Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Accubond or Berger VLD

No clue. You tell me. I've never seen an AB do that. How many other antelope/deer have you shot with them? Did they all look like that?

I shoot heavy for caliber Berger VLDs at between 2820 and 2950 fps. I have been very happy with quick kills and minimal meat damage on over a dozen animals. Ranges from 35 yards to 600 yards.

For the OP, if you are shooting these around 2700-2800 in a 30-06, either bullet would do great. Good luck.

I had a 140 gr. SST out of a 6.5-284 do similar to a Pronghorn at 385 yds. I gave up SST's after some other less than consistent results.

Old NBT's were about as bad, the newer ones seem a LOT better.

I don't have much experience with NAB's.

DF

Marty,
Broadside or raking shot?
Sumpin's not right there.

Those goats are fragile, tear up like tissue paper and bullets blow big gobs of hollow hair all over the landscape. Looks to me like that shot was high, caught some bone which blew out and made it worse.

Seen lots with holes like that and it's hard to nail down what works without tearing them up. High velocity numbers like 270-140,7x57-140,30/0-150 will make big holes. A 7 mag 160 Partition will behave one time and next shot cut one in two it seems. depends.

The "best" behaved pronghorn bullet ( if I had to pick one)IME would be 100 gr Partition from the 257 Roberts. It kills them quick without a lot of mangling.

Thanks for all the input gentlemen. The goal of this project is to give me that little extra "umphh" at open country elk that are 350-500 yards out. Otherwise, I'd stick with my 308 win. with 165gr Accubonds (which I have been rather pleased with).

It appears that there's a near split in opinions, and I honestly expected that. As stated, I've had good luck with Accubonds in my 308, but I've not had any experience with the Bergers. I will likely just figure out which of the two shoots the best out of my rifle and run with it.

Never had consistent wound channels nor exits with Accubonds and give up BC in the process.

Just between those two, I'll take the much more consistent and dramatic wound channels and the increased BC of the Berger....

No arguing I've not tried them. But why mess with perfection of the TTSX BArnes since they are available? Any other bullet is a lesser bullet.

When taking less, I still lean to Bergers because they have NOT done what you show at all. Ever. Worst one was not nearly that bad...

But it seems everyones mileage can vary and as most well know, wife or i never shoot bones... there is no need to. Especially with the bergers...

TTSX are far from perfect. All bullets have inherent trade offs and THE TTSX isn't special in this regard.

Just a general comment, but have seen TTSX's produce the same sort of damage as on that pronghorn when they hit bone. In fact saw one do it this fall when it hit the big shoulder joint of a doe pronghorn, and probably lost 75-80% of the shoulder meat.

Yes, hat was a slightly quartering away shot and hit the spine. Goat was at about a 30-45 degree angle (I wasn't the shooter, just the spotter).

I just put it in the category of bullets do funny stuff sometimes.

Here's some 130 VLD's out of 6.5's:

300 yards, laying in his bed slightly quartering toward me, above me. Hit him in neck with 6.5 SAUM/130 VLD/62.5 H1000 combo. You can see entry, small quarter sized exit on opposite side that I didn't take picture of:



260 Rem/130 VLD/43.5 H4350 at 235 yards, ground level, quartering toward me. Hit right shoulder and blew a nice exit on other side:

And a 6.5 SAUM/136 Scenar L/61.0 H1000 at 235 yards, broadside:
Entry:



Exit side:



136 Scenar L made a nice hole, he dropped like a bag of rocks.

Scenars are for stunt shooters. You should try a good roundnose in that round.

Here is last weeks 165 gr Accubond from a .308 Win. moving at 2700fps. The cow was 95 yards away and the entrance has minimal blood shot meat.


Here is the bullet found on the off side under the hide.

This is going to probably draw fire, but here goes:

But in my opinion there is no worse bullet for hunting anything over 50 pounds made anywhere in the world than those made by Burger.

They are accurate.
But they are NOT hunting bullets.

Burger got it's start making dedicated target bullets and did well. They they realized that there are 1000 deer hunters out there for every dedicated formal target shooter so they re-labeled some of their target bullets and call them "hunting bullets".

Hillary Clinton could take lying lessons from them on that account.

Calling them hunting bullets is like calling Obama staunchly pro Constitution.

Always easy to tell who actually shoots...

Or goes outside....

szihn,

You don't know what you're talking about:

1) It's Berger, not Burger.
2) Berger did not spontaneously decide to "re-label" their target bullets. Instead many deer hunters (and other hunters) tried Berger bullets on big game and found out they worked very well, partly because the long, essentially closed "hollow-point" doesn't start expanding the instant it touches hide. Instead the bullets penetrated a couple inches before even starting to expand.
3) After hearing more and more about the success of their bullets, they decided to thoroughly test them, at first using various kinds of "media." The bullets did exactly what hunters had described.
4) Then they started testing them on animals, first feral pigs that are considered varmints. They worked fine there too.
5) After that they started testing them on other big game animals--and still had not decided whether to sell them as big game bullets, and in fact invited experienced hunters who hadn't used Bergers before to try them out, emphasizing that if the hunters had any objections to the results, they should make them known.

Only after those tests also turned out well did they finally started offering Berger Hunting bullets.

If a hunter understands how they work, they'll ruin less meat than many "purpose designed" hunting bullets, while still killing very well. But obviously you've never shot anything with them, and probably never will, because you believe you know everything about them already.

This was the last critter I shot with an Accubond, large mule deer at 140 yards.

Entrance side:


Didn't even make it to the off shoulder. Not sure what happened but that was pretty much all I needed to see.

Tanner

I shot a mule deer twice last year broadside behind the shoulder, perfect hit, and then a follow-up through the neck as he was still on his feet and all I had to shoot at.

Neither exited at 525 yards from a .280 Ackley....

I gave them two years of shooting stuff, not once did they impress me in any way.

Bullets are funny things, all bullets seem to do wonky stuff at some point but we all have to follow what we've seen and done...