Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Barnes bullet... are you completely sold?

jwp,

We've found both TSX's and TTSX's that sheared petals--as well as the original X-Bullets. In fact a couple that lost all their petals. Have seen the same thing with Fail Safes. Have also found "lost" petals in animals with both bullets, sometimes at the entrance but sometimes around the exit.

That said, lost petals don't seem to affect how they kill, and may even enhance "killing power," though petals tend to be lost when hitting relatively heavy bone, which also affects killing power. Eileen killed a big cow elk a couple years ago with a 130 TTSX from the .308 Winchester, quartering to her at around 250 yards. The bullet broke the near leg just above the big shoulder joint, and the cow stumbled 20-25 yards--obviously done for--before falling. Found the bullet minus all 4 petals under the hide in the middle of the ribs on the other side--with a petal in the ribs maybe 2 inches away. (Also found a petal from a 300-grain Fail Safe at the edge of the fist-sized exit hole it left in a Cape buffalo.)

So far have not found any E-Tips that lost any petals, at least that I recall--though will check my records. Also no GMX's have lost any, but haven't used nearly as many of them as X's, Fail Safes and E-Tips.

But as noted above, I don't know how much it matters. In fact Randy Brooks told me years ago, while sitting around a campfire during a mule deer hunt, that the first X-Bullets tended to lose their petals, which he thought probably made them more effective. But then customers started bragging about 100% weight retention, and some even complained about lost petals, even though the animals they came from were really, most sincerely dead. But Randy was enough of a businessman to go with what customers wanted, so tweaked the bullets do they'd tend to retain their petals.

Nowadays, of course, the petals of LRX's are considerably "softer" so the bullets will expand more readily at lower velocities. So it's kind of gone full-circle!