Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Observations of bullet performance

Many things influence bullet performance besides velocity. Within the past week, I killed two unusually large hogs at ranges of 165 and 155 yards using a 24"-inch-barreled Contender in 6.5x30-30 AI using 123 grain Hornady SSTs at app. 2600 fps MV.

Both were quick, clean kills, but the recovered projectiles look nothing alike. One is nothing but a jacket; the other is closer to the textbook mushroom. Did one fail? No way. It's certainly not a textbook mushroom but about what I expected due to the size of the hog, the structure of the bullet, the impact velocity and the hard impact (shoulder) before encountering soft tissue. The hog died in its tracks, the bullet plowing through the onside shoulder and then carrying forward to damage the heart and a portion of the lungs before lodging in the meat on the inner portion of the off-side shoulder. It weighed 28.1 grains, retaining none of the core (just some smeared lead on the interior of the jacket).

The second boar was taken with a tight, behind-the-shoulder impact as the boar's front leg was forward (ribs only bones hit), and the bullet was recovered under the hide on the far side after thoroughly wrecking the lungs and again penetrating the ribcage. It weighed 72.3 grains and had a max diameter of .530".

The final appearance of the two bullets may be quite different, but the end-results were the same: dead hogs.

To me, the most important thing in developing a load is using a bullet that works well well inside of your maximum/minimum velocity window. Another thing that years of studying wound channels has taught me is that judging a bullet on the basis of a single incident is far from wise as no two situations/impacts are alike.