Video: How Lead Shot is Made

If you’ve ever wondered how lead shotgun pellets are made, this is your lucky day! The video below will tell you about it.

Actually, it is an old video, ostensibly from 1950 of a shot tower in England. Yep, a tower.

Molten lead (or more commonly, a lead alloy with other metal(s) added to make it harder) is poured through a sieve or screen. As each drop falls through the air, it becomes round due to surface tension and begins to cool.

When it lands in the water below, the cooling is complete, and the water prevents each pellet from deforming by colliding with other pellets that have already landed.

Naturally, screens with different-size holes are used to produce different-sized shot. The tower in the video was making roughly 50 million pellets per day.

Pretty cool!

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.