How to tell you’re taking it too far

If you get to a point where you’re forming your own .223 jacketed bullets from lead wire and spent .22 LR cases, that means you are now officially taking reloading “too far”.  You can still get help.  It’s not too late.

In all seriousness though, this is actually pretty awesome.  It really does take reloading to “the next level” – making even the lowly .22 LR casing something you might want to scoop up at the range.

7 Comments

  1. I remember reading an article in Guns and Ammo years ago about making your own jacketed bullets. But making them out of spent .22 shells is recycling in the extreme. With the price of scrap metal these days, all my .22s go into a coffee can to go to the scrap buyer along with the aluminum cans and other scrap I’ve been collecting.

  2. Bench rest shooters have been doing this for generations. Control of jacket quality is essential to the best accuracy.

  3. I don’t know. If you live in a state where they try to track the ammo you buy, this starts to just look practical. Then you can add in the fact that it’s probably significantly cheaper than buying completed bullets, along with making you even more self-sufficient. If there’s a way to make factory quality gunpowder (or at least really close to that consistency), you’d never have to worry about buying ammo for your AR-15 again.

  4. I looked into swaging my own ammo….but you have to use copper sheeting to jacket the bullets rather than spent .22s for rounds like .45 ACP and .38 Special which I reload the most. That and the cost of the press (that goes double when you start looking at production time) there really was no earthly way I could recoup those costs.

    So I bought another case of 230 gr plated .45s : ]

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