.22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

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Klingon00
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.22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Klingon00 »

I'm going to file this one under "Don't do this at home". Still an interesting experiment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOZpy55U-jY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In the video, this guy muzzle loads a .22 air rifle pellet down to the beginning of the rifling above the chamber and loads a powder activated tool cartridge into the chamber behind it.

The end result is VERY interesting. :shock:

Lets just say, the results look more like what I see with some .223 rounds more than .22lr.
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by sodbuster95 »

Huh...not what I was expecting.

Interesting result.
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Stryker74 »

Wow!

Not that I want to try that, but it was cool to watch.


Funny to see this too - we have been watching 'The Wire' from HBO on Amazon Prime recently. There was a whole story arc around a power charged nail gun in that series - and we just watched is recently. I chuckled when I saw this post!
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by TSiWRX »

Whoa! :shock: 8)
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Sevens »

I have put a .22cal airgun pellet in to the barrel of my .223 chambered Super-14 Contender and then launched it with a piece of small rifle primered .223 brass.

It was very much like shooting an air pistol... except you get the primer stink. Not at all like the power and destruction these guys are seeing with the blanks.
I like to swap brass... and I'm looking for .32 H&R Mag, .327 Fed Mag, .380 Auto and 10mm. If you have some and would like to swap for something else, send me a note!
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by BobK »

My takeaway is it would be interesting to see .22lr rounds sold with a 15 gr bullet.
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Sevens »

SAAMI max for .22LR is quite low, some 24k PSI max or somewhere near there, isn't it? Compare that to modern... or better, I should say... popular calibers and it falls short. A good reason for that is the age of the chambering itself, always have to be wary of very OLD guns that are chambered for the same thing. Another good reason is the construction of the brass cartridge case, the rimfire style of priming makes for a folded case head that is inherently less able to resist higher pressures.

So I'm curious about the pressures at work in these blank cartridges...
or maybe I should say, where these are designed to operate. For whatever it is they do when they are discharged, a large part of the equation is whatever is resisting the blast. In the case of their actual design, it's going to be some sort of industrial nail or brad. In the case of these guys and their testing, it's a lead pellet of known weight.

When you take these little blank rounds and you put an obstruction in front of them that is -NOT- what they were designed to do, you are altering the max chamber pressure of their design... which I can't say we even know from the get-go.

In this day and age, gun manufacturers can certainly make chambers and barrels that can handle a .22LR round that were upped from 24k PSI but the question becomes... can the cartridge case withstand it? Can the unlocked breech/blowback design handle it? And how long before someone slips a hot .22LR in to a 100-year old platform of some sort?
BobK wrote:My takeaway is it would be interesting to see .22lr rounds sold with a 15 gr bullet.
This would be easy to attempt at home...
Take two rounds of .22LR. Yank the bullet from one of them. Clip off the tip of it incrementally until you have the slug down to ~15 grains in weight. When you've successfully done that, replicate your clipping on the other loaded round of .22LR.

Now, shoot that round.
I'm guessing it won't perform the destruction we're seeing in the video. And that's because the ~24k PSI we get from a SAAMI standard .22LR round with it's OEM 40-grain bullet is going to drop significantly in max pressure when we lop more than half it's bullet weight right off the tip of the slug.

We know this from convential centerfire handloading. If we take a known full-pressure cartridge and we knock more than HALF the bullet weight off it, we know that we'll need to increase the powder charge to bring the round up to pressure spec. And that's if we can find a bullet that will fit. :lol: Because we don't typically see that wide a range in one bullet diameter. In fact if we did... we would most likely also change powders entirely to address the radically different bullet weight.

I think all of that adds up to the possibility that these nail gun blanks were built & designed specifically to run at a higher pressure than .22LR ammunition, and that's why these pellets are hitting like hammers compared to ammo from the same exact firearms.
I like to swap brass... and I'm looking for .32 H&R Mag, .327 Fed Mag, .380 Auto and 10mm. If you have some and would like to swap for something else, send me a note!
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Mr. Glock »

Isn't the new .17 Winchester rimfire based on a nail gun blank, with some speedy results?
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Sevens »

Hey, I caught a magazine article on that... and now that you bring it up, I believe that is exactly what they said!
I like to swap brass... and I'm looking for .32 H&R Mag, .327 Fed Mag, .380 Auto and 10mm. If you have some and would like to swap for something else, send me a note!
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Chuck »

Sevens wrote:SAAMI max for .22LR is quite low, some 24k PSI max or somewhere near there, isn't it? Compare that to modern... or better, I should say... popular calibers and it falls short. A good reason for that is the age of the chambering itself, always have to be wary of very OLD guns that are chambered for the same thing. Another good reason is the construction of the brass cartridge case, the rimfire style of priming makes for a folded case head that is inherently less able to resist higher pressures.

So I'm curious about the pressures at work in these blank cartridges...
or maybe I should say, where these are designed to operate. For whatever it is they do when they are discharged, a large part of the equation is whatever is resisting the blast. In the case of their actual design, it's going to be some sort of industrial nail or brad. In the case of these guys and their testing, it's a lead pellet of known weight.

When you take these little blank rounds and you put an obstruction in front of them that is -NOT- what they were designed to do, you are altering the max chamber pressure of their design... which I can't say we even know from the get-go.

In this day and age, gun manufacturers can certainly make chambers and barrels that can handle a .22LR round that were upped from 24k PSI but the question becomes... can the cartridge case withstand it? Can the unlocked breech/blowback design handle it? And how long before someone slips a hot .22LR in to a 100-year old platform of some sort?
BobK wrote:My takeaway is it would be interesting to see .22lr rounds sold with a 15 gr bullet.
This would be easy to attempt at home...
Take two rounds of .22LR. Yank the bullet from one of them. Clip off the tip of it incrementally until you have the slug down to ~15 grains in weight. When you've successfully done that, replicate your clipping on the other loaded round of .22LR.

Now, shoot that round.
I'm guessing it won't perform the destruction we're seeing in the video. And that's because the ~24k PSI we get from a SAAMI standard .22LR round with it's OEM 40-grain bullet is going to drop significantly in max pressure when we lop more than half it's bullet weight right off the tip of the slug.

We know this from convential centerfire handloading. If we take a known full-pressure cartridge and we knock more than HALF the bullet weight off it, we know that we'll need to increase the powder charge to bring the round up to pressure spec. And that's if we can find a bullet that will fit. :lol: Because we don't typically see that wide a range in one bullet diameter. In fact if we did... we would most likely also change powders entirely to address the radically different bullet weight.

I think all of that adds up to the possibility that these nail gun blanks were built & designed specifically to run at a higher pressure than .22LR ammunition, and that's why these pellets are hitting like hammers compared to ammo from the same exact firearms.
The way I see it, the nail gun load is designed to drive a piece of steel one to one and a half inches into cured concrete, something no one would expect a .22LR to do, so of course it's going to drive the heck out of those little pellets

Reminds me of a story from back in my Cardinal days.
We had a guy in the maintenance shop take one of those concrete blanks and put it in a piece of 1/8" pipe in the vise and smack it with a screw driver and hammer. A piece of the brass came back and went in the hand holding the screwdriver and crossed two bones.
Can't believe he didn't get fired, had to go to the hospital to get it out,,,,
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Re: .22lr hard to find? What about nail gun blanks?

Post by Atilla »

Hilti shots are .27 cal, not sure what other manufacturers of industrial powder actuated tools are. They are color coded to power (white, green, yellow, red, purple in order of strength IIRC). They are becoming obsolete with faster and safer butane/electric tools which I am sure could be converted to a fun weapon.
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