Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting The 300 Wby Mag for elk- is there anything better?

Why not just accept the fact that some of us prefer other bullets than your beloved Noslers? We get along just fine with our "flying bricks"'and other designs you seem to look down your nose at, given your vast hunting experience.

There you go again making assumptions that you have no way knowing are accurate or not. Many of us are quite familiar with the design parameters of the bullets mentioned and have more than a little experience hunting game of all sizes. If we choose not to use them for various reasons it's not a condemnation of them, it's simply someone liking something else better.

But there are plenty of hunters who never get beyond a belief in sheer weight retention.

The AB and PT are fine bullets. Keep in mind even at 300 yards a bullet with a medium BC like an AB will be running away from a brick like an Aframe or a NF.

Awesome, you have succeeded into turning your 7Mag into a 280!

No, because I use 140g NF and TTSX in the .280. They both get launched about 250fps faster when I use them in my 7mm RM.

While I agree the AB and PT are good bullets, the rest is not exactly true. Even if it was, does it matter? The important thing to me is terminal performance. NF are easily the most consistent performers across a wide range of velocities that I have tested. (By 'range of velocities' read 'from 10 feet to 500 yards'.) They expand well, don't lose their tips and jam the gun, don't lose their petals and the solid rear section has ensured decent weight retention even when the front core has been smeared off while passing through heavy bones.

Comparing 7mm 160g NF and GS 'bricks' to the AB bullets at 3048fps (the MV for my 7mm RM 160g loads), at 300 yards the AB has a velocity advantage by about 175fps. By 400 yards that advantage is up to 265fps and yet, by some miracle, the 6x5 bull elk I shot last year at 411 yards with a 160g GS 'brick' managed only 4 steps before going down. That is about 55 yards less than the cow I shot in 2013 with a 225g AB from my .338WM, range 487 yards.

For me it comes down to trust in proven performance rather than high B.C. values. While I use AB and TTSX quite a bit, I have more trust in the North Fork bullets. That trust is based on about 12 years of testing them at the range and taking game with them in the field. At close ranges the AB have shown weight retention of about 62% while NF and TB retention at the same range has been over 90% and as high as 97%. Given that I've had shots at a few feet but never beyond the range where the 'brick's I use perform well, I plan to continue using the 'bricks'.

These pictures were posted earlier in this thread but they demonstrate why I trust NF bullets. The 165g .308" NF 'brick' performed very well - and very similarly - at both 25 yards and 500 yards.





From left to right:

.30-06, 165g North Fork @ 2800fps
500yds from dirt, 145.0g retained

.30-06, 165g North Fork @ 2800fps
~25yds from cow elk, 133.2g retained after hitting a rib and leg bone

7mm 140g North Fork @ 3200fps
~150yds from buck mule deer, 131.2g retained after going from ham to sternum

Ray,

Petzal apparently believes (as many people do) that weight retention is the ONLY factor in bullet penetration, and it isn't. Frontal area of the mushroom is at least as important, and perhaps more so. This can easily be demonstrated by shooting various bullets of the same weight, diameter and muzzle velocity into the same media. But there are plenty of hunters who never get beyond a belief in sheer weight retention.