Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Favorite bullet for 308 win

Unfortunately im not impressed with my experience with 180 partitions.

Unfortunately im not impressed with my experience with 180 partitions.

Prepare yourself for execution via a dull butter knife...

LOL.

Dancing Bear, it's Interesting you should mention the 150 grain Winchester Power Point.

Many year ago when I was shooting a lot of 30-06 and 308 in M-1 Garand, M-14 and FALs I bought (if memory is correct)16,000 of them from Black Hills. I found them to shoot to the calibrations of the issue sights and they were about 2X and in some guns 3X more accurate then most FMJ Ball ammo. I did kill a few deer with them, but mostly I simply loaded ammo for my match and fun shooting for all my 30 cal military rifles. I am almost out of them now.
But 5 years ago I was with my wife and a few of our friends on an elk hunt and I had thrown in my Mossberg MVP rifle as an "extra' so we'd have one more gun in camp. As it turned out we got into an area where the elk were not moving and in our hunting we'd seen them over on the far horizons from our position, so we all decided to move the camp over about 5 miles, but you had to "go around" to get to the place we wanted to set up the new camp so we threw all the stuff into out 3 trucks and drove around the mountains to get over on the other side. We all had gun cases for our main rifles and for a stupid and non-thinking reason, we put them into the trucks first and laid all the camp gear over the folded tents and drove over. We thought we'd be there in less then an hour. The MVP with it's long magazine didn't firt a case and has a plywood stock, so I never bother to case it and it ended up on the top of the pile, last thing thrown in before we left to relocate the camp.
Well guess what......... We get about half way there and jump out a heard of elk about 75 in number and all the rifles except the MVP are buried on the bottom of the pile. The MVP uses the same magazines as an M14 and those old M14 mags were all loaded with my ammo from the old days with 150 grain Win P.Ps. So I and my wife jump out of the rig and get after them. I drop my 2 cows and hand the rifle off to her, she kills her remaining cow for that year, and we give the rifle to our friends who go after the elk and cut them off about 1/2 mile up and they kill their elk (20 rounds in that mag was a blessing that time because all the extra ammo was also on the bottom of the pile in the 4Runner)
We filled every elk tag we had in about 5 minutes.

As a rule, in my experience 150 grain lead core 30-06s, 300 mags and 308s do not exit elk. Well most of the WW points did. I butchered all those elk myself and I recovered only 2 bullets. I have them on my mantel piece right now. One weighs 131 grains and one weight 129 grains, and BOTH of those 2 bullet broke large bone which is why I assume they didn't exit. The total of hits on those 5 elk were 9 rounds and of the 9, 7 went clear through and exited. WAY better performance then I expected from a 150 grain lead core bullet on elk. And with recovered weights of 131 and 129 grains, I have to say the performance of those 2 bullets was the full equal of any Partition I ever used. Not bad for bullet that cost me only about 6 cents each in theers than I have killed myself. I have seen a lot shot with 30-06s and quite a few with 308s and 300 mags. Yet for body shots with 150 grain leadcore 30 cal bullets I don't think I have EVER seen a Remington Corelokt, a Sierra, a Federal Power Shock, a Hornady or a Speer bullet exit an elk, but 7 of the 9 WW Power Points did. Up until that hunt I just assumed the PP bullets were about the same as everyone else's 150s. Of the 9 shots fired some were not perfectly placed, yet the penetration was so good that they still got through and hit vitals and left exits.

So I can't say this is definitive information, but it certainly was enough to get me to have a far higher degree of respect for the old plain vanilla 150 grain Power Point bullets made by Winchester.

i use 150gr Partition Golds.Have yet to recover a single one.

George

We don't get very many elk down here in south Georgia :), but the Gamechanger has held up very well on large hogs, all purposely shot on the shoulder.. Very accurate bullet and it certainly passes muster down here. The Partition still remains just about perfect in my opinion

Meaning what? Please quantify this statement.

If I were to go elk hunting this fall or whenever, I would use my 308win with a Speer 180gr Mag-Tip.
I have no elk experience with any bullet, but that is what I would use. They shoot well in my rifle with a dose of RL15.

I used a 165 bear claw on my one 308 elk.

My daughter has killed a cow and two 6 point bulls with 150 fusion federal factory load. All three were dead on the ground inside of 40 yards.