NJ 07033

UNIFORM TUBE INC.200 WEST SEVENTH AVENUECOLLEGEVILLE PA 19426

90

VALLEYCAST INC.P.O. BOX 1714APPLETON WI 54913

WALTEC AMERICAN FORGINGS INC.P.O. BOX 35WATERBURY CT 06725-0035

WATERBURY ROLLING MILLS, INC.P.O. BOX 550WATERBURY CT 06720

WELDALOY PRODUCTS COMPANY11551 STEPHENS DRIVEWARREN MI 48089

WOLVERINE TUBE (CANADA), INC.P.O. BOX 420MONTREAL QB H1BSK4 CANADA

YOUNGSTOWN WELDING & ENG. CO.P.O. BOX 2461YOUNGSTOWN OH 44509-0461

91

Custom Bullet Makers by Firm Name

AAA AMMUNITION14717 INDUSTRIAL RDOMAHA, NE 68144 USAContact: PAUL HARLOWPhone: (402)334-3389 Fax: (402)334-0777Bullet diameters: 224 243 308 511

ACADIAN BALLISTIC SPECIALTIESP O BOX 61COVINGTON, LA 70434 USAContact: B.J. DANTINBullet diameters: 452 454 455

ACCURACY UNLIMITED11805 COCHISE CIRCLECONIFER, CO 80921 USAContact: BOB ANDERECKPhone: (303)838-5218E-mail: ACCURACYULTD@EARTHLINK.NETLead wire offeredBullet diameters: 451 452 458 500 505 540 577

A.J. BROWN ARMS709 NORTH WASHINGTON STREETBLOOMFIELD, IN 47424 USAContact: A.J. BROWNPhone: (812)384-1056 Fax: (812)384-4100E-mail: AJ-BROWN@VIADUCT.CUSTOM.NETLead wire offeredBullet diameters: 224 452

ALASKA BULLET WORKS, INC.9978 CRAZY HORSE DRIVEJUNEAU, AK 99801 USAContact: MIKE MURRAYPhone: (907)789-3834 Fax: (907)789-3433Bullet diameters: 277 284 308 338 358 375 416458

92

ALPHA MANUFACTURINGPO BOX 81072LINCOLN, NE 68501 USAContact: JERRY J. FRANCKPhone: (402)466-3193 Fax: (402)466-3193 Bullet diameters: 458 430 452 416 357

ARMFIELD CUSTOM BULLETS4775 CAROLINE DRSAN DIEGO, CA 92115 USAContact: JIM ARMFIELDPhone: (619)582-7188 Fax: (619)287-3238Bullet diameters: 224 243 257 264 277 284 308

338

A-SQUARE COMPANYONE INDUSTRIAL PARKBEDFORD, KY 40006 USAContact: ARTHUR B. ALPHINPhone: (502)255-3021Fax: (502)255-9149E-mail: AALPHIN@A-SQUARECOMPANY.COMWebsite: WWW.A-SQUARECOMPANY.COMBullet diameters: 338 358 375 412 458

BAYFIELD BULLET COMPANYPO BOX 1185BAYFIELD, WI 54814 USAContact: BILL CORNELIUSPhone: (715)779-7019E-mail: BAYFIELDBILL@YAHOO.COMWebsite: WWW.CUSTOMBULLET.COMBullet diameters: 416 411 377 375 348

BALLARD BUILTP.O. BOX 1443KINGSVILLE, TX 78364-1443 USAContact: DENNIS BALLARDPhone: (512)592-3608Bullet diameters: 430 451 475 510

93

BARNES BULLETSPO BOX 215AMERICAN FORK, UT 84003 USAContact: RANDY BROOKSPhone: (800)574-9200Website: WWW.BARNESBULLETS.COME-mail: CONIBROOKS@HOTMAIL.COMBullet diameters: 224 243 257 264 277 284 308 323

338 348 358 366 375 406 411 416423 429 430 435 451 458 468 474483 488 500 505 510 575 585 620

BAYOU BALLISTICSPO BOX 773NICEVILLE, FL 32588-0773 USAContact: DAVE BURKHALTERPhone: (850)678-0812 Fax: (850)678-2811E-mail: BURKHALT@AOL.COMBullet diameters: 224 308 355 357 400 429 452

BAYFIELD BULLET COMPANYPO BOX 1185BAYFIELD, WI 54814 USAContact: BILL CORNELIUSPhone: (715)779-7019E-mail: BAYFIELDBILL@YAHOO.COMWebsite: WWW.CUSTOMBULLET.COMBullet diameters: 416 411 377 375 348

BERGER BULLETS, INC.4275 N. PALM STREETFULLERTON, CA 92835 USAContact: WALT BERGERPhone: (714)447-5449Fax: (714)447-5407E-mail: BERGERLTD@AOL.COMWebsite: WWW.BERGERBULLETS.COMBullet diameters: 172 224 243 257 264 284 308

BG ROYAL BULLETS3499 E. Bayshore Rd. #133Redwood City, CA 94063 USAContact: BRUCE OR SALLY GROUTPhone: (650)368-5289E-mail: BGROYAL1@AOL.COMBullet diameters: 257 270 284 308 338

94

BIG BORE BULLETSPO BOX 872785WASILLA, AK 99687 USAContact: DOUG VAN WINGERDENPhone: (907)373-2673 Fax: (907)373-2673Bullet diameters: 224 308 338 355 357 375 429

452 458 500

BISON BULLETS1727 HWY 32BOLIVAR, MO 65613 USAContact: WILLIAM CASSETTPhone: (417)326-8176Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 308 312 4085

BLACK HILLS AMMUNITIONPO BOX 3090RAPID CITY, SD 57709-3090 USAContact: JEFF HOFFMANPhone: (605)348-5150 Fax: (605)348-9827Website: WWW.BLACK-HILLS.COMBullet diameters: 224 243 264 277 284 308 312 355

357 400 429 452 455 458

BLUE MOUNTAIN BULLETSHCR 77 BOX 231JOHN DAY, OR 97845 USAContact: JACK DEROSIER Phone: (541)820-4594Bullet diameters: 243 257 277 284 308 323 338

358 375 429

BOUNDARY BULLETSHCR 60 BOX 271BONNERS FERRY, ID 83805-9518 USAContact: WM LEFEBVREPhone: (208)267-7378Bullet diameters: 243 284 429

95

BUCK-STIX— SOS PRODUCTSPO BOX 3NENAH, WI 54957-0003 USAContact: HELMUT SAKSCHEKPhone: (414)729-9609E-mail: BUCKSTIX@AOL.COMLead wire offeredBullet diameters: 145 269 308 410 441 457

BUCKHORN BULLETS406 W. BROADWAY STREETGAINESVILLE, TX 76240 USAContact: BUCK STIENKEPhone: (940)665-2289Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 308 338 416 458 429 452 510

512BUCKSKIN BULLET CO.

PO BOX 1893CEDAR CITY, UT 84721 USAContact: J. LOWE BARTONPhone: (801)586-3286Bullet diameters: 45 50 54 58

BULL-X, INC.520 N. MAINFARMER CITY, IL 61842 USAContact: ANGELIQUE DOLBERTPhone: (800)248-3845Fax: (309)928-2130E-mail: BULL-X@BULL-X.COMWebsite: BULL-X.COM Bullet diameters: 313 356 357 358 401

411 427 430 452 458

CERTECH INTERNATIONAL11514-15TH AVE N E,STE.531SEATTLE, WA 98115 USAContact: MICHAEL CRAIG Phone: (206)527-8532Fax: (206)524-8289E-mail: MCRA16@CYBERSPACE.COMBullet diameters: 204

96

COLORADO BONDED BULLETS7910 BLUE GILLFALCON, CO 80831 USAContact: C.H. PERDUEPhone: (719)683-3575Fax: (719)683-3575E-mail: COBONDED@AOL.COMWebsite: WWW.MEMBERS.AOL.COM/COBONDEDBullet diameters: 264 284 308 358

CUSTOM BULLET SHOP DEGOLSLANGBEEKWEG 43ZONHOVEN, 3-3520 BELGIUMContact: WIM DEGOLPhone: (321)122-9510Fax: (321)122-9510Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 510 458 440 435 423 416

411 408 375 366

D K T INC.14623 VERA DRIVEUNION, MI 49130 USAContact: CHUCK RICHARDSONPhone: (616)641-7120Fax: (616)641-2015E-mail: dktinc@aol.ocmJackets offeredBullet diameters: 228 287 300 318 329 351 406

411 585 620

ELD ENTERPRISES2811 N MESA DR #35PRESCOTT VALLEY, AZ 86314 USAContact: ERIC DENNISPhone: (520)772-4085Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 223 224 308 356 429 452 675

710

97

ELKHORN BULLETSPO BOX 5293CENTRAL POINT, OR 97502 USAContact: RALPH MCKECHNIEPhone: (541)826-7440Lead wire and Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 284 308 338 348 358 375 412

416 458

E V D ROHM37 BULAWAYO, KENRIDGE HEIGHTSDURBANVILLE, 7550 REP. SOUTH AFRICAContact: E V D ROHM Bullet diameters: 243 251

G & C BULLET CO8835 THORNTON RDSTOCKTON, CA 95209 USAContact: SAM GARCIAPhone: (209)477-6479Fax: (209)477-2813Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 311 356 357 358 401 429

452 457 575

G.T.B.482 COMERWOOD CTSOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94080 USAContact: ROBERT CAUTERUCIOPhone: (415)583-1550 Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 224 264 284 308

HARRIS ENTERPRISESPO BOX 105BLY, OR 97622 USAContact: STERLING HARRISPhone: (503)353-2625Bullet diameters: 224 264 348

98

HEIDENSTROM HYLNER OG KULERURDNGT 7 3927 HEROYAPORNGRUNN,NORWAYContact: OLAV-REIDUN HEIDENSTROMPhone: (003)551-3356Fax: (003)551-3356Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 311 313 308 358 264 314 500

HIGH SCORE BULLET COPO BOX 80271INDIANAPOLIS, IN 46280-0271 USAContact: MARK NOTTERPhone: (317)783-4838Fax: (317)783-4838E-mail: HIGHSCOR@AOL.COMWeb Site: High Score Bullet CoBullet diameters: 224 243 308 355 356 357

400 429 452

J & M CUSTOM BULLETS13021 GOPHER WOOD TRAILTALAHASSEE, FL 32312 USAContact: MICHAEL Q MCINNIS Phone: (904)668-2751Bullet diameters: 358 429

J. PHILLIPPI CUSTOM BULLETSPO BOX 773LIGONIER, PA 15658-0773 USAContact: JUSTIN PHILLIPPIPhone: (412)238-9671Fax: (412)238-2962E-mail: JRPHIL@JUNO.COMBullet diameters: 224 358 430

99

JERICHO TOOLBOX 70—RD 3, RTE 7BAINBRIDGE, NY 13733 USAContact: BOB WILLIAMSPhone: (607)563-8222Fax: (207)563-8560Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 429

JEWELL’S CUSTOM FIREARMSPO BOX 733, 211 WEST 2ND AVE.RIDDLE, OR 97469-0733 USAContact: JERRY JEWELLPhone: (541)874-2926Fax: (541)874-2526E-mail: JEWELL@PIONEER-NET.COMBullet diameters: 224 308 375 458 510

KASWER CUSTOM, INC.13 SURREY DRIVEBROOKFIELD, CT 06804 USAContact: BILL KASWERPhone: (203)775-0564Fax: (203)775-6872E-mail: KASWER.CUSTOM@SNET.NETBullet diameters: 243 308 355 357 400

410 430 451 458 730

KEITH LUCKHURST ASSOCIATES26 YORK ROAD, GREENDALEHARARE, ZIMBABWEContact: KEITH LUCKHURSTPhone: (263)449-5365Fax: (263)449-5365Bullet diameters: 308 366 375 284

KITZMILLER’S KUSTOM BULLETS360 2ND AVEGALION, OH 44833-2810 USAContact: MERRLIN KITZMILLERPhone: (419)468-5219Fax: (419)468-5219E-mail: KITZY@MAIL.BRIGHT.NETBullet diameters: 172 224 243 287 308

100

KLA ENTERPRISES, INC.PO BOX 2028EATON PARK, FL 33840 USAContact: STEVE LEGGPhone: (941)682-2829Fax: (941)682-2829Bullet diameters: 355 357 429 452

KONA RELOADSPO BOX 1178KEALAKEKUA, HI 96750 USAContact: BRIAN NAKASHIMAPhone: (808)323-2757Bullet diameters: 224

LIGHTNING PERFORMANCE INNOV.RD 1 BOX 555MOHAWK, NY 13407-1509 USAContact: MATTHEW PIELECHAPhone: (315)866-8819Fax: (800)242-5873Lead wire and Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 338

MAD DOG MUNITIONS2455 BENNETT VLY.RD-STE C-218SANTA ROSA, CA 95404 USAContact: JOHN MADERIOUSPhone: (707)526-5200Fax: (707)526-9674Bullet diameters: 577

MECO CUSTOM FIREARMS1922 BROADWATER AVEBILLINGS, MT 59102 USAContact: PAT ELLINGHOUSEPhone: (406)652-6002Fax: (406)652-6002E-mail: MECO@WTP.NETWebsite: WWW.LWTP.NET/MECO Lead wire and Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 224

101

MOLOC BULLETSPO BOX 2810TURLOCK, CA 95380-2810 USAContact: RICHARD NELSONPhone: (209)632-1644Bullet diameters: 224 268 308 312

MONTANA PRECISION SWAGINGPO BOX 4746BUTTE, MT 59702-4746 USAContact: RUSSELL M. DUGDALEPhone: (406)782-7502Fax: (406)782-7502Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 365 395 399 431 439 440

450 505 577 412

NAHAS AMMUNITIONRD 1 BOX 150BELL VERNON, PA 15012 USAContact: TONY NAHASPhone: (412)379-7942Lead wire and Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 224 243 277 284 308 357 429

452

O. AMERICAN BONDED BULLET CO.672 WORTHAM CIRCLEMUNDELEIN, IL 60060 USAContact: JOHN BOICHPhone: (847)949-9569Fax: (847)949-9570Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 284 308 338 375 458

NORDIK PREMIER BULLET MFG.ABBOX 133AMMARNAS, 92075 SWEDENContact: OLLE NILSSONPhone: (460)952-60370Fax: (460)952-60370E-mail: OLLE_NILSSON@FC.TELESTUGAN.SEBullet diameters: 264 308

102

NORTHWEST CUSTOM PROJECTILEPO BOX 1141MOORHEAD, MN 56561 USAContact: ROBERTPhone: (701)361-3783E-mail: Baydog@cableONE.netWebsite: www.cableONE.net/BaydogBullet diameters: 224 308 284 452 12ga

NORTHWEST PRECISION2700 SELTICE, STE 2-200POST FALLS, ID 83854 USAContact: BOB BURLEIGHPhone: (208)777-2037Bullet diameters: 224 308 311 355 357 452

PABLO FIERRO-CANSECOCALLE BANOS 45-70ALBACETE, 02005 SPAINContact: PABLO FIERRO-CANSECOPhone: (346)750-3988E-mail: NAVARRON@CTV.ESJackets offeredBullet diameters: 313 355 400 429 451

PB CUSTOM AMMUNITION44631 NORTH HWY 60MORRISTOWN, AZ 85342USAContact: WARREN S. PHILLIPSPhone: (520)684-0402Bullet diameters: 312 357 429 223 355 410 451

PRECISION RIFLE MUZZLE BULLETSBOX 12 GRO 71 RR 1ANOLA, MB R0E 0A0 CANADAContact: CECIL EPPPhone: (204)949-7949Fax: (204)866-2269E-mail: PRBULLET@MB.SYMPATICO.CAWebsite: WWW.MTS.NET/~PRBULLETLead wire offeredBullet diameters: 429 502 540

103

R&R GUNWORKS7703 INGALLS DRIVEWHITE CITY, OR 97503 USA

Contact: RICK DENN JRPhone: (541)826-3627E-mail: RRGUNWORKSSALES@CHARTER.NETWebsite: WWW.RRGUNWORKS.COMBullet diameters: 224 243

RAPTOR ARMS2OO3 BRIARSTEM DRHOUSTON, TX 77072 USAContact: MICHAEL COLLINSPhone: (281)558-4514Fax: (281)558-1928Lead wire offeredBullet diameters: 284 308 312 338 358 429 451

458

RAZORBACK BULLET WORKS136 WILD ROSE LANEROCK SPRINGS, WY 82901 USAContact: BILL CROYPhone: (307)382-6899E-mail: ABCVENTURES@WYOMING.COMBullet diameters: 224 257 338 375

REARDON BULLETS12520 115TH AVENUECHIPPEWA FALLS, WI 54729 USAContact: F.C. REARDONPhone: (715)288-6439Bullet diameters: 406 411

RHINO BULLETSPO BOX 787LOCUST, NC 28097 USAContact: TIM CLARKPhone: (704)753-1906Fax: (704)753-2198Lead wire and Jackets offered Bullet diameters: 358 375 416 430 452

104

RICOCHET SPORTS15 BLUFF AVETIVERTON, RI 02878 USAContact: DAVID REGANPhone: (401)624-6847Bullet diameters: 575

ROLL YOUR OWN AMMO7525 E. MAIN STREETFARMINGTON, NM 87402USAContact: LEE TURNER Phone: (505)326-6401Fax: (505)326-6401Lead wire and Jackets offered Bullet diameters: 510 500 452 429 401 357

355 308 284

SABERTOOTH INDUSTRIESPO BOX 772SANTA CLARA, CA 95052 USAContact: PETER GISE Phone: (415)515-4546Bullet diameters: 355 45

SCORPION BULLET CO.36 GLENN STDOUGLAS, MA 01516 USAContact: TONY TOLOCZKOPhone: (508)476-7009Lead wire and Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 451 452

SHELL RELOADING1485 SOUTH LAWSONAPACHE JUNCTION, AZ 85220 USAContact: BOB SHELLPhone: (602)983-7078E-mail: REL4350@AOL.COMBullet diameters: 308 356 357 358 400 410

430 452

105

SPRING PRAIRIE BULLET COW 1384 POTTER RDBURLINGTON, WI 53105 USAContact: RANDY AMANNPhone: (414)767-0549Lead wire and Jackets offeredBullet diameters: 510

STARKE BULLET COBOX 400 605 6TH ST. N.W.COOPERSTOWN, ND 58425 USAContact: CLINTON STARKEPhone: (888)797-3431Fax: (701)797-3433Bullet diameters: 224 243 308

TIMBER BEAST PRODUCTS,INC.W 652 COUNTY HWY DBERLIN, WI 54923 USAContact: WARREN GABRILSKAPhone: (414)987-5052Fax: (414)987-5052E-mail: TBPWAR@AOL.COMBullet diameters: 224 243 308 429 452

TRUE SHOT2101 FAIRLANE RDYREKA, CA 96097 USAContact: TERRY SIMASPhone: (916)842-2312Bullet diameters: 284 355 358

VILLAGE METAL WORKSPO BOX 1358SNOQUALMIE, WA 98065-1358 USAContact: FUZZY FLETCHERBullet diameters: 357 429 451 452

VINCENTS SHOP210 ANTOINETTEFAIRBANKS, AK 99701 USAContact: GEORGE VINCENTPhone: (907)452-4392Bullet diameters: 224 257 308 338 358 375

416 510

106

WILDCAT CUSTOM BULLETWORKSRYNDON 165-16ELKO, NV 89801 USAContact: RICHARD WOMACKPhone: (702)753-8576Bullet diameters: 284 308 338

WILDERNESS TRADINGRT 2 PO BOX 246MARSHFIELD, VT 05658 USAContact: STEVE OR TIMPhone: (802)426-4088Fax: (802)426-4089E-mail: WILDER@PLAINFIELD.BYPASS.COMBullet diameters: 308

WYOMING BONDED BULLETSPO BOX 91SHERIDAN, WY 82801 USAContact: ROBIN BLAKELEYPhone: (307)674-9519Bullet diameters: 284 358 375 308

ZERO INDEX CO.PO BOX 234KERNVILLE, CA 93238 USAContact: LARRY WULSTEINPhone: (760)376-2040Fax: (760)376-1252Bullet diameters: 5000 5002 5004 5006 5008

5010 5013 5016 5020 5025

107