How you gonna make one?

A bullet made from chopped fiber in a matrix is possible.  They could be cast or machined from extruded stock.

Contemplating fabricaton of a bullet made from sheet goods gives me a headache.  About the best you could do is cram some pre-pregged material into a die, mash hell out of it to get it consolidated, then cure with heat to get the bullet out of the die in a sensible amount of time.

If you want to experiment with the viability of this idea, buy some nylon 6/6 rod and turn bullets from this stock.  This is a glass filled nylon that is close enough to a carbon product.  You might be able to find some carbon filled nylon, too, but I'm not going to look for it.

Use 0.06 to 0.065 pounds per cubic inch to estimate the weight of your bullets.  Lead alloys are essentially 0.395 pound per cubic inch.

Folks have incorrect notions that carbon/epoxy "things" have magical properties.  I'm not going to go into the reasons why it falls down in certain applications and where it is best used, but remember this in the context of using it for a bullet; it's burnt string and glue.

A low speed primer powered bullet is possible.  There are better choices, ones that are not filled with carbon or glass.  I don't want to run those materials down the barrel of any of my guns.

Try to run one at high speed and you'll probably not get it out of the bore when the plastic matrix melts.

Wooden bullets of WWII and earlier were generally "blanks" used for firing rifle grenades or just to make a bang.  From the things I have read the bullets would either be counted upon to fly apart shortly after leaving the barrel or there were some blank adapters that had a plate that would smash the bullet on exiting the barrel.  I have never found any reliable accounts of the Germans or Japanese using the wooden bullets as anti personnel.  But like the man said, anything leaving the barrel at 1,000fps should be considered potentially lethal.

Marketing and the ignorance of the marketers selling the stuff, and that includes executives that know better or ought to know better.  "Stronger that steel!"  "Lighter than aluminum!"  "Never fatigues!"

I looked at a popular make bike with carbon forks a few years back.  The dealer, and apparently the manufacturer, was suprised the forks failed.  My comment was they failed just as they were designed to fail; that always gets a raised eyebrow.

You should see the kluge of claptracketry in the floor beams of the first 7 or 8 (9?) 787's; all due to a dumbass design.  Several hundred fittings are requried to fix the assemblies.  The good news is thes production bonded titanium-carbon/epoxy assemblies will be assembled in an Indian factory by a subsidiary of Tata.  Not.


I shoot the Speer plastic bullets occasionally, and I sure as heck don't want to be hit with one.  They punch through three layers of corrugated cardboard like it's not there, and tear up the blanket I hung in back.  Some made it through the blanket to disappear out in the yard.