Rusty 3's Comments

Rob J said:
>Now onto the sparking bullets. I have no idea
>where this individual is from but lead bullets
>haven’t been made in quite some time.

Not sure where YER from but most bullets are made from lead and still are. Manufacturers of SHOT for shotguns have gone away from lead for a number of years but lead shot is still quite available. Some states have outlawed lead shot for environmental reasons (being eaten by water fowl, etc) Shot is not considered a bullet.

Many military bullets have steel cores now, I believe,
for deeper penetration and they fly at a higher velocity. Unjacketed lead bullets can have surface melting from friction with the barrel at high velocities and this will affect their flight characteristics -- thus the reason for the copper jacketing, semi- or otherwise.

>Most bullets whether for consumer or military use
>are copper jacketed with or without a ballistic
>tip, this applies only to rifle ammunition.

Uh... I've got a whole mess of 9mm and .45ACP that's fully jacketed with copper. Those are pistol rounds.

Ummm... what material is that copper jacketing or covering? Lead mostly, especially for consumer ammo.
I have a hundred pounds or so of ammo and it's mostly lead, usually jacketed or semi-jacketed with copper.
Sometimes the copper is simply a "wash" over the bullet and it's very thin. I have a number of bricks of name-brand .22LR ammo that have no copper jackets at all.

>Most pistol ammuntion is either full metal jacket
>or semi-jacketed. Either way the bullet itself is
>not entirely lead or very little lead if any.

Full metal jacket is simply a covering. By mass or weight, the bullet will be mostly lead, lead with steel core, or steel. There are other materials used for bullet cores, including nylon(!).

True, the entire bullet is not made of lead, in many cases but if the core is steel or other hard metal, upon contact with a hard surface, that surrounding lead will deform and the core explosed. Now you have steel against steel and that can cause sparks. It will all depend on what type of ammo is being used. In the "macho" gun-toting movies (ones with sparking ricochets), you can believe that military style ammo is used (or at least it's plausible that the movie is "suggesting" that it is used).

A reasonable explanation of bullets can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet
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  • Member Since 2012/08/21


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