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

In 2005 (a year after the TSX appeared, but a couple years before the TTSX) Dave Scovill, Randy and I sat around a campfire on a mule deer hunt, and Randy explained how he'd finally been able to get consistent copper to solve the expansion problem--which also solved bullet-forming problems. I had already noticed that several years before the TSX appeared, when the original, ungrooved X-Bullets started shooting far more consistently, and expanding nicely even a longer ranges on lighter game. On of the loads I'd been using was the 120 X-Bullet at 2950 in a very accurate 6.5x55, and it expanded great on a rib-shot pronghorn buck at around 400 yards.

They did have some problems getting the size of the hollow-point right on smaller-caliber TSX's, but once they did, they expanded well.

Randy and Coni Brooks sold Barnes Bullets somewhere around the time Dave Scovill retired as the editor of the Wolfe magazines, so if the new bullets are having problems it has nothing to do with what Randy told Dave many years ago. Dunno if the folks in charge now aren't as careful about the copper, but your elk bullet expanded quite a bit more than some of the earlier X-Bullets I've seen, and did indeed kill your elk within a typical monolithic run.

In fact I killed a mule deer doe this fall with a right-behind-the shoulder double lung shot with a 140 TTSX from a 7mm-08, and she went more than 60 yards yards before falling, which I have learned to expect now and then even with plastic-tipped monos. It exited so dunno if it didn't expand much, but the lungs were pretty torn up. I didn't expect the bullet to crumple the doe right there, especially at 7mm-08 velocity at 200+ yards, but it was open country and I don't see any reason to shoot up extra meat with a softer bullet just so the animal (might) drop a little quicker. But that's me.

During that same discussion Randy confessed that when he designed the X-Bullet, he thought losing petals would be a pretty good thing. But so many hunters started bragging about 100% weight retention, apparently because they believed it led some sort of magic, that he dinked with the bullets until they tended to retain petals. I also wouldn't mind if they lost petals--since I've seen some that have lost ALL their petals and still killed fine--though normally the death run is still longer than with lead-cores.