Reloading and lead...THIS IS NOT A VEHICLE FOR PERSONAL INSULTS BTW!
- Thread starter enfieldspares
- Start date
Or indeed to practice with and set a zero? I hope that this issue is raised for submission to the consultation?
countrryboy
Well-Known Member
And since when have shooters ever had a fair deal at a consultation, no mater how many submissions are in favour of sensible exemptions.
For scottish airgun licences something like 95% of submissions were against it, including the police but it went throu.
They will already have made their minds up, any consultation is just a white wash/sham
With the orgs selling us down the river they are not in much of a position for arguing any exemption,and lets face it do u really think the HSE really care about any of the very valid reasons for specific exemptions.
NO They don't and it will only make there life more complicated, so why would they really bother ( and even us as shooters a large % would just shrug and carry on as normal with there new O/U and wouldn't give a 2nd thought for airguns, 22s or 410's and esp not any obscure historic/target calibres, happy someone elses hobby has been flung under the bus to save there's. Which is all well and good until they come for ur specific hobby, and they will if it involves guns)
Why is HSE even involved for most things they really only get invovled after an accident or near miss in the work place, lead pellet ingestion is the lowest risk it ever has been due to less and less folk eating game and even those that do will be eating a more balanced diet ( wll obtained from numerous sources) than ever before.
If it truely was an issue worth worrying about it would have shown up in previous generations of keepers/farm workers where a large % of there food/meat would be lead shot game.
There is a Broad in Norfolk, in fact it is called Decoy Broad, where ducks & wildfowl have been harvested for centuries commercially, with punt guns, 10 bores & shotguns & netting. I dread to think of the tonnage of lead that was fired out over that water. It was dredged 30 years ago, a trap fitted to it to catch lead pellets & other metal objects. Not one single lead shot did they find, they reasoned that the pellets sank very deep through the soft silt, way out of reach of wildfowl. I fully except that it may be a different story in recently dug gravel pits, but it was interesting.
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
Necessity is the mother of all invention. Copper bullets are pretty simple to make on CNC type lathe technologies. Challenge is getting shape correct. But overall cost in introducing a new bullet is not prohibitive.
A quick search on google shows the likes of Leigh Defence in the US already produced flat nosed copper pistol bullets.
.400 caliber, 190 grain Wide Flat Nose Lead-Free Bullets
The concept of a Wide Flat Nose (WFN) projectile is nothing new or groundbreaking, but it does leave room for improvement. It is a proven projectile design that has been around for many years and has successfully been utilized by hunters all over the world who demand deep and straight-line...
lehighdefense.com
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to take that base design and turn it into 38, 44 etc calibre ammo for use in pistol calibre carbines.
In Europe sellier & bellot are already offering whole lines of lead free non toxic training ammo in pistol calibres to meet requirements of indoor range use by government agencies. Admittedly this mostly pistol rather than revolver ammunition.
Lead Free Bullets – Sellier & Bellot
www.sellier-bellot.cz
As regards muzzleloading rifles, having watched a lot of cap and ball, didn’t a lot of early rifles use an undersize bullet and then use a leather or paper wrapper to grip the rifling. Indeed early cartridge rifles used a paper patched bullet. In the US, where muzzle loading hunting is actively promoted, they already use copper bullets with sabos to achieve the same ends.
Absolutely get your point re handloading. The HSE report does rather imply that shooting community cannot get its own house in order and this needs regulating out of sight.
I can see little reason why historic arms cannot be used under an exemption on ranges where bullets can be captured, and that you are granted permission to acquire, manufacture or use such bullets.
At the moment historic arms and obsolete firearms can be acquired and held without a certificate. But as soon as you want to use them you need to be granted an FAC to use, acquire and possess ammunition.
What we now have is a consultation period, and all the shooting organisations and shooters themselves should respond.
I don’t see any point in arguing against the science that lead is harmful both in food and in the wider environment. If lead is to be used in ammunition, the arguments need to be clear on a) why it needs to be used and that there are no viable alternatives, b) what mitigation can be put in place to prevent contamination of the wider environment and c) how, where land is contaminated there are methods by which the lead can be recovered.
On the last point, many clay grounds that I have visited have bunds and embankments which capture a lot of the shot - probably the easiest lead mining available!!
Whilst that is true there are legions of shooters who still cast, at home, using recovered range lead or scrap lead mixed with scrap linotype, with no tools other than a ladle, an old saucepan or an electric lead melting pot and a Lee, Lyman or RCBS mould set. Sizing (if required as most don't for muzzleloading arms) with a push through die All of this fits into a large shoe box, costs less than £100 to set up and the bullet cost for them is but pennies. Few have the purse to buy a CNC lathe, the skill to use it or the space to house it.
So their choice is to buy bullets which will be expensive and in respect of the likes of the .455 Webley revolver won't have that needed hollow base to pass through a cylinder bored (as they all were) at .450" into a barrel bored at .455" and seal properly. Even with the metal jacketed hollow Mk VI bullet the .455 Webley still requires a hollow base bullet to seal correctly. It is why I started swaging commercially using a Corbin press and later commissioned RCBS to make their .455 Mk II and .455 "Naval Bullet" moulds that they still list today.
Lastly I would fear that if a general prohibition across the board comes in that no danger area ranges that use a steel plate backstop with a linatex curtain will suffer bending and other damage to the steel plates and/or also as the copper bullets are harder a risk of literally "getting your own back" from harder solid copper bullets not flattening on the steel plate backstop but rebounding from it and re-passing back through the linatex curtain. Again this needs to be raised in any consultation.
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Or depleted car batteries.
Stop scaremongering, you are just making it up
Norfolk Deer Search
Well-Known Member
It will be what it will be!
There is bugger all we can do about it, if it’s 100% lead ban it will be 100%, if there are concessions there are concessions!
Just have to take each day as it comes and it will be what it will be
There is bugger all we can do about it, if it’s 100% lead ban it will be 100%, if there are concessions there are concessions!
Just have to take each day as it comes and it will be what it will be
I think you will find the embankments are round trap layouts rather than English Sporting or FITAS grounds and the principle reason they are their is to reduce noise pollution, rather than catch lead shot.
A lot of English Sporting and FITAS is shot in woods or partly in woods, making reclaiming shot virtually impossible.
However clay grounds operate generally speaking over a fixed relatively small area of land and the risk to the environment is confined just to that area. Nothing or nobody eats clays.
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
Agreed. Re the woods part, easy enough to remove woodland and then remove the topsoil. Not something you would want to do, but its something that happens all the time if building roads, housing estates etc etc.
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
Yes I know that club member, or very similar - they are the same ones that take cases of cartridges and bang away at all the ducks and geese that fly over far out of range and claim that steel is crap.
There also plenty who take a few cartridges to the foreshore, wait until the birds are well within range, fire a few shots in the evening and come back with duck and geese.
The early steel that we had was crap. Last few years with modern steel, I am dropping ducks and geese dead in the air just like you used to, but I wait till they are in range.
oh a duck hunter rather than a Wildfowler. best he stays on his flight pond and shoot the 200yard high ducks that he hits once in every box of ammo. If he come the right ammo for the target species and pattern tested, he would find that steel nowadays is better than lead was back when it was banned for fowling! and if he tries TSS and could afford it, he would never shoot inferior lead again!
countrryboy
Well-Known Member
To be fair there is/was quite a few case studies with wildfowl where they found the oppisate and the birds were actively ingestion lead shot think it was there food source.
A lot will depend on the exact site circumstances and how deep the silt is and wot lies beneath it.
But i do agree many of these cases would be the extreme end of the spectrum not the norm and considering how long we have been using lead and how big a % of our meat intake it would of been in the past compared to now, all this really is a massive over reaction which is not justified.
it would not surprise me 1 bit if various anti/pressure groups have already commissioned lab studies into any environmental or toxic effects of 'non toxic'
shot already, as soon as were are weaned/forced on to them they drop a few scientific reports and we're back to square 1 except with no alternatives
so we shoot recover the lead and wait what twenty years for the trees to grow back before we shoot again
Heym SR20
Well-Known Member
No I was more thinking if you have to remove all lead prior to returning the land to alternative uses. More likely you would have to remove top layer of leaf litter and soil without removing trees. Yes it would be an utter embuggerance.
It would also become a major factor to consider when setting up new shooting grounds or adapting, modifying new layouts.
timbrayford
Well-Known Member
That's one of the inconsistencies about the proposals. Taking them at face value it appears to be unacceptable to (allegedly) poison the environment and damage human health with lead bullets unless they are being fired by a crown servant in which case it matters not a jot. Since when did nature & people's health make virtue judgements? Surely as non-lead equivalents exist for both police & military use shouldn't HM Government lead from the front on this and bring in an interim ban on the use of lead bullets by crown servants?Necessity is the mother of all invention. Copper bullets are pretty simple to make on CNC type lathe technologies. Challenge is getting shape correct. But overall cost in introducing a new bullet is not prohibitive.
A quick search on google shows the likes of Leigh Defence in the US already produced flat nosed copper pistol bullets.
.400 caliber, 190 grain Wide Flat Nose Lead-Free Bullets
The concept of a Wide Flat Nose (WFN) projectile is nothing new or groundbreaking, but it does leave room for improvement. It is a proven projectile design that has been around for many years and has successfully been utilized by hunters all over the world who demand deep and straight-line...
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to take that base design and turn it into 38, 44 etc calibre ammo for use in pistol calibre carbines.
In Europe sellier & bellot are already offering whole lines of lead free non toxic training ammo in pistol calibres to meet requirements of indoor range use by government agencies. Admittedly this mostly pistol rather than revolver ammunition.
Lead Free Bullets – Sellier & Bellot
As regards muzzleloading rifles, having watched a lot of cap and ball, didn’t a lot of early rifles use an undersize bullet and then use a leather or paper wrapper to grip the rifling. Indeed early cartridge rifles used a paper patched bullet. In the US, where muzzle loading hunting is actively promoted, they already use copper bullets with sabos to achieve the same ends.
Absolutely get your point re handloading. The HSE report does rather imply that shooting community cannot get its own house in order and this needs regulating out of sight.
I can see little reason why historic arms cannot be used under an exemption on ranges where bullets can be captured, and that you are granted permission to acquire, manufacture or use such bullets.
At the moment historic arms and obsolete firearms can be acquired and held without a certificate. But as soon as you want to use them you need to be granted an FAC to use, acquire and possess ammunition.
What we now have is a consultation period, and all the shooting organisations and shooters themselves should respond.
I don’t see any point in arguing against the science that lead is harmful both in food and in the wider environment. If lead is to be used in ammunition, the arguments need to be clear on a) why it needs to be used and that there are no viable alternatives, b) what mitigation can be put in place to prevent contamination of the wider environment and c) how, where land is contaminated there are methods by which the lead can be recovered.
On the last point, many clay grounds that I have visited have bunds and embankments which capture a lot of the shot - probably the easiest lead mining available!!
Dunwaters
Well-Known Member
Possession will only be part of your problem, where are you going to shoot them?
To use it you’re going to have to find a licensed facility that will accommodate you and your lead projectiles. Thats probably going to be the biggest hurdle. Depending on how onerous the licensing restrictions are, many ranges and grounds may opt to discontinue to permit lead use. It’ll all come down to numbers, if most users of the facility are using non lead alternatives, will it be worth while catering to the lead group?
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