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

M D -

One problem I have seen in trying to measure bullet holes in hides is the

elasticity of hides. They do expand and contract IMO.

Jerry

Yes, they do. But the exit hole from a .25 caliber expanding bullet should be larger than a knitting needle.

M D -

Yes indeed. The only exit holes I've seen that were small like that, I could tell the bullet had Xploded and only fragments exited.

Jerry

[quote=shaman]I'm a fellow who likes to muck around with the easiest, simplest, cheapest solution I can find in my reloading. As a result, most of my favorite loads are a few percentage points off the MAX. I take sure-bet shots at whitetails at fairly close ranges, and usually the biggest challenge I look for is how close I can run the pickup truck to the carcass. As a result, I am not an expert on bullet failure.

I am also not a big expert on bullet success. I have recovered exactly 1 bullet in 15 years. It was a pure-lead .54 cal muzzleloader bullet recovered out of a doe. It had flattened to a pancake under the far hide. Hunting success? Plenty. Bullet success? Frankly, I am at a loss.

However, I will throw my $.02 in on this subject regarding one narrow point. It has been my experience on a few occasions that the first shot does not always bring them to a proper toes-up configuration. I've never recovered a bullet in these situations, [/color]but I have noticed that sometimes even the best shot at an optimally situated animal can produce absolutely nothing.

"Ah HA!" you say. "Shaman, if only you'd loaded for better velocity. You would not have had to take that second shot."

I say piffle! If I'm shooting my 308 WIN 165 grain load and it hits a deer at 2600 instead of 2700 fps inside 100 yards, that is no different than the target being 50 yards further out. Furthermore, if I'd taken that shot with a 300 Savage instead of a 308 WIN, I'd be told it was perfectly adequate. Still, the deer paid no attention and went back to munching grass.

Now, here's the odd part. Over the years, I've discovered that it is ill advised to try to go back through the same hole. Once you've plowed that furrow, you're basically sending a bullet through open air. On the other hand, re-targeting an inch or two away inevitably puts them down. I've seen this happen on a 30-30 WIN, a 35 Whelen, a 30-06 and a 308 WIN. All shots were inside 100 yards. All first shots were well placed broadside or slight quartering shots aimed to take out both lungs and the top of the heart. No bullets were ever recovered and the far side of the animal inevitably showed signs of proper expansion.

My reason for bringing this up is that, given any reasonable bullet in any reasonable situation, you're going to have days where stuff just happens. If I've sent a round through the heart and lungs and nothing happens, I don't suspect the bullet. On the other hand, I do suspect that under the right conditions whitetails can have absolutely devastating damage done in the boiler room and show no outward effect.

Without a carcass to examine, there is no valid point that can be made for bullet failure. Even with a carcass, without the bullet to examine, there is no bullet failure. However, the fact that you have the carcass negates the argument of bullet failure.

Shaman,

This post of yours does not make sense:

However, I will throw my $.02 in on this subject regarding one narrow point. It has been my experience on a few occasions that the first shot does not always bring them to a proper toes-up configuration. I've never recovered a bullet in these situations,[color:#FF0000] but I have noticed that sometimes even the best shot at an optimally situated animal can produce absolutely nothing.[color:#FF0000][/color]

The best, first shot on an animal can produce nothing???

Wrong!!

First off, let me address the story of M. Mule Deer.

The key portion of your stories is the small bullet holes on the other side. I would indeed agree that the bullets did not expand the way you expected. The point of there being no blood trail is extraneous.

One of the questions I used to field was "What round produces the best blood trail?" Blood trails are more a function of where the entrance and exit wounds occur on the animal. The size of the hole is a secondary matter. The chest cavity is like a bucket. If you shoot a hole in it, blood will leak out when the blood reaches the hole. If the hole is high, a lot of blood has to fill the bucket before it starts leaking. I've had a .308 blow a hole the size of a tennis ball on the far side and seen zero blood for the first 80 yards. In this case, in this case, both entrance and exit wounds were high. On the other hand, I have seen a buck with a quarter-sized hole leave a gusher, because I'd shot him from a high angle in a treestand.

Your two examples are good ones. However, I'd just throw out that a failure to open that was endemic to a particular bullet would be hard to hide in this modern world of the Internet and customer reviews.

Now to M. Savage 99's comment:

Look, it's really easy to blame the indian in a situation like this. However, I'd say maybe 1 in 10 whitetails we shoot here at camp have some anomalous behavior after the shot. The first shot is a good boiler room shot, and either there is zero reaction, or the deer runs off a bit and then resumes feeding, or stands there defiantly like this story from 2005.

Hubert D. Buck meets Mr. Whelen

If memory serves, the exit wound was one ragged hole. After that episode, I switched from Remington PSPCL to the round nosed SPCL's. I have no idea if it was the bullet's fault, but I was determined to blame the mess on something.

My last instance with this was 2010. I shot the buck with a 165 grain Hornady Interlock SP fired from my Savage 99 in 308 WIN. The first shot was about 100 yards broadside. The finishing shot was under 70 yards slightly quartering away. The entrance and exit holes were touching. Heart and lungs were destroyed, so it was hard to tell which shot had done what.

The shaman Bags an 8 pointer

I've used this bullet to take a large percentage of the whitetails at our camp since 2001. I have the utmost confidence in the Hornady 165, both SP and SPBT. I'd be the first to admit stuff does happen every now and again.

shaman,

I can assure you that I'm familiar with how high a bullet exits on the side of an animal affecting the size of the blood trail. In both the instances I mentioned, the hole was about a third of the way up from the bottom of the chest. Not only were both entrance and exit holes tiny, but the narrow wound channel didn't result in much interior damage. The vast majority of the blood remained inside the undamaged portions of the lungs, which were considerable.

Bullets that fail to open are certainly rarer than bullets that fail to penetrate, but the make of bullet that failed to open on the pronghorn buck is actually pretty popular, even though failures to open have been documented by quite a few hunters. Sometimes the bullet is even recovered, normally through a severely angling shot on a larger animal, providing further proof of the problem. But this normally occurs within a fairly narrow range of bullet weights and diameters, one reason many hunters never encounter the problem when using this particular bullet.

The other problem is that most bullets even in that narrow "problem range" expand fine. Between those two factors, most hunters will never encounter a bullet that doesn't open, because most hunters don't see many animals killed. But when it does happen problems can definitely occur. One of my good friends once had two of that brand of bullet fail to open during a safari in Africa, resulting in very long chases. Luckily, both animals were recovered--and both bullets were recovered. One had barely started to open, but the front end never expanded even to full bullet diameter. The other didn't open at all.

This statement from Shaman above is unbelievable. I post it and then laugh.

"The first shot is a good boiler room shot, and either there is zero reaction, or the deer runs off a bit and then resumes feeding, or stands there defiantly like this story from 2005."

Look, Mister Savage, I'm not trying to blow smoke up your skirt. If it was my failure or the equipment's, I'd be the first to say so. My point in bringing this up is to illustrate that deer hunting is not as sure a thing as some folks want to believe. At least it has not been so for me, and I have heard enough reports from others that I am inclined to believe this to be so. Sometimes the root cause of the failure remains a mystery.

You can laugh all you want. If you have not seen a deer react this way to a shot, then so be it. There is no reason for you to be derisive, just because of your lack of experience in this regard. The worse instance I've ever seen was a 60lb doe go back to browsing with a long arterial spurter coming from her side. My point in bringing this up is that sometimes even the deer's reaction may not be indicative of bullet performance.

My apologies to Mister Mule Deer. I looked back on my previous post and realized it did not come out quite right. My point was not to say you did not realize the height of the impact influencing the size of the blood trail. What I meant to communicate was that folks in general seem to equate bullet performance with the size of the blood trail.

Shaman -

I have seen deer have all kinds of reactions to being hit. Drop Right There, Kick like a mule, rear up, stagger sideways, walk STIFF legged a few steps, et.al. including NO reaction at all for a little bit of time.

Remember the member who wears the DUNCE cap. Indications are that some folks haven't shot/killed many deer.

Jerry

http://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/10017794/1


dave

Thanks.

I spent some years as a QA Manager. In Quality Assurance you are constantly faced with anecdotal problems.

What impresses me in this thread is nearly every situation is unique. Every failure ends up being a one-off. Furthermore, one of the key factors, speed, is related to a factor that hunters are historically inaccurate in estimating: distance. I can't count the number of times I've heard somebody claim to have nailed a buck at 300 yards with a 30-30 offhand.

Do some of these bullet failures come from inadequate muzzle velocity? I'd say you'd have to rule out faulty distance estimation first.

On the other hand. . .

I worked in a solder factory for about a decade. A lot of the issues encountered there would be similar to bullet production. What I can tell you from that experience is the finished product can have a wide variation in its properties depending on how the material was handled. We'd make a batch of brazing rod, and if things were not done just right, a semi-ductile rod of alloy could come out so brittle it would shatter when dropped to the floor. We were known for our high quality, but I'll tell you that keeping the product in spec was a bear, and we were selling it by the 10s of thousands of pounds. I did not work in QA at that plant, but I respected QA's work.

Based on that experience, it would not surprise me if one welding stick in a thousand came out queer in some manner, just as I would not be surprised if 1 bullet per million or even 1 bullet in 10 thousand came out bad. QA can catch a bad batch, but failure rates that low are going to be hard to spot.

I am leaving now for a couple days' sabbatical to test whether a .54 caliber dead-soft lead bullet cast on my own patio is sufficient to put down a KY whitetail. It may be while before I get back here.

Think the last deer he killed was in the late 1950's.

Bill Steigers at Bitterroot use dot tell me that he routinely rejected its of copper and lead for jackets and cores because they did not meet his specifications. He said that "good" copper and lead were essential to uniform penetration and expansion . It was important that the material be ductile enough and not brittle, which was inclined to shatter.

Im convinced that this is one reason for the bullet's reputation for uniform expansion and performance,which is strikingly similar in all calibers from 270 to 375. Still I bet a few got by his scrutiny even though I have never seen one.

I do know that he refused offers to go large scale "commercial" with the Bitterroot with other bullet companies because the techniques required to manufacture the bullets would have necessitated the use of brittle alloys for jackets and cores and compromised the bullet. He was not willing to do that.

I would not be shocked to learn that substandard material accounts for some of the bullet bahviour people complain about.

More than a few Barnes 'failures' I believe can also be traced to twist rate.

Lots of folks are afraid of twist, for some odd reason.

A man would have to work hard to push/spin a Barnes too fast. As much as velocity is your friend with a Barnes (especially the pre-TTSX), spinning the hell out of them is a huge plus.

Some very good points in all of this.

Here are a few samples of my own: Case 1 - groundhog hunting with my .223 Rem. Had been using HP's all along of 53gr with great success to around 300 yds. Was getting low on them, so decided (?) to switch to the Nos. 53gr SBBT. Shot an 8 lb in the chest as it faced me at about 50 yds. It dropped so fast in the 1-foot tall grass that I temporarily lost sight of it. Walking in the directing of where I'd aimed, it was found stone-cold-dead still facing in the same direction as when shot. No blood, no apparent entrance (at first glance) and no exit. The bullet entrance was discovered, after a prolonged search, and not a single drop of blood anywhere. NO EXIT! When I picked up the little beastie, it was as though it was filled with water! That discouraged me from ever using that bullet on anything larger.

As a complete contrast to the above, I, at one time previously, had shot many groundhogs with a .22WM at up to 150 yds. The HP 40s would blow a hole through 'em that you could just about see daylight on the far side. In fact, the first one shot with my .22 WM was in a hedgerow at about 10 yards, and I literally was able to stick the toe of my boot into the cavity!

Case 2 - I shot a good medium-class bl. bear frontally in the chest from 70 yds in a treestand using a single-shot NEF .45-70. The result was similar to the groundhog episode. The load was a 465gr semi-hardcast at 1900 fps (MOA and chronographed). The rifle weighed less than 8 lbs with scope and ammo attached, so recoil was "up there" and when the rifle came down out of recoil the bear had "disappeared". Well, actually the grass was 30-inches tall and he was simply "flattened" without a wiggle in the tall grass. I got down on the ground, walked over to where he should be -- he was flat on his chest as though sleeping and not a drop of blood anywhere. I found the bullet entrance where it should be and, later, in dressing him out found the exit at the bottom of his sternum. His chest was filled with blood and not a drop on the ground. A neighbor, digging a water hole for his cattle, heard the "Waaack" of the bullet and said out loud to himself, "Either he hit a large tree or the bear".

Case 3, 4, 5 etc. I'll reserve those for another time.

If you do much hunting over time (In my case that's 60+ years) you're bound to have some anomalies. But I will say this about the unnamed bullet made reference to by MD -- my experience exactly!

Bob

www.bigbores.ca

Mule Deer, I think I used the same bullet that you used in the Roberts on a Virginia whitetail, with similar performance. I shot the animal twice through the lungs, and the wound channel from those never got larger in diameter than a nickel, the deer ran about 40 yards, where it stopped and looked at me. The third shot impacted below the right eye and exited the back of the skull through a hole the size of a pencil. There was no blood on the ground between the site of the first shot and the last. I stopped using that bullet. Changed to the 100 gr. Sierra, and the next deer I shot spun and fell with similar shot placement. I don't think it's rear hooves moved more than 6".

Old70

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.

Nice report Bobby

Yes.

What killed the animals in both instances was that the bullet penetrated to the vitals and expanded to tear up vital tissue,so in that sense both did their job.

But I came to regard such bullet performance as undesirable because it was inconsistent depending on what it hit,and how fast it was going. At those velocities it may have work fine but at higher velocity or closer impact the jacket might shed the core in heavy resistance and fail to make it into the vitals.

Also IME animals hit so that vital tissues are destroyed and heavy bones are broken just tend to make fewer tracks.

I like core and jackets to hang together, or the bullet to have some mechanism for locking some portion of them together, for any game from large deer on up.The bigger the game, the more important this becomes IMHO.


This is more satisfactory to my way of thinking. 270-130 NPT. Game was a very large bull elk.

Hey Bob, I didn't know you liked bullets that

"shed their cores" ! !



Jerry

ps - JUST IN CASE some don't know-- there is PARTITION in front of the rear core.