The old Silvertip was, in some models and some calibers, very reliable. In others it was a catastrophe. You never knew until you shot something.
I have a friend who's shot dozens of elk with 130 Silvertips in the .270. His father bought 1000 of them way back when and they're very reliable: expand and penetrate just like Nosler Partitions.
At other times other makes/calibers of Silvertips have come apart like varmint bullets. Another friend had to shoot a brown bear 11 times before it quit, mostly because very few bullets even made it through the wet hair on the big bruin. This with 300-grain .375's! I personally had a 150-grain ST from a .30-06 come apart on the shoulder of a forkhorn mule deer back in the 1980's, a little buck that wouldn't have drssed much over 100 pounds.
I believe Winchester eventually recognized the erratic reputation the bullet had and moved on to better things.
JB
