Zinc jackets?

[geargnasher]

Sorting a bucket of WW tonight, I was wondering how tough it would be to make jacket cups from zinc, insert them in a mold made to fit them, and then pour them full of lead and cut the sprue like normal, making bonded-core boolits like FMJ .45 ACP or 9mm ball ammo.

I've never really worked with zinc, but I was wondering if the jacket could be made from cast balls about like 000 buckshot, then swaged in a pocket mould and the excess ground flat to make a square base. Anybody think this could be made into a practical process?

Gear

[stubshaft]

"Back in the day" I used to shoot the Harvey Pro-Tex-Bore? boolit in .357. It was a zinc washer onto which a soft lead boolit was swaged onto. If memory serves they worked pretty good at normal 357 mag velocities. I also tried the old NEI process of inserting a half jacket copper tube into the mold and then pouring the alloy in after. That was a Big PITA!. The only consolation was that I could throw the rejects back into the melt and recover those tubes/half jackets. Shortly after that I went to paper patch and plain old cast boolits in my 375 H&H.

Don't know if the end result will be worth your effort but the name of the game with boolit casting is experimenting.