Jim Taylor
Wax Bullets
Sunday, May 30, 2021, 15:56

Back before the CPC (Current Primer Crisis) shooting wax bullets was a fun way to practice, maintain your skill level or improve it and have some fun without going to the range. With just a little thought and preparation shooting can be done indoors during bad weather and in the back yard, in your garage or most anyplace else where it will not upset the little old ladies who run our society.

Powered solely by the primer, wax bullet loads can be fired from rifles or handguns. The cartridges were prepared the same way. Using fired cases from the guns they were to be shot in, the cases were de-primed. Using a drill bit slightly larger than the flash hole, I opened up the flash hole in each case that was to be used for wax bullets. The case heads were marked to indicate they were not to be loaded with any other loads than wax.

The reason for opening up the flash hole was to prevent primer set-back at firing. With a standard size flash hole, sometimes (in revolvers especially) the primer would set back a little bit and either tie up the gun or make it hard to cock and fire the next shot.

Once the flash holes were opened up I used pocket knife and later a Lee Chamfer Tool to remove the crimp and "sharpen" the edges of the cartridge mouth. This helped "cut" the bullet out of a block of paraffin.

When the cases were prepared I took a block of paraffin and shoved a cartridge case into it, filling the case with a wax bullet. Once all the cases had bullets of wax in them, then I primed them. If you prime the cases before shoving them through the paraffin you compressed air inside the cartridge. This kept from getting a full size wax bullet, and often the compressed air would shove the bullet part way back out of the cartridge.

I used these for target practice, quick-draw, practicing point shooting, shooting insects and other targets. They were definitely more fun than dry-firing. I had swinging targets, balloons, little wooden boxes and all sorts of things to shoot.

When I was younger I shot a lot of them from a Model 92 .44-40 levergun. In fact, I experimented with wax bullets powered by fairly heavy loads of Bullseye at one point. I loaded a wax bullet on top of 10 gr. of Bullseye in the .44-40, then fired it into a 1" thick piece of oak plank. I had it set in the fireplace (it was summer and no fire was burning). The wax bullet punched a clean .44 caliber hole through the oak. It was not ragged on the back. There were no marks on the brick of the fireplace. I never discovered any trace of the wax.

I miss the fun of shooting flies, wasps, grasshoppers and crickets with wax bullets. Hopefully one day we can get past the primer shortage, though from past experience I doubt we will ever see the return of the prices we enjoyed just a couple years ago. However I have never put a dollar amount on what has been important to me. You can never spend too much on good guns, ammo, knives, books, boots or hats. As my friend John Taffin says, "Cheap is too expensive."