Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters AccuBonds vs. A-Frames in Africa............

jmp,

If you read ALL of this thread you'll find out the reason the OP had problems. Maybe you have--but it was a one-time, brief problem with one worker at the Nosler plant, a year or two after ABs appeared. Before then they worked fine, and after the problem was corrected they worked fine--yet some Campfire members here started to doubt that after this thread was recently resurrected.

Which demonstrates, once again, what people are willing to believe after they read it on the Internet....

Never knew anyone was actually comparing Accubonds to the Partitions or the A-Frames...

Phil

Guilty. Magazine articles too. Present company excluded.

Yep read it all. Thanks very much for the explanation of the past issues. I use them in a few rifles and have had good luck and will continue to do so. LONG BUT GOOD thread!

JB, your post underscores a couple of problems with internet discussion boards and us rifle/hunting looneys.

First, far too many of us don't read the entire thread, especially when it gets long. Instead, folks just jump in and post their "I-have-zero experience-on-this topic-but-this-is-what-I think-anyway" stuff and we end up with about 1.5 pages of information scattered among 15 pages of drivel.

Second, far too many people don't actually test their ammunition. Sure, everyone takes their hunting rifle and ammo to the range and fires a group or two before going, just to be sure the scope didn't grow demons over the past few months/years it was sitting unused in the safe, but few internet rifle/hunting looneys actually test their equipment. Which, if you're looking at spending well north of $10K on a hunting trip, you should invest in, in my humble opinion. By testing equipment, I mean really practice with your hunting rifle... multiple range sessions with practice ammo AND your high-dollar hunting ammo. And it really makes sense to actually make sure your bullets are going to perform as advertised, if you're able. Consider the fact that a block of Clear Ballistics gel will cost you only about $100, and you can melt it down and reuse it to test your bullets in it over and over again if you need to. (Or you may develop an addiction to shooting the ballistics gel just because!)

My dos centavos this morning. Have a good one.

Ballistic Gel is useless. All it does is compare bullets reacting to Ballistic Gel. Shoot x brand bullet into gel five times and you get the same result five times.

Game on the other hand is a very broad spectrum medium. Bullets do weird things in that medium based on angles, shot placement, animal structure etc. Animals are extremely hard on bullets.

Bullets are pretty hard on animals, too.

Which is why I use DRY newspaper to pre-test bullets. It simulates hitting animals that are hard on bullets better than anything else I've tried--and I've tried a bunch of different kinds of "media," including ballistic gel. (Wet newspaper isn't any better than ballistic gelatin.)

Posted this once already in this thread, but there's an entire chapter on pre-testing big game bullets in the first Big Book of Gun Gack, including the reasons I finally settled on dry newspaper.

Interesting.

I remember wet newspapers and phone books being the go to test medium back in the 80’s prior to ballistic gelatin. It’s not something that I’ve ever experimented with or given much thought to but I can see where dry paper would be a better test of bullet toughness.

The problem with both ballistic gelatin and wet newspaper is neither really stresses big game bullets--which is why many bullet manufacturers used something called "wet lap," which is basically "raw" wet newspaper: Bullets shot into wet lap tended to come out as "perfect mushrooms," which looked really good in magazine advertisements. But it didn't indicate how they'd react to various amounts of bone.

Same deal with ballistic gelatin. While there are different "hardnesses," none contain anything resembling bone. Instead they're designed so simulate "soft tissue," meaning muscle and internal organs.

Both can demonstrate how deeply bullets will penetrate compared to other bullets, and clear ballistic gelatin can show through slow-motion video HOW bullets expand in soft tissue (which most hunters don't understand), neither indicates much about how relatively tough big game various big game bullets are when the going gets tough.

The book chapter explains stuff like that--and the rest of the book explains a lot of other stuff that most hunters (and hunting handloaders) don't really understand, partly because so much "common knowledge" is wrong, including a lot of stuff that's been repeated over and over in over the decades--without any real evidence.(Or they started with an incomplete understanding of whatever they "discussed," a good example being annealing brass.)

after reading and using Gun Gack IV The little Book of Rifle Loads That Work i see no reason to argue with anyone ,its almost like cheating when loading ammo. Thanks John

Thanks, Steve! Glad you're getting some good use out of the book....

John

I received mine a couple of days ago and I am enjoying it a lot.

I've seen those 200 grain Nosler Partition's shoot very well too. I think they shoot better than the lesser Partition's
Not taking anything away from it's brother and sisters under the same brand name.

It might also depend on whos pulling the trigger.

Great conversation and nice to have unbiased real world results shared. Thank you.

I am also trying to pick a bullet for my 338 Win mag and Swift is moving up the chart. I know high BC is all the rage but if the bullet doesn’t do it’s job then the advantage of wind drift and drop is a moot point. You still have a wounded animal. Thanks to everyone for contributing to this post!

That's been my general experience as well--though the 165s have also been very accurate in several rifles as well, especially in .308s and .30-06s.

Also my 300 WSM.

Rug3,

One of the more interesting experiences I've had with the 165-grain Partition occurred when I used one of the late Verne Juenke's internal-concentricity bullet-testing machines for a couple of years, around 20 years ago. The machine used ultra-sound to test the consistency of jacket thickness in lead-cored bullets, and had a dial indicator to indicate how concentric each bullet was. It worked very well, and in fact a number of bullet companies used one to improve their manufacturing techniques--and some competitive shooters used them as well.

One thing I discovered during my experiments was that one particular lot of 165-grain Partitions tested just about as well as some "match" bullets. I then went back and looked through my handloading notes that that batch had grouped VERY well in every rifle I tried 'em in, whether a .300 Savage 99 or several .300 magnums, including a WSM, Winchester and Weatherby.

But other batches of 165 Partitions have tended to group better in milder .30s, especially .300 Savages, .308 Winchesters and .30-06s. My guess is they were more "average" in concentricity than that one lot--and since the milder rounds don't spin 'em as fast, that's why they tend to shoot better.

Sometimes I still miss having the Juenke machine, but the guy who loaned it to me was Dave Scovill, the long-time editor of Rifle and Handloader magazines. After two years he asked me to send it to Barnes Bullets, so I did. (This was something of a mystery, because the machine didn't work on monolithic bullets, whether copper or cast, because they don't have jackets. But I did as Dave asked.)

After my article on the machine appeared in Handloader, Verne said he'd build me one for a very favorable price--but unfortunately passed away before that occurred, in 2018. But if I did have one, would be tempted to ask you to send me a few of the 165s that shoot so well in you .300 WSM, just to see how well they test!

This is the mind-numbing reminder of the potential for infinite rabbit-holing opportunities in reloading.
Change primer
Change powder
Change powder charge
Change seating depth
Change bullet
Change neck tension
Change brass
Etc.


Now we can evaluate each freaking bullet for internal concentricity?





P

I have a Juenke machine.
It doesnt matter which of those you change^^^^^^, if your bullet isnt concentric, none of those changes will make a difference.
You will have fliers...Do you have to have it...No....but it can help eliminate one variable..The most important variable...Pretty basic really