pressing a small cylinder out of copper?

Metal Casting
sweety_atspacecase0 asked:


I want to press a small cylinder out of copper
as in make my own .22LR shell casing.
so, I realize that there is no economical reason to do this.
I have read that it is a series of progressive dies,
but what do they look like ?
how far can you take the metal each pressing ?
I could make one that would have straight walls,
but I can’t figure out how to get the edge on the outside and to make that space hollow on the inside. same thing with most of the large rifle rounds, they are big inside with a small opening in the top, are they cast ?
I have a 10 ton press to play with and I have annealed copper sheets (I know I should use brass and I have a little of that).
I am willing to make the dies, but don’t know what shape.
I looked at everything I could find in google for about 3 hours and could not find an answer.
I got reloading dies to see how they worked and they don’t push the metal around much at all
any ideas anyone ?
thank you for the bullet info it gave me some ideas,
but I was looking for the casing info, the brass part, the part with the primer in the back that holds the powder, not the bullet.

and the cases for the large rifles I could cast,
cases for a .357 I could press because it is straight walled.

rim fire 22 shells have a flared edge on the back where you hit them to set it off.

in the 1800s they had a .32 rimfire and the ammo is no longer made in quantity.

I am curious how to reproduce the .32 rimfire.
the bullet part is no problem as they are easy to cast or swage, the gun powder is easy to buy and harder to make but possible.
the brass casing is what has me perplexed.

Metal Casting Forum

2 Responses to “pressing a small cylinder out of copper?”

  • Most are produced by a process called swagging, which is often misstated as progresive die punching. Below is a site that sells dies and gives a lot of information about the whole process. I didn’t want to cut and paste all of it, not knowing how much you know already.

  • While I don’t think it really answerers your question, you might find the following page interesting; one especially interesting thing is a a few copper cased cartridges are shown.

    While is doesn’t cover rimfire, the book, “Punches Dies and Tools” by Joseph V. Woodworth, published in 1931 by Norman Henley Publishing and reprinted by Lindsay Publications, reprint ISBN 1-55918-282-2 might be useful, Section VII of the book has information on making rifle cartridges, albeit center fire. One problem might be finding a copy, the publisher does not show it on their web site (though one might request a printed catalog) the bookstore I bought my copy from does not show it as existiing, even as an out of stock title, Amazon shows it as out of stock with no estimate of when or if more may arrive. However, Google books has it, thought there are a some scanning problems, look at section VII (pages 185-210)

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.