Air Guns, Pellets, Molds & More
Air Guns, Pellets, Molds & More
First, let’s talk about firing shotshells through a rifled barrel. People have written books on rifling and the effects of twist rate on speed and accuracy. It is pretty interesting and given enough money and time you could probably spend a year trying out different combinations to figure out what works best for the firearms […]
Next week someone will probably make a bigger pellet, but for the next few days this is the largest pellet in the world for the AEA Zeus 72 caliber. Due to its design, it fits easily in the barrel and this 3 ounce chunk of lead will tear a hole through just about anything.
Click Here to see a video of this beast’s first test fire into ballistic gelatin.
Well, the short answer is…Who Knows?
Here is the slightly longer answer. Anyone familiar with airguns probably spotted the AEA Zeus 72 caliber in my website’s artwork. This is one of the many guns I bought from AEA when I became the Texas/Oklahoma dealer a couple of months ago. So, I dove into making custom ammunition for these and began having work done on the website. Then I met one of my neighbors who lives a few miles away about a month ago and found out that he is a new AEA dealer. I have learned a lot in the last month and hope to learn a great deal about the airgun market for a long time to come. I have learned that it is a rapidly expanding market and that verbal contracts don’t mean much. I’ve learned that there are people in this industry who are making promises they cannot keep. I’ve figured out that a lot of the new products that are coming out from multiple manufacturers seem to be using the buying public as their R&D department and are using them to work out the bugs after the products have made it to market. Things like barrels that seem to loosen up on their own, FPE (Foot Pound Energy) numbers that seem very unrealistic, airguns brought to market with no apparent structure in place to supply any pellets, much less pellets that fit adequately and are designed in such a way to help them meet their FPE promises and stated purpose (Hunting, self-defense, etc.).
There are three of using working at TPP and we have all had a lifelong fascination with air guns. More recently, what got us into the business was the shift to more powerful air guns whether we are talking about the wide variety of powerful 357 caliber and larger air guns or the more obscure ones like the Umarex HDS 68. What we bring to the table are decades of firearms experience and the tried-and-true standards that are used to make antique and modern firearms ammunition.
For instance, our 72 caliber 725 grain and 835-grain pellets are something completely new. Unlike most of the ammo we have seen and tried so far, these are not made from existing 12ga molds or a tired old 100+ year-old 72cal musket mold. These are new custom molds that are meant to have a 1 to 1 fit with the AEA 72. We did this by removing the barrel, plugging it, pouring melted lead in the barrel, and creating a form. We used these measurements to order custom molds in a size that never existed before. Even new molds can have tolerances that can be too great for the ammo we want to produce; so, we also had custom sizing tools made. When we were done, we hand-pressed the bullets through the barrel to make sure we have perfect contact with the lands and grooves of the rifling. Then the fun began with lots of test firing of these new products. This is the process we go through with all the ammo we make.
Do you need custom lead pellets that do not yet exist? Tell us about it. Maybe it’s a new project or you just want better fitting or different weight ammo for air guns that already exist. There will be time, tooling, and molds required to make it happen, but with a large enough initial order, these costs will be covered. Some of the tooling lead times can be as much as eight weeks, but usually, we get it much quicker, and we can be in production the day the tooling arrives. More importantly, you are in total control of the pellets that get produced, such things as, size, weight, lead hardness, powder coating, and even copper jacketing. So, let us know if you have a project you need some help with.