Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Hornady .243 100 grain boat tail soft point Interlock

I would turn over as many rocks as possible and buy up as many 95 NBT's as you can find. I can't comment on smaller game like Antelope, but for deer and black bear the 95 NBT is one of the best killers in .243

Well...just to stoke the fire a bit the 90 grain accubond is on sale over at sps for $16/50. Put the code "inependance day" and you should get 15% off your order!

I used to use this bullet in my .240 Weatherby shooting goats off cliffs at 500 yards using a 2 foot holdover.
It works great in my experience for those 120-200 pound animals and they have skin much thicker than deer.

I have killed over 100 white-tails out to almost 400 yards using the 100 Interlock in my 6mm. I load it to right at 3000 fps. It has never failed to do what it was supposed to. It has taken a few antelope also.

It is a very accurate bullet and very good for deer. I believe that if I felt the need to use a little caliber for elk, I would NOT use it. I would go with a 100-grain Partition or even a Barnes.

243 got a bad rap in the 60s due to cheap bullets not exiting. The deer would run a hundred yards or so in dense brush and not blow much blood out the small entry. That's a problem for many when shot at dusk and the hunter is not expended and doesn't have a good light.

I wouldn't hesitate to use it on a broadside bull elk and hit the shoulder or ribs with that bullet.

In case nobody mentioned it, I personally have had better terminal performance out of the flat base Hornady 100 grainer than the BTSP 100 grainer�.

YMMV

After analyzing my big game hunting notes (now coming up on 50 years of dead stuff), I decided the common knowledge that boattail cup-and-cores come apart far more frequently than flat bases was a little exaggerated, since an equal number of flat-base bullets had separated over that period, both in my rifles and those of hunting companions. Also, even though some cores left the jacket, the bullet almost always killed the animal anyway. Often the "separated" core was found in or next to the jacket under the hide on the far side.

But one of the very few bullets that failed to penetrate the chest cavity of a deer was a Hornady boattail Interlock. It wasn't the 100-grain 6mm, but the 117-grain .25. The rifle was a .257 Roberts and the animal a mule deer doe about 100 uards away, quartering toward my cousin Eric, who was standing next to me. The logical shot was the shoulder joint, and that's where the bullet went. The deer turned and started hobbling away, and Eric put another in the ribs, finishing the job. The remains of the first bullet hadn't penetrated the ribs.

Of course, saw basically the same thing on a forkhorn mule deer shot with a 150-grain Winchester Silvertip from a .30-06 factory load. (It was the original Silvertip, not the Ballistic Silvertip, which is a different-colored Nosler BT.) The range there was about 200 yards, and again the bullet hit the shoulder joint and came apart. I found the empty jacket resting against the ribs. It happened another time with a 150-grain Federal .30-30 factory load on a Montana whitetail doe, which supposedly isn't possible at such low velocity.

On the other hand, have had a Sierra 120 6.5mm at about 2700 and a Nosler Ballistic Tip 100 .25 at 3000 go through shoulder joints on deer of about the same size and end up at the rear of the ribs on the other side. The Sierra shot placement was a little bit of an accident, as the deer turned a little just as I shot, but the BT was deliberate, and the range only about 50 yards. That little 100-grain Ballistic Tip has a pretty thick jacket.

I was kind of surprised at the 117 Hornady not making it through the ribs, and really surprised at the 150 .30-30 bullet, but then life is full of surprises.

The other thing for me, quite frankly was that my rifle didn't like the boat tails�..other did, mine didn't.

My fave load in my .300 H&H was a 1909 Gr. Hornady boat tail, which would often shed the core, but almost invariably the core and jacket would be found within a couple inches of each other.

1909 grain is a HEAVY bullet for sure!

I forgot to mention�its the 300H&H UBER Mag!

Honest to God, when I was in the gun biz I had a customer ( trying to impress the guy behind the gun counter-if you can imagine that�) tell me he had a .300 H&H Weatherby Mag Improved�.


I asked him if he couldn't fit more adjectives behind the title and it went right over his pointed little head�.

The bullets that I've seen come apart weren't wearing boattails.

That is some funny stuff that right, that right there is.

Ingwe
I think I know that guy- When he stopped at my counter he was talking about hunting caribou in Paradise Valley- and I did not make that up.

No doubt built on an Argentine 1909 action....

Not so much terminal performance, but it is scary accurate in my rifle. I averaged groups in the .6s with that bullet....until they quit making them.

Like the 170 grain FP for my .30-30.....geeeezzzz, I think Hornady took inventory at my house and said "Let's discontinue these"...

Me too, why do they hate us ??

Is the Sierra flat base heavier than the Hornady flat base?

jr1968

I dunno, I think they are both 100 grainers, though I haven't shot a Sierra at anything in years...

No, it is the same weight. I averaged a bunch of both bullets for data correction in Quickload, and my lots of both the Hornady and Sierra bullets averaged 99.9 grains.

My limited experience with them tells me that the Hornady is more stoutly constructed, and more likely to penetrate deeper. That might change if I shot more deer with the bullets or the range were longer, as most of the deer I shoot are well under 100 yards.

All in all, I got better accuracy and on-game performance with the Hornady.

So I went with the TTSX....It shoots real good in my rifle, too!