Saturday, February 19, 2011

Silver Bullets, Anyone?

My wife and I started watching "The Wolfman", the 2010 remake of the Lon Chaney classic. Made in 2010, it stars Anthony Hopkins, Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, and Hugo Weaving. She could only watch about 15~20 minutes or so of it, up to when Lawrence goes to the Gypsy camp, and then it got too gory for her, so we turned it off.
But it started me thinking of a project I had considered many years ago when I was learning the basics about reloading from my best buddy Joe.
We joked about making real silver bullets, so me being the 'egghead' of our hot rod, shooting, and general carousing crowd, I started looking into it. When I found out that silver melts at 1760*F, compared to 620*F for lead, we kinda gave it up. I also found out from some jewelery-making girlfriends that silver also shrinks quite a bit when it cools, which would make for a loose-fitting bullet.
Back to the present......
Since we didn't have the Internet back then, I punched "silver bullet" into my favorite search engine, and out popped quite a few hits, along with a recommendation to search for "silver ammunition".
Paydirt! Seems I'm not alone in my curiosity.
The best one I found, by far, are the "Silver Bullet" pages on Patricia Briggs' website. One of the more interesting observations made, is that since it's not exactly easy to cast a a properly sized silver bullet, why not just put silver bits and pieces into a shotshell, and use that? And lo-and-behold, the jewelry people already sell "BB size" silver spheres!
So, whether you want to make up some werewolf killin' shotshells, or go to the trouble of actually casting your own silver bullets, it looks doable.
Now I just have to convince my wife that I need to buy some BB-sized silver pellets.
Maybe I can tell her I decided to start doing some "jewelry making" as a new hobby......

1 comment:

  1. LOL- I was at NRA today, and took a pic of a "vampire" gun... the bullets were silver and carved into little head shapes :-)

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