Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Why no love for Speer bullets

I reload and shoot and hunt with Speer handgun bullets in my Ruger 41 and 44 hunters. Accuracy and performance seems to be very good. But......

How come no love for Speer Rilfe bullets. Rarely mentioned here on the Fire and never see them at my LGS. Would seem that Barnes (TTSX), Nosler and Hornady are about IT!!

The TTSX-them things will penetrate just about anything, from any angle. Recovered one from a huge hog and one from a buffalo. I've used them on three international trips with great success. Don't use Nosler anything(bullets). Don't know why, just don't. Hornady, well I grew up with Hornady (really, Joyce Hornady taught me how to reload) and have used them successfully for 55 years and have never been disappointed.

Sierra groups are usually pretty good, but performance lacks (sucks).

Speer, well they would seem to be in last place and loosing ground.

They don't advertise much that's for sure. Round nose bullets are a dying breed in the market place but their .308 150 RN is one of the great deer bullets.

I like the 87 grain HotCore and TNT .257" bullets.

I also like the 180 and 220 grain .358" FPs.

The 35 cal 180 grain hotcor is a great bullet

I just put a .30-06 together, an older Savage 110 action, ER Shaw barrel, some off-brand composite stock, and worked on the trigger until it didn't take 2 men and 4 boys to get it to break.

WW case, CCI 200 primer, Speer Hot-cor 150 grain flat-base .012" form the lands, and a Garand-safe charge of AA2495. 2735 fps and under MOA.

You must shoot a 250 Savage.

I've never had a bad experience with a Speer bullet and have used them for what I would estimate to be around 70% of all my big game hunting.

Mo Ed -

I know I'm in a/the minority around here but I don't hunt deer with Speer bullets, even Hot Cors.

I hunt and prefer hi vel cartridges such as 6mm Rem, 270 Win, 7 RM, 300 Win Mag, etc. that said I push bullets relatively fast.

We have discussed this subject a few times in the past 4-5 yrs. Several report the Speer rifle bullets perform well at medium or low velocity.

So and on par with reports, I have had every Speer bullet to separate or 'splode'
on White tail deer. That's why, and it's true from MY experience.

Others MMV (mileage may vary)

They stopped making bullets I like to use like the 6.5mm 140 gr G.S. and 30 cal 180 gr Mag Tip, changed the Grand Slam's to be not as tough as the dual core bullet. The Deep Shock and Deep Curl becoming available and then disappearing was really annoying too. I would be using them more but they change or drop the ones I like.

I do like and still use the .311 180 gr RN and 358 250 gr spitzer and will look at trying some 150 gr Hot Cors in the 270 Win and the soon to be arriving 308 Norma Mag will likely see some Hot Cor's too. Really miss the 180 gr Mag tip though.....

I use them. I like them.

The 165g Hot Cor in the 308 has been great on pigs. I love the 150g Hot Cor in my 270 Win. Used the 130 with good results too.

For some reason though - in this country at least - they've got really pricey. They used to be the cheapest but now they're about 30% more expensive than the equivalent Hornady products.

*I doubt Speer is slowing down at all... here in Oregon, at least the Southern part, they can readily found... a good cross section of their product line...

I use a lot of Speer's bullets, for varminting and hunting...

the varmint ones I tend to order on line from Powder Valley...

Speer is owned by ATK, which also makes Federal and they also make pretty much most of the 17 HMR rimfire rounds and a bunch of other rimfire rounds...

bet more of their production goes into factory ammo etc...

Like everyone else, I am sure they are running at max capacity, but just don't need to advertise any more... and they know that the market is eventually going to slow down... so don't want to add...

Hornady seems to be the most responsive and orientated to the handloading crowd...

no major company in the bullet biz is losing money these days...
or in need of finding new markets...

I think it's the color of the box.

I would be the first to say that most folks do not think real logically. Oh sure, they hide it behind a veneer of what passes for rational thinking, but underneath is pretty much an instinct-driven animal. I would be the first to admit I am no better.

Unless you are looking for bananas, yellow is not a good color. Red, on the other hand, has been shown to evoke hunger, anger, aggression, and our animal brains have been finely tuned to pick up red in our environment. Hornady makes their boxes red, and they have done a pretty good job of filling the shelves with that color for decades. You walk into a store, you look around, you see those red boxes first.

Speer has a passive yellow color. You have to know what you're looking for. If you want Speer bullets, you got to go to the red boxes and then hang a left. Hornady owns whatever space it inhabits, at least in every store I go.

A weekend or so ago, I took Angus out driving. He got his temps, and needs some time behind the wheel. I decided to have him drive up north to a sporting goods store I had not visited in almost a decade. It was way back on a residential street. You'd miss it if you did not know it was there. We walked in. I had not seen this place since the Bush Administration.

My first reaction to myself? " Oh!, they've moved the Hornady bullets out into the middle of the room! They used to be over by the cash register."

Just for kicks, I had business down in my reloading room this morning. I went down. I've got probably 70% of my bullet shelf space filled with red boxes. The rest is white (generic), or clear plastic bags, a bit of black and gold, some blue (Midway generic). . . and oh! There the are! A few yellow boxes. I knew they were there somewhere.

color of box, WTF - your kidding, right?

I used Speer bullets a lot. I started out using Speer and Sierra 75 grain bullets in my 6mm in the 60's - both shot around 1/4" at 100 yards.
When I shot an antelope (pronghorn)six times (100 grain Hotcor 6mm in 6 mm Remington)in the lungs before it dropped and each of the bullets exited at apparently the same diameter as the entrance I stop using Speer on game animals. Speer bullets always shot accurately, but I don't trust them on game. Now I've read testimony in this forum that the Speer 35 caliber bullets expand well on Elk, so I may try them. I'm sorry though, yellow boxes work for me as well as red. I don't like green for game animals though - and that has more to do with explosive Sierra bullets than the color green.

When I was growing up Speer was about the only bullet to be found around here. I've used them to kill a buttload of deer. I hate that the Mag Tips are gone the 150 was my main hunting bullet in the 308 and I loved the 160 in the 7x57.

I've always gotten good accuracy from Speer and they always kill well for me.

Now it all makes sense.

IMO Shaman is being T N C.

I don't think I've seen such a ridiculous "Troll Post" in all my years of reading the gun forums.
But it makes perfect sense because no one is paying attention to those Berger Bullets in the banana boxes either.

When I started handloading, Speer were among the hardest bullet of the big 4 of the time. From about late 70's to early 90's, they softened up, particularly the boat tails but remained good killers on deer sized game as long as the bullets were directed into the chest cavity.

The market has toughened whereby less than perfect placement and full/angling penetration is more commonly spoken of so the CnC bullets have lost favor to the homogenous and expansion restricted designs.

It doesn't change the value of the bullet if you hunt and place your shots well but time and opportunity is overshadowing good intent and hunting prowess.

You will notice the absence of stalking and observing game and waiting for the right shot on these forums but thats ok when the topic is simply the bullet and how it performs.
John

The Deep Curl bullets were quickly becoming my favorite whitetail bullet. I was impressed with their performance. I stocked up on a few, but not enough.

It's almost as if they were trying to protect the Fusion line of ammo by not selling the Deep Curls in the preferred weight for the cartridge.

Had they offered them in different bullet weights from the beginning, I'm sure sales would have flourished. To me, that was a major marketing snafu.

I recently had a conversation with the CEO (Vista, now split from ATK) at a manufacturers summit. I asked him the question specifically about components. His reply was that all efforts were in ammo at this moment. I got the impression they didn't have handloading components high on their priority list.

As was their Deep Shok teaser. And then they turned the Grand Slam into a Mag-Tip, but kept the price the same. They were going to discontinue at least certain Hot-Cors with the introduction of Deep Curls. With the Deep Curl's demise, are they manufacturing the Hot-Cors again? From a reloader's viewpoint, it's hard to get excited about a company's bullets when you don't know what next year will bring.

I've killed dozens of big game animals with Hot-Cors from 6mm to .338, and sent a bunch of small varmints skyward with TNT's.

But in general Speer hasn't kept up with the modern handloading market, and in some ways has gone backwards:

While Hot-Cors are adequately accurate, they've never been known for super-accuracy like some other big game bullets. Plus, the ballistic coefficients don't compete with some other bullets. This doesn't really mean anything in normal hunting, but somehow even normal hunters have become BC obsessed these days.

As somebody already mentioned, the Grand Slams have been turned into what are essentially heavy-jacketed Hot-Cors with an even worse BC. They don't work as well as the older GS's when they hit stuff, and they don't fly very flat. Essentially they're expensive Mag-Tips.

The Speer boattails (which do have somewhat higher BC's) AREN'T Hot-Cors. Instead they're formed like most other cup-and-core bullets, by swaging a cold core inside a jacket, and the core is pretty soft. Consequently they don't hold up on game like the Hot-Cors, though they can be very accurate. But they also don't have the trendy plastic tips beloved by hunters who tend to shoot at longer ranges.

Speer's marketing of DeepCurl bullets was inept, and then the bullets were dropped entirely, while some of the long-selling Hot-Cors were dropped.

None of their varmint bullets have plastic tips, which DO make a difference in both violent expansion and downrange performance in smaller bullets. Their really explosive varmint bullet, the TNT, has such a large hollow-point that it slows down even quicker than soft-points, and far quicker than plastic-tips, so drifts in the wind more. It is "affordable," but plastic-tips have become more affordable in recent years.

Yeah, Speer bullets work, but big game hunters who just want a reliable cup-and-core bullet often choose a Hornady Interlock instead. Hunters who want something that flies flatter and drifts less in the wind buy some sort of plastic-tip, whether for varmints or big game. Hunters who want a premium bullet can't find a real one in Speer's line.

It ain't a mystery.