X-Treme Bullets?

[Veldy]

It is viewed that the main reason for the huge jump in lead prices was the olympics.

I would put my money on the fact that we are fighting two wars.

If you were listening to the run up for the summer games, there was all kinds of talk about the bad air in China, and specifically Beijing. A look at the map would show that the areas slightly south and mostly west of beijing are their industrial heartland. Huge smelting plants for copper, Lead, iron ore, and other minerals all lay directly up wind from Beijing. A lot of this production capacity was either moved or shut down to allow for the air to clean up before the Olympics, Rebuilding the supply is taking longer than they thought, and many of the plants were damaged by striking workers who were pissed off about being laid off for months prior to the games. Prior to the games, CHina was smelting something like 45% of the worlds lead and when they dropped out, demand for critical uses stripped the worlds of excess supply and drove the prices sky high, at times bulk lead had tripled, add to this an insane concept that using lead acid batteries for Hybred cars and a jump in oil prices, it will take a couple of years for the market to catch up.

(the concept of the hybred is insane because the cost of the new batteries at the end of their 4-5 year life span will completely eat up any gains in fuel savings, AND the pollution from making those batteries will over take any savings in running on batteries,)

Hybrid batteries are warranted for 7 years in Minnesota and the exact same battery gets a warranty of 10 years in California, and by what I have read, they are expected to remain usable to 14 years on average. So, I wouldn't let that stop you. Personally, I believe hybrid cars to be a fad and doesn't solve any fundamental problems with US energy policy. So, buy what you like ... you will save money on gasoline and when the price of gasoline goes back up, the hybrid owners may be laughing at us IC engine auto drivers

As far as copper [the main component in brass], electronics are making a boom on the demand for copper. There are cases where servers are being connected very delicate COPPER cables rather than fiber channel, which is so typical right now. I believe it to be an intermediate technology as they are finding better and better ways of sending multiple spectrum segments down the same fiber due to gains in material science allowing for some spectrums to pass clean through some mirrors allowing greater and greater amounts of bandwidth on fiber; so I think, eventually, the demand for copper should decline; most likely soon after the wars end and our military is resupplied and maintenance is caught up.

[Veldy]

The Xtreme bullets are plated vs Hornady jacketed. Hence you might want to be cautious with respect to loading them. Precision Delta has jacketed bullets...for a decent price delivered.....

Can you explain this? What is so bad about about plated versus jacketed? If anything, I would think plated would be better as it would be more uniform; but perhaps I am incorrect about this.

I gotta think that Black Bullets int. may well be a good alternative....they seemed to shoot well out of the G17.....

If I knew of a local place that sold 100 of them, I would give them a try. The problem is that I can't invest in a large quantity and find they foul the barrel every time and require me to scour the barrel with the bristle wire brush to get the lead out ... and turn my family room into a superfund site. I usually load my 9mm rounds with 124 grain bullets [either FMJ/FMC or JHP] with Alliant Unique, Bullseye or Bluedot [in about that order ... the latter leaves the barrel pretty dirty but fires nice].