Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mule Deer - 308 Win and Moose question

I will be hunting Eastern Moose this fall. I've been told to expect that most shot opportunties will probably be under 100 yards but that 250 -300 yards shots are not out of the question.

I will be using a .308 WIN Browning BLR. What do you think would be the better choice - 150 TTSXs or 168 TTSXs?

My gut tells me 168 grainers, but with only a 20" barrel, I am wondering if velocities will be too low to get adequate expansion using these bullets at the upper, possible shot opportunity ranges (i.e., 250-300 yards).

BTW, I will developing loads using VARGET(all I've got at the moment), and so I am expecting my max velocities to be in the 2610 fps or less range (based on Barnes #4 data with 45.5 grains of Varget and max velocity of 2712 fps using a 24" barrel).

Thanks

Either one will work to perfection if inserted in the proper location

+1

I'm not John, obviously. I agree with careful bullet placement and Varget powder.

Two points: Barnes, IIRC, states that 1,800 fps is needed for good performance of their TTSX bullets.

Barnes bullets penetrate, performing with lighter weights than cup and core. I would check a ballistic program for the estimated velocity of each bullet at your max proposed range.

I'd probably go with the 150, knowing it will penetrate enough to do the job and it should be moving a bit faster than the 168. Barnes bullets like speed.

IMHO,

DF

I'd probably lean toward the 150 as well, partly because I have seen what a tipped monolithic from a short-barreled .308 does to game bigger than deer. But the 168 would no doubt work fine too.

Varget's about as good as it gets when loading the .308 with medium-weight bullets.

I'm interested in hearing you expand on this John. Did the bullet not expand?

Simple, they work

Yup. Always... 150 TTSX from 308 Win on elk. Hit nothing on its way, didn't open and tumbled:

I intepret Mule Deer's statement as meaning that the 150 TTSX should work fine with my quarry based on his observations on its effects on game larger than deer.

As for the adequacy of both 150's and 168 TTSXs for moose, that is great. I will then simply picked what is most accurate (as long as velocities with the accurate load are not too low).

Thanks for the input.

You have more bad luck than 100 ohers combined

Bad luck?

I don't know. He recovered the bullet from a dead animal, right?

What's not to like?

Any bullet is going to screw up sometime. My experience is the tipped monolithics (whether TTSX or Nosler E-Tip or whatever) fail to expand less frequently than hollow-pointed monolithics. In fact I haven't see one that failed to expand yet (aside from Brad's, that is) and I've seen quite a few shot into animals from coyotes to big elk in the past several years.

For anybody who didn't quite understand my first post, my opinion is the 150 would work just fine. In fact I'm so impressed with the performance of 150-grain tipped monolithics in .30 caliber that I'm considering switching to them for most of my larger-than-deer big game hunting, whether in the .308, .30-06 or .300 H&H, the three .30's I hunt with most.

Back in '78 0r '79 a fifteen year old kid working for me in Cody, Wy., was fortunate enough to draw, on his first try, a moose tag. Neither he nor his dad were serious hunters or even shooters but they headed up the north fork of the Shoshone river opening morning and the kid, with his first shot with a .308 and factory ammo of some unknown weight, dropped his moose.

Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

Makes sense, why beat the crap out of your shoulder if there's no difference. Just like back in the day, never could tell the difference between 150's & 130's in .270, or 150's & 170's in .30-30, so I just default to the lighter bullet if all else is equal.

Not trying to start anything but it almost looks like dirt in the nose of that bullet?

Corey

Apparently you're prone to mistaking fat for dirt...

John, I think the tipped monolithic's are too new to be dogmatic about failure rates compared to the older open point designs (of which I've seen and experienced many failures).

What I'm certain of is that there are more failures to expand (per capita) of expanding-monolithic's than lead-based premiums.

Obviously all things man-made fail, but I'm fairly convinced the expanding-monolithic's are more prone to opening-failure than the lead-based brethren.

Certain are you? You have scientific data to back that up, right?

Brad,

You have a point, but I've been shooting tipped mono's into game since 2007, when I took a batch of pre-production E-Tips to South Africa on a cull hunt. They were 180's in a .300 Winchester, going about 3000 fps, and worked perfectly on close to 20 animals ranging from 75-pound springbok at close to 400 yards to blue wildebeest at 25 yards. Blues are basically the size of elk, and I deliberately shot the shoulder knuckle on a quarter-on shot. Eileen took a .308 loaded with 150 E-Tips on a combined cull/trophy hunt to RSA the next year and had similar results on a bunch of animals from a 20-pound monkey to a 600-pound zebra.

In North America Eileen, companions and I and have also used E-Tips and Tipped TSX's ranging from 90-grain 6mm to 180 .30 on animals from coyotes to big bull elk. Same results. I would have to look at my hunting notes to add them all up, but the total is at least 50 animals, and probably more. Haven't seen one fail to open yet.

That's maybe 1/3 of the number of hollow-point "petal" bullets I've seen shot into big game (which would include the Combined Technology Fail Safe as well as the original X and TSX) but the failure-to-open phenonomenon I've seen from those bullets is around one in 25--though always from bullets of .30 caliber or less. The bigger ones have big enough hollow-points to open, at least if the impact velocity is sufficient.

I'd gladly go with the 150gr TTSX. The extra velocity over the 168gr version may come in handy, but on the other hand I doubt if you'd notice any benefit in the 168gr TTSX over the 150.

And I've shot and seen shot about a dozen game animals with the TTSX now (and probably about 75 with the TSX), and I have yet to see a failure. Add that to John's talley, and it's getting fairly statistically significant. Especially if you talley the experience of all the members here combined, with Brad's single TTSX failure (to my knowledge. I haven't read or heard of any others with TTSX's). That's probably somewhere close to 1 failure in 500 kills, I would guess. The total kill count may even be quite a bit higher than that, who knows. But what I know is that I've only seen Brad's 1 TTSX failure to expand (which I'll take every time over a bullet coming apart and failing to penetrate. At least you end up with an unexpanded bullet through the heart/lungs/CNS).

My point is- the 150gr TTSX will likely be your huckleberry