My 35 cal bullets pictured above were all straight WW alloy. The subsonic hollow points were air cooled, while the full power 35 Remington loads were heat treated and water quenched.
Quench hardening these alloys does make a difference on expansion (i.e. it can prevent expansion if velocity is too low) but works well for the high velocity stuff or large flat points at medium speed.
Getting expansion for hunting from cast bullet alloys is like standing up a tripod, where the three legs are velocity, alloy hardness, and meplat size (or hollow point shape). If those three things are balanced about right it can work very well, but if one of those doesn't match the other two, the whole thing falls on it's face. Fortunately there is quite a bit of wiggle room in all of those so it's not too hard to figure out a good hunting load.
Also - I don't worry too much about maximum weight retention any more. I've found that a bullet nose that fragments or blows apart can be a very effective killer, as long as the remaining shank can penetrate deeply. Done right, that is a lot more like Nosler Partition performance than like a Barnes TSX. Even with that subsonic (i.e. 1,000 fps muzzle velocity) hollow point above, I've seen it blow the nose off on a broadside whitetail shot and take a golf-ball sized chunk out of the heart and lungs while embedding fragments in the spine and sternum from the inside, with the remaining bullet shank breaking the far shoulder and exiting.
Last edited by Yondering; 12/13/19.
