Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Barnes bullet... are you completely sold?

Many people dont have a clue what they are talking about.

Always interesting to hear what a bullet from a quickly dead animal should look like.

I’m no gun writer like you but a lot of people have this vision of partition bullets perfect mushroom.. I’m just showing a picture of a partition that isn’t all pretty.. also used a 200gr hot-cor out of a 325 wsm on a caribou 400yds. Only thing I recovered was pieces of lead never found the jacket. Caribou took 3 steps dead, but majority of you would consider that bullet failure because a perfect mushroomed billet was not recovered. I’m in the camp dead animal equals great bullet performance..

Well you see it here all the time, especially when it comes to the TSX bullet. A lot of guys cuss the eld-x, I shot a caribou with one and perfect performance it hit bone and bullet was never recovered. Like I said dead animal means great bullet performance.

They've worked for me in several calibers and weights.

Not too unlike bullet failure stories from the skinning shed...

DF

The partition bullet is designed to blow the from half of the bullet off, with the back half remaining intact. As Insaid they worked perfectly. I've only recovered one partition and it look just like the one you posted with the lead gone.

I have used the TTSX, and LRX exclusively for the last few years. The only reason I use them is because I dont want to deal with lead fragments contaminating my meat supply and being fed to my youngs kids.
With that said I have noticed in many cases you don't get much of a blood trail, of any at all. The entrance and exit wounds are tough to even see with out looking. This kinda makes the exit hole thing moot. The other thing I have noticed is that they simply dont shred internal organs like a Nosler BT or Hornady IL does. Likewise reaction to the shot isnt as pronounced or non existent.
FWIW this applies to 175 LRX and 180 TTSX in the 300 RUM and WSM and the 100 TTSX in the 25-06AI.

Forum member Brad had the same thing happen with a 30 caliber TTSX out of a 308.

If you had recovered it and it didnt look like a perfect mushroom with 100 percent weight retention many would say it failed...
I dont care what the bullet looks like per se. I want the animal dead pronto.

As we’ve discussed before, I don’t doubt your experience, but I have had the opposite experience observing kills with the TTSX/LRX and NBT/HIL bullets. Funny how two pools of experience with fairly significant numbers can lead to such opposite conclusions.

Just because a bullet kills something doesn't mean it worked as it was designed to.

Likewise lots of critters get multiple bullets in them. Some may have not been fatal for whatever reason, or would be fatal only after several miles of running.

If a bullet designed for penetration explodes on an elk's shoulder bone, but a small piece of it makes it to the lungs, then the hunter finally finds the elk miles later, would you say the bullet didn't fail? It killed the elk after all.

Good points, all.

I like DRT, or at least a short death run.

So, a critter being dead and found, ending up in the skinning shed, doesn’t guarantee the bullet performed optimally.

Seeing how it worked (or didn’t) can be interesting.

Suboptimal performance may not technically be failure with a hanging dead critter.

DF

True..and that's where the word "subjectivity" comes to mind.

One man's definition of "good" or even "acceptable" varies quite a bit too, which I suspect is why different people come to different conclusions, especially concerning bullet performance on this site, when most all the parameters are the same.

Have taken 5 deer, from about 50 - 293 yards, with the 145LRX, only 2 took about 5 steps. One from this year was pouring out blood from the exit. Could see a stream through the scope.

A Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles blood trail.

Found one last night with wide blood trail. Bud shot a doe a bit back, hit liver with 130 NPT out of his .270. Yeah, I know. Didn’t have the heart to give him the scoop on his choice of round. Doe ran 60-70 yds, spewing blood. We found her where she ran out of gas (blood); she’s hanging in the cooler.

DF

It also means that more than likely the guy that pulled the trigger might not have put the bullet where it needed to go.

Mystifies me that all these bullets of so called failures came out of dead animals.The best one I have always heard was the animal ran off never to be found so it was definitely bullet failure.Same story as above..

Seeing some of these responses, makes me think about my grandfather’s ‘32 Chevrolet......it got him to town, but not nearly as comfortably as one of today’s modern vehicles is capable of. There are those that refuse to have an objective view of improved technology....and much prefer the “old” ways! memtb

Years ago, I used the original Barnes X bullets and they did real well, from my 7 mag, on three New Mexico Oryx and a few elk. I bought a second rifle, that obviously had a tighter barrel,etc., and had to back the powder off five grains, over the older rifle. I wanted a load that would shoot well in both, and so I went back to Nosler Partitions and Hornady Interlocks and never looked back.

I do a lot of shooting and I do not like the expense of the coppers, for one, and also, I, for the most part, do not shoot real high-velocity cartridges. The only thing that I would use the coppers on, now, would be big dense critters like elk. There is absolutely no need to use them on deer-sized critters.

Another fallacy, is that the lead bullets will harm the children (always goes back to the children, when justifying a reason not to use something). There is zero evidence that any lead shot into an animal has ever had a bad effect on humans.

I have nothing against the coppers, but for my hunting/shooting I will stay with the lead-core bullets.

Mono's like these step a marginal round up to greater task. They definitely makes my 25/06 and bull elk round, without the mono's it is a little to light, imo