This was a project I first created for my brother back in early 2019 (before the rug was yanked from beneath all of us). It’s one of those things I thought about for years.
If you consider what a Stephen King fan I am, it’s little surprise creating silver bullets has been a lurking project idea for some time. I’ve reloaded my own ammo over the years yet casting a pure silver bullet always felt a bit beyond my level of craft (and safety). While buying bullets at a local outfitter, however, I stumbled across a brand which had nickel plated cases and solid brass – nickel plated hollow tipped bullets. From there, the process more or less wrote itself.
Back in 1994-95 I was working quite a bit in the jewelry lab at ASU. I became intimately familiar with the material catalogue of Rio Grande jewelry supply. From there, it was pretty simple to use some calipers to determine the interior dimensions of the cavity at the nose of the hollow-tip bullets. Reverse engineer that against gauge tables, and its not hard to find the exact match for pure silver wire to hollow-tip cavity.
With a bit of JB Weld epoxy, I affixed a 99% pure silver (what is known as dead soft silver) plug into the end of my bullets. This in no way compromised the integrity of the factory loaded and tested ammo.
There’s not a ton more to it. Beyond this, I made a simple walnut and oak box for my brother’s birthday.
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