Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting TSX/TTSX on Deer Questions

Well, all this has been very interesting. I never had much interest in the mono bullets until I got lucky a few years ago and drew a tag for a deer hunt in the Kaibab. Arizona requested the hunters in the kaibab "voluntarily" use monometal bullets as it was part of the condor flyway.
I had two rifles that I wanted to use, a Winchester M70 Featherweight .257 bob or my .35 Whelen. I did load work for the two and the .257 has proven to not like the TSX bullet so far. On the other hand, the .35 Whelen proved to be a tack driver from the first trial loads with the 225 gr. TSX.
Other bullets I have tried are the 120 and 140 gr. TSX in a 7x57 and .280 Rem. Right now, the 7x57 seems to like the 120 gr. bullet and the .280 the 140 gr. bullet.
Ss far as game take, the .257 Bob, 7x57 and .280 have only killed paper with the TSX bullets. The .35 Whelen has taken two cow elk so far, the first dropping if someone and pulled all foug legs out from under her and the one just this last January slowly sank by the rear end and collapsed. Neither animal move in any direction except straight down.
Aftr reading Mule Deer's comments on the smaller bullet and their lack of a blood trail kind of makes me a bit leery of using them on deer. My rifle appears to have a somewhat slow barrel and upping the charge a tad makes accuracy go all to hell. Been playing a bit with the seating depth on the Bob and there's been some improvement. I'll be doing the same with the 7x57 and .280.I've thought about using the .280 next year on my cow elk hunt. Anybody used the 140 gr. 7MM TSX om elk? How did it do?
Paul B.

Here is a price comparison.

BAR30875 .308 150 GR TIPPED TRIPLE-SHOCK BT (50) Yes $32.05

BER30508 BERGER .308 155 GR MATCH HUNTING VLD (100) Out of Stock $40.80

Thus the mono bullets cost 50% more.

While I could afford 'whatever' to hunt I do shoot 4 rifles every week or more often in good weather and from what I read I don't see an advantage to mono's.

If you shoot that often how come you never know WTF you're talking about?


Dave

So the mono's cost more money. Big deal.

At Midway's current prices, the Berger VLDs cost about 61% more than Hornady A-MAX and about 50% more than Hornady InterLocks. Why are you wasting money on the more expensive Bergers?

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that using mono's on paper doesn't make much sense fiscally. Saving the mono's for hunting and using cheaper bullets for paper works for a lot of people.

Last year I took a big mulie buck and a cow elk using 180g Barnes MRX, predecessor to the TTSX. Today's Midway prices are $35.39/box of 50 for the TTSX and $49.49 per box of 100 for 175g Berger VLDs. In other words, I could have saved a whopping total of $0.43 by using Berger VLDs instead of Barnes TTSX.

What I want is a bullet that will hold together after impact, provide rapid but controlled expansion and provide deep penetration. Moreover I want a bullet that puts game on the ground quickly and reliably. I've driven Barnes 180g mono's front to back and out on mule deer and only one animal (an antelope I shot with a 100g TTSX) made it 25 yards. The rest have dropped where they stood or have taken only a few steps at most. The mule deer buck this year managed it 3-4 steps and the cow about double that. A Berger VLD might have put them on the ground quicker but it wouldn't have mattered a whit.

Last night my wife and I dined out and I enjoyed a $7.95 glass of wine. If I saved $0.43 per year in bullets it would be over 18 years before I saved enough for another glass of that wine.

You see no advantage to using monos but I see no point in using a bullet I consider too frangible just to save $0.43 per hunt. And for targets I'm fine using the (much less expensive than Berger VLD) Hornady A-MAX.

Far as I'm concerned, there's bullets for the range and bullets for hunting...sometimes they are the same and sometimes they arent....but even if I went to Africa to cull stuff,and used 50 bullets over there,costing a whole $1 each...that's like $50 bucks!

People spend a grand on a rifle....$500 to $2000 on a scope...gawd knows how much to hunt....and then complain about the cost of a bullet...the only damn thing that actually kills anything.

I never udnerstood skimping when it comes to bullets for hunting....for the range and varmints ,yes.For BG hunting? Don't understand it myself.

For years I shot Core Lokts and silver tips (not ballistic tips but the old style silver tips). Never had a problem.
I guess I got caught up in the hype of the Barnes bullets, and the boxes they were in were purty...
Anyway, not being happy with the level of dead I was achieving I switched. Shot a nice buck, no blood trail. He ran 150 yards and I was dang lucky to find him. Actually he was rutted up so much I smelled him when I walked by. Chalked it up as a bad shot. Next, shot a 10 point, he exited the food plot, no blood trail. Again he ran 150 yards and again I was dang lucky to find him. Quite by accident, actually was giving up until the next day and found him on the trail to the truck. Next up was a really nice buck who showed himself at 250 yards. First shot was in the shoulder. I expected bang/flop, but got a "limp" out of him. He staggered 30 yards and stopped. Pumped another behind his shoulder, and he left town. Very little blood. Trailed him for 6 hours, then looked for buzzards, ect for 2 weeks. (actually went back yesterday) nothing. To each his own, but I'm done with these bullets in the 308

What bullet what weight?

If I thought the extra cost of Barnes would increase my chances of success while deer hunting, I'd buy em in a heartbeat. However, I'm sold on cup and cores for general deer
hunting because I honestly believe, with all else equal, they put em down faster. The monos will blow away less meat, but the way I figure it, the cost of the extra meat lost by cup and cores is just about proportional to the extra cost of the monos.

Have only shot 7 Deer and one Mountain Goat with TSX/TTSX from a .223AI, .22-250, .308W, .30-06 and .338Fed. 2 in the head, 3 in the chest that exited the back hams and 3 in the shoulders that exited the opposite side. Total distance traveled for all is under 40yards.

Friends have shot two Deer with them. One a .223Rem in the lungs that went about 70 yards and one with my .223AI in the shoulder that went around 20 yards.

Just one for me. 120 TTSX from a 7-08.

I got a great blood trail, likely due to it being a low-chest hit. The deer (a doe) did run a long ways. The wound channel was definitely different- much "cleaner" if that makes sense.

I can like them for what they do well and yet still prefer other bullets for what THEY do well. Having never once seen a penetration "problem" with deer in 20+ kills I'm not looking for a solution. On the other hand, I have seen well-hit deer go a loooong ways and that is a problem. So personally, I tend to hedge my bets a bit more to the quick-killing side of things than the way-overpenetrating <grin> side. But I do see the validity to either approach.

So far the 85gr tsx .243, 100gr .257, 115gr 257, 130gr 277, 150gr 30, 168gr 30, 225gr 338, and 270gr 375 have all worked on deer, from about 80 to 300 yards.

Why is it that stories like this or from Brad are not uncommon, and yet other people can have radically different experience with these bullets?

I've killed a fair number of deer with Barnes bullets. I worked up each rifle for everyone I hunt with using Barnes bullets now and between us we have sixty odd deer killed with them. All but for one, one shot kills. A couple of deer got a second dose after they hit the ground, but they never moved from where they were hit (nor would they have).

One of the guys is a terrible shot, he's gut shot three and shot one in the knee. The knee shot deer traveled a total of about 250 yards before I killed it. One of the gut shot deer made it about 150 yards.

Of the rest of the deer, none made it much past fifty yards. One might have made sixty.

I don't care what you shoot them with, take out the heart and lungs, no matter how completely and they can still make that fifty yard run. The last one I shot with a muzzle loader (Barnes T-EZ bullet), I put a golf ball size hole all the way through including both shoulder blades low on the blade. This was about a 100-110 lb fawn. He did not go down when hit. The lungs but for one fist size chunk were gone, just red soup left. The upper 3/4 of the heart was shredded and mostly gone. The heart was loose in the chest. He made it the same typical fifty yards give or take. I don't know how to do a better job than that short of head shots. I could literally have run a shovel handle through the hole and had a handle to carry the bugger out.

These bullets may not make the nastiest holes in deer of everything I have used, but they by far are the most consistent performers I have used in a span of 56 years of loading my own and shooting deer. It just seems to me that a whole lot more people ought to be having a whole lot more trouble with them if there's a problem with the bullets.

the correct answer seems to be "all of the above", I won't use partitions or BT's because I don't like them (reading here seems like they have improved from 15 years ago), another man won't use mono's because he had a bad experience with them. The TSX/TTSX seems easy to work up a load for in the 3 calibers I have tried so I like using them. So in the end its a matter of opinion more than anything else.

With a 7x57, 280 and 30-06, for hogs, white-tails, exotic deer including red hinds and maybe another cow elk, I'll stick with Ballistic Tips and Partitions. capt david