" The bullet penciled through" (or some form thereof) is repeated in this thread.
How do these "evaluators" know this?
It is the vast majority of my experience that a bullet passing through an animal has escaped any chance of such scrutiny and definitive conclusion as to its actual performance while inside the animal.
Perhaps the only statement making less sense is concluding "bullet failure" based solely on appearance of a bullet (or pieces thereof) recovered from inside an animal that the bullet successfully killed.
Early Ballistic Tips (never touted as sturdy) WERE more fragile than the current ones, but it became then and is the bullet of choice now for our Deer/Antelope camp of 54 years. If dead game is the measure, they have never "failed".
Early Ballistic Tips WERE more accurate, too.
An early 150gr Ballistic Tip from a .270 impacted the BALL of the shoulder of a 6x6 Bob Marshall bull, and exited through the BLADE of the far shoulder at 175yards, rolling him in a cloud of powder snow, dead before he quit skidding.
Speaking solely of my experience. When I refer to a bullet “penciling through” or ice picking, it’s in reference to a bullet failing to expand. When you drag the guts out of a deer and the lungs have a hole approximately bullet diameter it’s a pretty good sign expansion didn’t happen. I saw this more than once when I was loading the early Barnes X bullets without a chronograph and found out later I wasn’t getting enough velocity to keep them in their design window for expansion. I also recovered a couple that had barely begun to open, the petals were no wider than the bullet shank.
They weren’t bad bullets, I just wasn’t using them correctly.
