You learn something new every day.
Hat tip to a reader of the blog, named Robert who first turned me onto this idea of making home made “armor piercing” ammunition.
Then I went looking for instructions and it turns out it’s pretty simple.
How To Make Home-Made Incendiary, “Armor Piercing” Ammo
A reader of this blog left an awesome comment the other day, saying this:
“A little trick for handgun ammo, but don’t know if it would work in rifle ammo. You drill a tiny hole in flat nose ammo, like the FMJ .357 Sig and insert a full length lighter Flint with a drop of crazy glue. I guess a used Flint from a Bic lighter that runs out of fluid would also work too. The Flint when it hits steel will superheat it and be “armor piercing”. I don’t know if there are any laws against it, but if they don’t see it, who cares!”
The truth is that I’ve never heard of this before, so I did a little research and found out that Robert is right.
You can do it!
You’re actually making incendiary ammo when you use this method because the little flint tip ignites. It appears to work similar to armor-piercing ammo.
I’m not sure this is really that useful of a thing to do, if you really needed armor-piercing bullets, so it’s more of a novelty.
Anyways, here’s a youtube video where a guy shows you how he took a rifle bullet with a polymer tip – Hornady A-Max in this case — and after removing the tip, he fills it with loctite to hold the zippo flint:
And in the video below, these guys actually shoot their 7.62×39 bullets with flint tips at a steel target. The truth is that steel target looks pretty thin anyways — and most rifle bullets will penetrate a lot of things based on sheer velocity alone — but it appears the flint tips made them burn right through the steel like they’re supposed to:
Anyways, I haven’t tried this out myself, but it looks like there are people who definitely have.
I couldn’t find anyone trying to use these home-made bullets against body armor, but here’s a cool video from the Demolition Ranch guy showing some Armor Piercing .308 and .50 BMG against AR500 multiple Armor Plates:
Leave a comment if you’ve ever tried making your own, legal, Armor Piercing ammo.