Ah, hot tracers and mercury, those were the good old days!
There is a problem with putting mercury into a lead bullet in that over time, the mercury crystallizes the lead and it just sort of turns to mush. I've tried a bunch of other things, including putting primers - or priming compound - into hollow points. Sometimes they go off and sometimes they don't but they never create additional damage so basically are a waste of time! And labor! Plus, if you think about it, they are kind of working against the bullet!
Tracers are another can of worms, unless you can get the cold tracers or the stick on reflectors for reloaders. I've never used either one so can't really comment on them. Real military tracers are another matter.
Me and a few other similarly crazy friends went out on a an evening trek to an old abondened Vega left out in the desert. There were 5 of us, everyone had AR's or M-16's except my one buddy with an FAL. So we all loaded up with our stash of tracers and had a mad minute on the Vega. One of my rounds lit up after hitting the car but bounced way up high and dropped over the rim of a small cliff. I went out and took a look but all was well.
However, my FAL buddy had set his gas port on grenade launch and only got one round off, so when we did another mag dump on the car, he was the only one shooting tracers. His very last round ricocheted around inside the car a couple of times then popped straight up out of the roof about 50 feet up and landed just a few yards beyond the Vega. After we all picked ourselves up from rolling around on the ground laughing, I looked to where the tracer had landed and saw flames. I yelled "Fire!" and we all ran towards the fire. But by the time we had covered the 50 yards to the fire, the flamers were already head high and roaring! That Tucson desert is like a match head! We all started stomping the several little fires that had magically sprung up around the dried up little tree. But we were losing and things were rapidly getting out of our control! That's when I remembered the tarp in back of my pickup. I ran and got it and we used it to good effect to beat the flames down and within 4 or 5 minutes had nothing but a few glowing embers and 5 very scared and out of breath guys standing around looking at each other. Right there we all swore off tracers forever!
I do have 3 tracers loaded into the bottom of 4 of my AR mags I keep for any bad times, just in case. But just to play around with them? Not me, boyo! Never again!
Cheers,
crkckr
P.S. it had been less than a year since a lone hunter got lost on Mt Lemon.just out side of Tucson and started a signal fire that quickley got out of control and burned several hundred acres. Fortunately no on one hurt but he was tried and convicted (it was a "no fires" month) and he was presented with a 3.5 million dollar bill from the Forest Service! I never heard what all else happened to him but I'm pretty sure he didn't have the cash to pay the bill! Scary stuff.