Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Nosler Accubond plastic tip - Useful or a Gimmick?

I recently got very good results from Nosler .257 Roberts ammo with a plastic tip.

100 yards


Is it a gimmick or does it really enhance accuracy

link to Nosler Accubond

My experience is that NAB hand loads and factory loaded NAB ammo in .270 Win and .30-06 are easily MOA from a couple different rifles for each chambering. Also, no WT deer have walked away from the .270 NAB's, factory or hand loads. Gimmick or not, they work for my situation.

I'm in a similar boat. The 200 gr Accubond out of a 300 win mag straight kills elk. And coyotes......

Don't know how much the plastic tip helps but it sure doesn't hurt.

It has nothing to do with accuracy. It makes the bullet more aerodynamic by improving BC. Meaning it will retain impact speeds at longer ranges than less aerodynamic bullets and have a little less drop at longer ranges. It also drives into the bullet at impact helping expansion.

I use them in 270 wed, 270 WSM, 270 Weatherby, and 257 Weatherby.

They kill, but I don’t think any better than Ballistic tips for deer and pigs.

Got some 6.5 140gr AB factory seconds . Suppose to be cosmetic blem only. Will try out this year on my local muley's..

The plastic tip is to eliminate battered tips under recoil while still in the magazine.
It is meant to promote quick expansion.
It is not primarily meant to enhance accuracy. Accuracy was/is a byproduct.

Remove the tips and the POI will change. I was given some 140 AccuBond .264 and some of the tips had come out or had been removed??? I thought what would happen if I was out on a hunting trip and something happened to the tips. So I loaded up a handful and shot them. POI was 3-4” to the right at 100 yds. They grouped well but the group had moved.
That convinced me that if somehow the tips were removed or damaged I would need to take a couple of shots and get the rifle resighted in.

^^^^ This.

We use them quite a bit in various rifles. The 110g AB provides the best long range ballistics of any bullet I've tried in my .257 Roberts, as does the 225g AB in my .338WM. Just developed a .270 Win load for Daughter #1 using the 150g ABLR. The 140g AB gets used in my .280 Rem, another 150g AB in .30-06 Accuracy is very good in all and on-game results have been excellent.

Not much to dislike. We use other bullets as well but the AB's will continue to get used because they work. Hopefully the ABLR will work as well.

That's what I thought, but JB says they usually separate and go off to the side on impact. The big hollow point under it then does its job.

Always exceptions to the rule of course.

That's been demonstrated in numerous high-speed videos of plastic-tipped bullets tested in clear ballistic gelatin.

The theory that the tip drives into the bullet to start expansion appeared before there was any way to "see" what was actually happening.

Interesting. This from Nosler.

"The unique white polymer tip resists deforming and initiates expansion on impact."

Yeah, some other bullet companies say the same thing. But there's a difference between "initiate" and "drive down into the bullet."

While the tip may "initiate" expansion, a little, the videos mentioned all show the tip actually moving ahead of the bullet as it starts to expand, probably because the expansion is slowing the bullet down considerably. Shortly thereafter the tip drifts off to the side of the expanding bullet. It does not end up imbedded in the middle of the mushroom. Or at least I have never seen or heard of that happening.

The tips don't "prevent" bullet deformation either. My 280AI slightly flattens the tips of polymer bullets under recoil

I’ve found the blue tip from a TTSX at the entrance.

I've been meaning to save some deformed tips and exclusively shoot them to see how they group. Might be a good story there for a writer to pursue. Ditto for deformed lead tips as well.

Is there any functional difference between the current plastic tips and the old Remington/Peters Bronze Points?

When I was given a Remington 660 in 6mm, my Father gathered up a dozen or so boxes of R/P 90 grain BP factory loads, as he felt that they were a better choice for shooting whitetails than the 80 or 100 grain 6mm options. Thankfully my 725 in 244 has a 1-10" ROT barrel, so it handles 100 grain bullets as well as any other 243 or 6mm that I've shot. I still have some of that +/-50 year old Peters 90 grain 244 ammo, both BP and PSP.

They may delay or slow expansion a tiny bit under certain circumstances, hard to prove one way or another, but I'm guessing they never race ahead of the bullet before expansion starts. If that is the case it would be hard to argue they don't help initiate the expansion.

There was an interesting development that the Hornady engineers detected when testing their 143 gr. ELD_X in the 6.5 CM. Their chrono data showed a significant loss in velocity at a certain distance. They eventually determined their plastic tip was partially melted from the rotational heat buildup. They "hardened" the tip and the chrono data anomaly cleared up. Kudos to science.

Ten rounds from 900 yards with .308 AccuBonds

308 Win/Remington M700 factory barrel/action by .com/photos/61286670N08/]Sharps Man, on [bleep]