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

Then you don't understand, in general.

Then you don't understand, in general.

Yea...not a clue.
I have a 200gr 30 cal aframe that failed to exit on a medium sized whitetail. I actually tried to post pics early but had no luck.

Now might be a good time to just bow out and admit you don't know what the heck yiur taking about.
For starters the Barnes ttsx/tsx begins to expand immediately and it is a deep penetration bullet.
Perhaps the writer in question doesn't know what the hell he is talking about either or perhaps your comprehension of what he wrote was off?

Perhaps it's you who can't comprehend what the writers say about bullet penetration when comparing the Partition, to the A-Frame, and to Triple-Shock?

Why do you think solid to near solid bullets are preferred for head shots on elephants? Because they expand the fastest and penetrate the most?

Your making the assumption that partition failed because you didn't find it. I highly doubt it indeed failed.
If indeed you want to go by the "will it kill a animal" criteria there isn't an animal in NA I couldn't kill and easily with a nosler 180 BT.

Yes, I understand what he says. But my point is that in general, the bullets that penetrate the most are the ones that retain more of their weight. For example, the partition is designed to retain around 65% of its weight, the A-Frame around 85 or more%, the FS and TSX around 100%, and so on.

Also, that every article I read about bullet penetration versus brand or type the A-Frame is always talked about out-penetrating the partition, and the reason why is one of the top bullets for hunting in Africa.

One writer, who has been known to be full of crap a time or three made a comment and you take it as gospel..
The rest of your post simply displays your inability to connect the dots..

Ray, in the calibers and weights I've tried A-Frames on I have not only found them to penetrate less than partition counterparts but they also were stopped by offside hide in dramatic fashion. Specifically, on one cull hunt I found several stretched out hides were an a-frame never broke through, forming a dramatic nipple. Probably because the aframes were quite roundish with no sharp edges. Also, I felt swifts did generally less damage than partitions.
Several reasons I feel make the X bullet a good penetrator: One, the frontal area of an expanded Xbullet is quite a bit smaller than a classic "mushroom" from a copper/lead bullet. Two, the mechanism in deformation by the means of bending that an X goes through takes less energy than the malleable plastic deformation a lead/jacketed bullet goes through. That's not to say the lead/jacketed bullet is harder, just the opposite in a general sense, and it just absorbs/dissipates more energy to expand. Ironically the swift AF looses energy by having the rear core rivet. Similarly, the failsafe penetrated deep but less when Winchester removed the steel insert in the rear core, causing it also to rivet. Winchester tried to convince people this double mushroom was some sort of double whammy on game and not some sort of cost cutting measure. Actually the frontal mushroom masked the the rear rivet as it does in the swift AF. Also, early X's commonly blew off thier petals, lost quite a bit of weight and still penetrated very deep. Now they don't but weight retention isn't really the reason behind their deep penetration. I have always looked at the swift as a generally unremarkable high priced premium bullet.

Same thing applies to your 280. Can't get around poorly designed shape.

Why do you think solid to near solid bullets are preferred for head shots on elephants? Because they expand the fastest and penetrate the most?

Maybe it's because they have the smallest frontal diameter?

What I found with the 250-grain A-Frame is that it was quite difficult to push it out the barrel as fast as the 250-grain Partition. The one I posted above somewhere was retrieved from I moose I killed several years ago. It stayed inside the moose, but it dropped it pretty fast. The 230-grain FS caused almost and instant death, but the effect was greater because it broke the near shoulder bone, clipped the heart's arteries as well as the lungs. The A-Frame dropped the moose on the moss, and I waited for it to die perhaps 10 minutes.

I not longer use the A-Frame (very expensive), nor the Partition. I have settled on the 225-grain TTSX, since the results from the Triple-Shock have been nothing but outstanding on moose. The only problem is that I haven't been able to retrieve any from the moose I have killed with it. I haven't shot anything with the tipped X, just the Triple Shock. I will see what happens in September during moose season

Well, most of the elephant guns are medium to big bores. But I imagine that the reason for using a solid bullet is so it does not expand and fall apart when it hits the skull.

I imagine that the reasons for loading handguns with hard-cast instead of defense ammo are similar (what you want the most is penetration, not expansion)?

Ray,

Sorry I was a little abrupt yesterday.

Many gun writers don't really understand bullet expansion and penetration, partly because so many don't carefully set up and analyze the tests they make--if the make any. Which is why you see the repeated claim that higher weight retention always results in deeper penetration. This simply isn't true, and while it's easy to prove, many people (not just writers) just repeat what they've heard or read. This has been pretty good for me, because I've sold a lot of articles that actually tested many old assumptions, which either were true at one time but aren't any more, or never were true in the first place.

I believe the fixation on bullet weight retention started with Bob Hagel's book, Game Loads and Practical Ballistics for the American Hunter, published in the 1970's. Before Hagel there wasn't much real testing of big game bullets, but there were only two real premium bullets back then, the Partition and Bitterroot Bonded Core. Hagel emphasized weight retention constantly throughout the book, but also mentioned at least once that the BBC didn't penetrate as deeply, because of its wider mushroom. But most readers (including a lot of gun writers) mostly remembered the emphasis on weight retention, which is why so many articles, books and hunter gossip emphasized weight retention as the Great God of Bullet Performance.

The other reason I suspect weight retention got such pay is it's much more easily quantified than wide expansion, so is more easily bragged about when hunters keep score. And most humans keep score in some way, whether or not the score means anything.

The most extreme field example of wide expansion limiting penetration I've seen was a 360-grain bonded bullet from a .416 Remington Magnum that didn't exit during an angling shot on a 100-pound deer. The bullet retained around 90% of its weight, but also expanded to over 2-1/2 times its original diameter, with only a very short shank left unexpanded. If it had been an actual mushroom, it would have looked like the mushroom's top was sitting directly on the ground. There's no way a bullet that wide will penetrate as deeply as a bullet that expands into a long-shanked mushroom with a small "top."

Another common and mistaken assumption (that you also alluded to) is that different expanding bullets expand faster or slower than others. Instead, the vast majority expand completely by the time they penetrate their own length. Instead, the difference is in how much they fragment, not how fast they expand.

The exception to this, oddly enough, is very long-ogived "target" spitzers with tiny hollow-points. The needle-point tends to delay expansion until the bullet penetrates 2-3 inches, whereupon expansion is usually violent because of the thin jackets common to such bullets.

Same thing applies to your 280. Can't get around poorly designed shape.

And btw assumption that a NF will expand at 500 yards in game from a 30-06 based on shooting a dirt bank is a bit flawed. Last I checked elk aren't made out of dirt.