Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting 180 grain AccuBond for deer?

So would a 180 gr AB work fine on deer, or would it over penetrate without doing much damage?

Here's the bullets and data for those who care:

[img:left][/img]

[img:left][/img]

These were the only 5 bullets recovered. The rest were passthroughs. The 160's were sizzling along pretty good at 3100+ at the muzzle. Combine that with impact at 100-140 yards, smashing through shoulders, etc. I was still a bit surprised that the bullet recovered from the zebra lost so much weight. Didn't really matter though, because the animals only ran from 0-65 yards are so before falling over.

there is a reason they earned the nickname "accubomb"

I've shot 2 elk with them and both blew up. One came apart and I later found the core in the heart. The meat waste was tremendous on both of them. My partners told me to not bring them to camp again.

Did these 160 AB's "blow up"?

Deer aren't hard to kill. Just about any bullet will work. I've killed mule deer using inexpensive factory rounds. Before boned bullets became all the rage, CoreLokts were the deer killing gold standard.

Not a single head of big game is long for this world sans its heart and/or lungs. It doesn't matter what destroys either. All that matters is that one or both are destroyed. That's simple biology.

BTW, how did our North American hunting forefathers manage to kill everything on this continent with anemic cartridges such as the 7x57 & .303 British using bullets that us modern hunters believe won't work on the same species?

JG,

Reading this post, I was going to cross reference your recent Safari.

Glad you showed up and saved me the trouble.

It's hard to argue with success.

WIth my .300 WM, I use 180 NBT's and 180 NAB's. These were the earlier NBT's and they are pretty expansive. I like that combo, because those two bullets have the same BC and about the same POI. I can use my turret with either one. The NBT is slightly more accurate than the NAB, both are pretty good.

JB has dome some work with the newer NBT's and found the jackets to be about the same thickness as NAB's. He also mentioned that the NAB jacket may get a mild annealing from the bonding process which uses heat. That may make the forward portion of the NAB jacket slightly softer.

DF

I would guess the newer BT's and the AB's should expand about the same. The AB's, at least theoretically, should hold together better than BT's due to the bonding process.

DF