tiggertate

The reason most swager's move from Copper tubing to preforemed jacket's is becouse of the possibility
of the copper tubing slipping ..Now i know alot of people that sware by copper tubing jacket's .
A very good friend of mine use's copper tubing and the thought of a jacket slipping ( i don't think) every crossed
his mined.
But i have shot ( alot) far more then most will every shoot
in a life time.
From 1964 to 1970 i put a little more then 250.000.00 round's down range. and in that time i have had only a handful of jacket's come off inside the barrel .
It was from alot of diffrent thing's .
One was using pure lead and not pressing it hard enough
in to the tubing. some time's it was from lube that's used
in swaging that get's inbetween the jacket and the lead core
( lanolin ) that cause's the lead to slip out.
sometime's it's not cupping the end over far enough to close the hole enough.
sometime's it's from using wheel weight's ( lead ) .
that's to hard and does not fully compress tightly into the
jacket made from copper tubing.
Some time's it's from sitting down at 1:00 in the afternoon
and not getting back up till 1:00 at night from the swage bench..being over tired and doing sloppy work...

there are a million reason's why.!
quailty control is more then likley tight at HAWK bullet's company and most place's wash there jacket's after forming them into jacket's when doing them from tubing and from flat's to get every thing off them from the process of transfoming them.

When i first started PA Bullet's in 1964 i used old jacket's
i just went out to the range and dug old bullet's out of a bank and melted the lead out and reused the jacket's
I also used Zinc Washer's for my gas check's.

my jacket's would come off once thay cleared the barrel's and hit somthing becouse i never bonded them.
It wasn't till about 1967 that i started bonding the core to the jacket.

About the same time i tried copper tubing
it worked great becouse i was using the bullet's in a hand gun and all the bullet's i made were shot from hand gun's
a few were used in 35 remington's.

In all that time there might have been 10 bullet's that
were made from tubing that lost there jacket's none ever got stuck inside the barrel's ( save one that stuck in the
very end of a old 35 semi auto remington it bulged the end of the barrel .
So i shyed away from using the copper tubing and stayed with old jacket's and zinc washer's

My friend has never said he had any trouble using copper tubing for his bullet's and alot of old swager's and new swage's sware by them.....


Pottsy

I once ordered a box of Hawk .318" 220 grains. However, I measured the bullets: they were in fact .323". I could have blown my my rifle if I had shot it with a load for .318" bullets. I will never touch a Hawk bullet anymore.

Fritz

I would not shoot them. A member fired one and the core blew out of the jacket, the rifle blew up and he was seriously injured.

They have a large hole in the base.

That does seem to be the draw back to those that choose
to use Copper Pluming Tubing over Preformed Copper jacket's from Ribbin-Flat's..

Copper tubing jacket's made from plumbing are a real bugger
to flux and bond the flux has to be a paste and the bonding job is done most time's with the jacket's placed on a metal
flat surfice so the lead won't run out the bottom hole of the jacket..
Trying to squeeze the hole at the base closed is not as easy as it sound's......

I found a way years ago to hold them some what better

i used to thread the copper tubing in side then cut the piece off to lenght .and repet ..
Then getting the hole as close to closed as i could i would drop in side of the jacket a copper pre cut waffer and let is rest at the base to keep the lead from coming out..


To much worry and to much time made me change and go with preformed copper cup's made by Butch at G.E ..

Thank's guys for your imput ...
But like i said there nice looking bullet's

A friend of mine wounded an eland in Zimbabwe with a 250 grain Hawk bullet shot from his .35 Whelen. There was a long tracking job before they were able to finish off the eland. I believe the animal was finally killed with a .375 H&H. On the other hand Gary Sitton, the retired gunwriter, liked their 200 grain bullets in his .300 Winchester Magnum for all the big game he took in British Columbia. The original Barnes Bullets were all, or nearly all, made from hard draw copper tubing, and I can't recall running across any stories of cores being blown out of the jackets, and Barnes made bullets for decades. As for myself I'm starting to make copper tubing jacketed bullets and see how they work. There are not too many sources of jackets for bullet making.