Salvaging Damaged Pellets

Cant be wasting too many pellets in this economy, nice one. 

While you have a bunch of bad ones, id be keen to see if the rumours are true that JSB thin skirts and soft lead will blow out into the rifling - minor skirt damage may be blown out into the rifling to engage well and shoot accurate..

shoot a bunch of damaged ones then good ones and check grouping...

Our local club regularly shoots with pistols indoors at 10, 12 and 15 yards and I've found that the 13.43gr JSB Exacts work best in my guns.  However, they're not currently available from retailers here so I recently imported several tins of 500 from Krale in the Netherlands.

Whilst the packaging was OK, about 90% of the pellets suffered skirt damage to varying degrees whereas some heavier pellets I'd also ordered were undamaged.  My assumption is that the very thin skirts of these lightweight pellets were damaged by movement inside the tins during transit and this may be the reason that no one is retailing them now.

Not to be discouraged, I came up with a plan to make them usable.  My setup is pretty crude, but it works very well so I thought I'd pass it on. 

Originally I was going to machine up a die on my lathe but being the lazy bugger that I am I opted to form one inside a good pellet using JB Weld.  I lightly smeared the inside of the selected pellet with silicon grease, mixed up the JB Weld and holding the pellet in a mini vice with rubber jaws, packed the epoxy in with a short piece of 1/16" welding wire placed in the centre.  When it was set, I remove the pellet and installed the wire into a short piece of dowel.

For the outer former I had also planned to make something on the lathe, but having some Crosman spares lying around I decided to try the breach feed end of a 2240 barrel.  With the barrel held vertically in the vice and a 4mm carbon fibre rod inside it sitting on blocks of wood on the floor to act as an adjustable stop, I was able to rapidly process several pellets with excellent results.  The pointed tip quickly broke off the die, but I realised it wasn't needed so roughly cleaned up the broken face with a file.  Silicon grease was applied to the inner die every 20-30 pellets to minimize wear.

The use of the carbon rod was a lucky choice as it ended up acting as a spring holding the pellets a little high when inserted but flexing and allowing the pellets to seat as pressure was applied to the die.  It also allowed me to easily lift the pellets out when finished.  At around 10 pellets per minute, a full tin took me about an hour to process.

The recovery rate was about 95% with the majority suitable for competition, maybe around 30 not to that standard(which will be used for chrony testing) and 10 or so not worth mucking around with.

Just 3 more tins to go