This is a draft
Ballistic gel is often made out of gelatine, which is a produce scrapped from dead pigs bones.
It is possible to make ballisic gel without hurting animals by using Agar-Agar, a polymer extracted from seaweed.
Agar-Agar also has the advantage of being re-usable. By bringing it again above 90°C.
Going towards a society that doesn't exploit animals doesn' impact the fact that we still need a working society. The need for advanced medical research, science, law enforcement, military and understanding lethality of weapons remains.
Altough, for serious application I'm sure chemists would come up with formulations much closer to human flesh, based on synthetic polymers and ultimately shoot cadavers. This here is more of a hobbyist thing or to satisfy ones curiosity.
About 40€ for 1Kg of Agar-Agar.
Which yields roughly 40 Kg of ballistic gel.
Agar-agar can be purchased as a powder or flakes.
You add the power to water, the liquid must not be too acidic (>4pH). You bring the liquid to a boil, mix it up a little bit and let it cool.
When it cools down to 30°C, it polymerizes and produces a gel.
The common dosage in food preparation is 1g per 0.25L which is not enough for ballistic gel.
- At 4g per 0.25L you start to get a fairly firm product, but with a tendency to explode way too easily (unless you mold huge pieces of ballistic gel). A piece that is 2" thick and 6" deep will partially explode when shot with a 40gr @1050fps solid point 22LR. Not good.
- At 6g per 0.25L the product seems to be more resilient, you will still need to mold a fairly large piece. Keeping at least 2" all arround the intended entry hole.
- Experiments at higher concentration remains to be done.
Remove the maximum number of bullets particles that you can. Chop the gel into pieces, add a little bit a water and bring the whole thing to a boil. Add a little bit of powder to compensate for the added water. You can pass the solution into a sieve to remove more bullet particles, before placing it into a mold to cool again.