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Analysis / Silver Bullet

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In reality, there are a number of difficulties involved in mass producing silver bullets the traditional way, but they can indeed be created using common everyday items. Using lost wax casting they can be made using simply wax, plaster of Paris, and a propane torch — search the internet for real silver bullet and you will find several techniques for making them.

Still, silver melts at a far higher temperature than lead, which can be melted over a hot fire or kitchen stove (961.8°C/1,763.24°F vs. 327.5°C/621.5°F). When cooling, silver shrinks more than lead does as it solidifies, so the use of a mold designed for lead would result in an undersized bullet; one should start with a mold that is over-sized. An alternative would be to machine the bullets from commercially available rods or bars of silver; however, this would be very time consuming and require specialized machinery and skills.

Silver also costs a lot more than lead does, making silver bullets a rather costly proposition. Silver is less dense than lead, though it is more dense than copper which is already used as a bullet source for modern firearms. Silver has been proven to engage rifling of a barrel similar to the way copper does.

An alternative solution to a solid silver bullet that comes up surprisingly rarely is silver-jacketed rounds, coating a lead projectile in a shell of silver in the way regular bullets use copper. This would increase the mass of the bullet while decreasing the amount of silver you need per round (and since the silver jacket could be quite thin, its hardness would be unlikely to impair the bullet engaging the barrel's rifling), but the manufacturing process isn't something a Vampire Hunter could easily MacGyver in their garage. Another under-explored idea is a silver core round, i.e. taking a common hollowpoint round and filling the cavity with silver.

Another solution would be a shotgun with shells packed with silver shot; this, too, is seldom used, but would be even easier than silver-jacketed rounds to make (and no rifling issues since shotguns don't have rifling in the first place). You can even forgo the hassle of melting your silver, as industrial-grade silver grain is easily available, though it would be quite expensive to scale up your production in this way if you wanted to stockpile silver shells.

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