Shiloh Rifle Forums

Have the first 22 shell my daughter ever fired and wanted to make a necklace pendant for her. Anyone ever try to cast a bullet with silver before? I’m not stuck on 99.9 silver but would like to if possible. Anything jewelry grade would be fine as long as it doesn’t tarnish overly fast or contain nickel. Don’t want to use lead because I want her to be able to wear it.

This can’t be as easy as lead with a higher temp can it? Would zinc wheel weights be a suitable alternative if silver based metals aren’t feasible?

Planning to order one of those 22lr reloading mold/crimp die combos for the project.

Howdy Tom,
About 50 years back when I was in high school I was into crafts and did lost wax casting. That was a little involved having to have a casting machine and acetylene set up. But I think it was the Hawaiians that came up with “Steam Casting” ? Do a Google search on that and see if that might fit the bill? You would make a wax duplicate of your bullet and place it in a plaster mold. For a one shot deal it might work for you?
Cheers,
Larry

I believe that silver has to hit about 1600 to melt

How about using pewter?

Cast it in Cerrosafe. I've got chamber castings I did over a decade ago, and still look bright. And it melts at boiling temp of water, so you can melt it in a double cooker, or a tin can in water.

silver solder? should be able to get that easily from a hardware store

silver solder? should be able to get that easily from a hardware store

Use pewter or lead free solder, it is mostly tin and will have the look of silver.

Silver solder would make a fine bullet. But to make it flow depending which type you get it takes 1200 to 1500 degrees to make it flow.
River solder is a mix of around 50% silver for the lower temp flow rate to around 75% silver of the harder alloy.
Plus it also has cadmium and nickel in it.

Just cut the pewter cap off your Shiloh wood. It stays silver looking for ever.

A "lost wax" casting in tin or pewter would be easiest to make and quite handsome. You could make the wax-bullet in a bullet mould, then add a little tail with a hole in it to string on jewelry.

CHRIS

That’s actually lot of good ideas I didn’t even think about. Glad I asked!

Gonna avoid the cerrosafe. I like where your heads at but if my daughter is like my wife it WILL get left in a hot car at some point and probably melt. Also I’m pretty sure it contains a fair amount of lead.

Kurt, always wondered why the pictures in my book by Mr. Marcot have some of the pewter tips that the ends look chopped off. Not a bad way to make mine look like an original…

Looking like the path I’m gonna head down is contacting a local jeweler to see about helping me out and if that is a non-starter then look into pewter. Was hoping to avoid buying a bunch of tooling and I don’t have any friends who do any kindof casting. I don’t own a metal lathe so milling something that looks like a 22 bullet is out. So right now if a jeweler can take a cast model of whatever material they want and make a silver bullet for me then I’ll do that. If not then it looks like pewter will be the easiest from the skills and tools I have. Your suggestions prompted me to actually look at the melting points of all this stuff because I’m dumb and didn’t do that beforehand.

Are there various grades of pewter (and if so which one shines up super nice like shiloh forend tips?) and does pewter tend to shrink a lot when cast? I know it’s mostly tin but I can’t remember if a high tin content tends to cause or prevent shrinkage. In bullets… or is that only just a property it has when alloyed with lead?

Since I didn’t actually mention the full plan in my first post… My idea is to have a bullet cast of silver and seat it into the empty shell. Then drill a hole in the bottom and put in a loop to turn it into a pendant. Thanks again. Hoping this turns out as cool as I picture in my head. I’m going to practice on a few 22 shells I have rolling around in the bottom of my shooting bag before touching hers. So I might try a couple ideas for getting the cast bullet. Will heating up a case to solder the loop into the hole be too hot and ruin it for my purposes? If so my backup plan is to go with epoxy inside the case before seating the bullet.

Thanks again. This has been very helpful.

Since it’s too late to edit my last post. What I meant to say is drill the hole and crate the loop and THEN seat and crimp the bullet.

For what you want to do you could use Stay Brite solder. It would cast well and it's fairly hard and it looks like silver.
This solder is 94% tin 6% silver. I used a lot of this solder for HVAC as a Plumber.
You can find it at most plumbing supply or ACE Hdw. But it comes at a very high price for a pound roll.

Kurt wrote: ↑Sun Jan 09, 2022 10:20 pm For what you want to do you could use Stay Brite solder. It would cast well and it's fairly hard and it looks like silver.
This solder is 94% tin 6% silver. I used a lot of this solder for HVAC as a Plumber.
You can find it at most plumbing supply or ACE Hdw. But it comes at a very high price for a pound roll.

For casting with that, just do it as the same process I would lead? Carbon the mold, heat the mold, melt the solder and pour? With the small amount I would be melting is flux in the melt something I should worry about? If so what material would you recommend? Flux is still a mystery to me. I use sawdust or candle wax with lead because I pushed the I believe button when I started casting even though I had no idea why. Nothing seems wrong with the bullets I cast doing that so I keep doing it.

Why not just cast a bullet out of tin?