.22 RimFire Ballistic Coefficients

[farmboy]

I do believe you are correct that Speer made those I think it might be fun to make another batch of the wax bullets to run over the chronograph.

[farmboy]

I don't remember who the manufacturer is, but 'somebody' makes reusable plastic bullets and cases for .44 Mag and .357 Mag. I think they would work for .45 LC and .38 SPL, but I don't know that for certain. The cases use only primers. In .44, they will go through a cardboard box at 15 feet. I wouldn't want to get hit by one at close range as I am pretty sure they would break the skin.

Paul

I always thought my wax bullets would make a nasty likely non lethal self defense load.

[jaeger88]

I guess at high speed, wax performs like a liquid, & I was always taught that you cant compress a liquid. Which is why your wax bullets punched through plywood.

However, I'm now more than a little confused, ( nothing new there then ), these following notes are from a website called "Quora".

And I quote !.

"As mentioned above, liquids are difficult  to compress, but they can be compressed. It is different from  compression of a solid though.

In solid, merely pulling the  particles together is compression. Because there generally is a gap in  between particles in solids, it is relatively simple.

But in  liquids, there is no gap between particles, so only way you can compress  is by reducing the gap at molecular level, which is basically changing  the state of that material, which involves a huge energy".

Also:-  ( from a different author ).


"Generally speaking, liquids can be  compressed as almost any other material. It requires however, a great  deal of pressure to achieve very little volume reduction. This is why  liquids and solids are referred to as being in-compressible.

As an  example, the water at the bottom of the ocean is compressed by the  weight of the water on top. British oceanographer J.C. Swallow used  floaters that were made to sink to a predetermined depth (and stay  there) to conduct an experiment (described here: http://aos.princeton.edu/WWWPUBL...). He used water density (compression) in his calculations to achieve this.

That  said, liquids don't compress very much, even under extreme pressure.  Their individual molecules are very close to each other and there isn't  much space there for them to get closer (compression). As the two atoms  are brought closer, the outer electrons in one tend to push away the  outer electrons in the second.
This prevents the molecules from overlapping".

Jay Newman
Physics of the Life Sciences:

I would guess then, that to all intents & purposes, wax bullets perform as if they were a solid. So maybe they wouldn't make a non lethal defense load, but quite a lethal one.

[farmboy]

Perhaps one day I should make a few more and shoot a skunk or something like that. In an old gun digest there was an article about getting ove 2000 fps out of a wheel gun the fellow achieved that with a 41 magnum and bullets made out of balsa wood. I had a few experimental bullets here one time that looked like copper plumbing pipe with a cap on the end. Not sure what ever happened to them likely in a box some where. Sort I got the thread off topic a bunch.lol