Originally Posted By Cpt_Kirks:
Aluminum is hard to form.  Thin copper sheet works best.

Originally Posted By AeroE:
I'll buy CCI and RSW caps before Remington or Italian.

I need to remember to save fired caps.

Originally Posted By Urimaginaryfrnd:
Caps have become more available here lately both Remington and CCI.  Call around .

Originally Posted By AeroE:

Change the nipples.

Originally Posted By kychas:
I use the copper sheet.  Much easier than aluminum, the tap a cap needs to bend the copper and not rip. Aluminum breaks or rips often when making the cup.
I use 3 German made toy caps to glue (Elmer’s) in to the cap, just wet the end of a match stick with a little glue and pickup the cap and touch the cap to the glue and push into the cup , stack them up 120 degrees apart
I cut them with a small hole punch (don’t know the size. About 1/8”?)
And I cut them out off center so they are able to be put into the cap off center to create a 3 leaf clover pattern
(The cap will not fire reliably if centered, if centered it may be pushed down the hole without being crushed and detonate the cap)
I keep the CCI caps for hunting, the homemade for target shooting where a failure to fire is not a problem

Originally Posted By fgshoot:
Having caps is much better than not having caps, but I have yet to see anyone produce a die set that makes a percussion cap that looks good. Every one I've ever seen, even from copper, looks very homemade. I mean, they go pop, but I won't spend my time making caps that look like that. That might sound strange being as I have made my own black powder before, but the difference is you can produce black powder that is every bit as good as what you can buy. If you follow Everythingblackpowder on Youtube, you can even produce black powder that is better than you can buy. I have yet to see a homemade percussion cap that is acceptable.

Before anyone takes offense to that, I have the same criticism of gas check dies for cast bullets. The dies that are available to us today simply do not produce a quality product.

Obviously every location is different, but there is no reason a store near you can't get caps. They are not hard to find right now, just very expensive. I don't know that I have a store around me that doesn't have them. Everywhere I look online has them, powder valley, midwayusa, natchez. If your local store doesn't have them, they aren't even trying to get them. Sure it might be expensive to buy online, but by the time you buy dies, mix, copper, all that stuff, you are certainly going to be in it over $100. Unless you shoot a ton, that $150 for 1000 caps will last a long time.

Originally Posted By fgshoot:
If that's what you want to do, by all means do it. It seems to me that percussion caps can be made that are reliable enough, and keep people shooting.

From what I'm seeing though, you are looking at a hours of work for 100 caps that are by every metric, inferior to what you can buy. Why better tools have not been produced yet, I have no idea, but that's what it is today. If I want to go through that kind of crazy tedious work, I'd much rather take up knapping flints.