Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game What is the WORST hunting bullet?

This has been very interesting.

One thing I have learned by visiting various bullet factories, and sectioning and shooting various bullets in both test media and animals, is that most cup and core bullets are pretty similar. Jacket thickness and alloy, along with the lead alloy in the core, are all very close, whether we are talking Core-Lokt, Power Point, Sierra GK or PH, Hornady Interlock, etc.

There are exceptions. Some of the roundnose Core-Lokts still have the thicker jacket sidewalls that were originally part of every Core-Lokt, but haven't been seen in the PSP CL's for close to 20 years. The Speer boattails are not Hot-Cors, which use a fairly hard lead alloy, but are swaged from a soft lead alloy, softer than about any other "big game" bullet on the market.

But the rest of the cup-and-cores are pretty much the same bullet. One may have an Interlock ring, another may have hadsthe core dripped in as melted lead, rather than swaged. Other than that there is no vast difference in jacket or core.

Anybody claiming one is vastly superior or inferior to all the rest is, I suspect, coming to that conclusion on the basis of limited experience, perhaps even a sample of one. When impact velocity is moderate (and really big bone is avoided) they all tend to work pretty well.

I have also gone through my hunting notes on hundreds of big game animals taken over the decades (both mine and those that other folks shot when I was there), and found that cup-and-core boattails do not separate core and jacket any more often than square-based bullets. In fact, in my data they separated less often. I suspect that we have been told boattails come apart so often that we have started looking for it....

Nosler Ballistic Tips are designed to open violently. That is why they kill so well, and also why they chew up meat. You cannot have one without the other.

JB