Silver Bullets

[ilmarinen]

So, this is the most comprehensive discussion I've seen of the topic to date

Comments

[maribou]

Mildly cheesy, yeah, but actually not bad. The covers are about 5X cheesier than the actual books... at least the couple I've read.

[randomdreams]

One obvious question is how much silver do you need, and another is where does it have to be. You could dip the tips of existing copper-jacketed bullets in a concentrated solution of silver nitrate and instantly plate them with silver (as thick as you want, if you're willing to wait a while) or you could do what the homemade armor-piercing crowd do and take an existing slug, prior to loading it, and center-drill it and put in a silver rod or tip. (They put in tungsten carbide slugs.) Either way, the first thing to hit a werewolf would be silver.

So I *am* a bit confused as to why silver would have better performance than copper in regular non-lycanthropic usage. Any suggestions?

[ilmarinen]

Well, I understood silver to actually provide a more lubricating effect in rifle barrels (forget where I saw that). It's slightly denser and softer than copper (so would be closer to unjacketed).

Swaged bullets actually look very doable for a DIY with jackets and everything. Don't know if you could swage the whole silver bullet (although it looks doable) but certainly could swage a partial or full silver jacket onto a swaged or cast lead core.

-B.

[ilmarinen]

As for where one needs the silver. obviously..a the crux of the issue, with no real answer. I'd assume that the actual "wounding edge" of the weapon would need to be silver. if so, a full-silver-jacketed bullet (other than not giving good wounding) would be as effective as a sold silver bullet. However, some interpretations have the mass of silver embedded in the body as significant though. Dunno. Think a full silver-jacketed bullet would get us pretty close though.

So, just dipping copper in silver nitrate will lead to plating? hrm.

-B.

[ilmarinen]

and man am I tired and typoing, bed time.

[gfish]

corvi and I were looking into doing that once. After my experiences doing some silver jewelry casting, I'm not at all surprised it's such a pain.

[randomdreams]

Silver's sluggish under gravity, even with a centrifuge, but does quite well using either pressure or vacuum to motivate it to fill a casting, esp. if the mold's hot.