Thanks for posting the pic Sir Ron, your post about the round nosed bullets getting flat is what brought this to mind, the recovered bullet is from a Mos mould that Bill gave me, it's a copy of the 458 cal paper patch bullets the Sharps Rifle Factory loaded and sent out to the Buffalo Hunters, I cast it soft at 30 to 1 to fire in an original '74 Sharps in 45-110, the charge is 100 grains of 1F, velocity from the old rifle is 1269 fps, slap in the middle of the wheelhouse.
I fired this bullet into 4 five gallon water buckets lengthways, recovered the bullet in the 4th bucket, with their tough plastic snap on lids and tough bottoms, it went through a pretty good test, what we see with this recovered bullet is it's shape, look closely at the solids that are world renowned for penetration DEEP and STRAIGHT, that old round nose paper patch is now parallel sided with a tapering nose precisely to a flat point, just like the solids that 'dont' change their shapes.
The old Buffalo Hunters knew what worked, but they may not have known why, it took modern man with countless thousands of man hours, safaris, untold amounts of money, field reports, bullets designs, cnc machines, lathes, lead alloys, presses, etc, etc to finally come up with the best solids we've ever had, when in retrospect, the Buffalo Hunters were doing that 150 years ago.
I have no recovered 40 or 458 cal bullets from game, only have two from my 50-90 hunting rifle, a 715gr paper patch that blew through a great Sable bull at 99 yards, then hit a tree behind the bull, the other is a 750gr flat nosed grease groove bullet fired into a bedded Eland bull at 60 yards, bullet entered right ham, skinners handed me the bullet from the bulls left shoulder, 8-9 feet of penetration, those bullets left the rifle at 1365-1400 fps and were cast with my alloy using three pounds of Lyman #2 with 7 lbs pure lead, it's about like 12 to 1 lead tin alloy.
