Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting What are your favorite deer bullets and why? Bad experiences?

LOL! LOL! LOL!

Accubonds are my favorite.

The most recent are Nosler Ballistic Tips, 100 grain out of my 250 Savage Ack Imp. For my son’s 250 Savage 100 grain Partitions.
My 358 Win Hornady 200 gr in Spire point and round nose.
I don’t remember having any bullet ‘fail’ on deer in over 50 years of hunting and killing about 60+ whitetail deer using these and many other different firearms and cartridges.
Smallest was 22 Hornet, biggest the 458 Win Mag (300 gr JHP handloads).

ADDED: Thinking back I shot a deer with my Ruger Redhawk with a Keith 44 Mag 250 SWC cast out of straight linotype high in a deer’s lungs. The deer ran for 100 yards and didn’t bleed a drop until it fell over. Not a bullet failure just my poor shot placement

Long time favorites: Speer hotcor flat base, Hornady Interlocks.

Recent 10 years: TSX and TTSX, Accubonds.

Conclusion, almost anything works well on deer, the only disappointment being a Speer boat tail completely disintegrating inside a mule deer shoulder (I like pass thrus).

100 grain Nosler Partitions in .243. Drops deer like they're falling through a trapdoor.

180 gn 30 cal Speer Grand Slam.
Every deer I have shot with them has gone straight to the ground. Never taken 1 step. Always shoots through and doesn't bruise up the meat bad around the holes. And a couple of them were bucks chasing does running. Hit them too far back and they still dropped dead.

In .308 I’ve used more 150 horn flat base than anything. Never a surprise from that bullet. 150 AB, Sierra and rem C-L have also always worked. Only two bullets I’ve had “fail” were a 150BT and 165 horn btsp ( out of a 308) that spit their cores out but I only know that from finding them while butchering the dead deer.

In 44 mag carbine 240 Nosler sp

In 243 100gr horn flat base spire point

270 130 horn sp

8mm mag 180 or 200tsx

300 savage 99 165 Speer hot core RN

Never had a bullet failure. Prefer lead to jacketed but use both. Never shot any mono-metal bullets, doubt that I will.

I like nos bal tips for deer in 6mm, 257, 6.5, 270, 7mm, and 30.

They all made them go bang flop.

Not as good, but will do are Hornady SST and Nos accubond.

Barnes TSX and TTSX are the only bullets that I've hunted with in my .375 RUM and .300 Weatherby. I've used them on exotics in Texas, 2 bull elk in Montana, 5 hunts in Africa, a hunt in New Zealand, and a hunt in Azerbaijan. Most were one shot kills including a Cape Buffalo and a Leopard. NEVER had any copper fouling, and all shoot moa or better.

As for my favorite deer bullets, since 1978 almost all of my mule and whitetail deer, 3 bighorn and a Dall ram, a mountain caribou, and one of my best 6x6 bull elk fell to single 117 grain Sierra Spitzer bullets. No bad experiences with any of them.

Favorites - Accubond, Ballistic Tip, Interlock, CoreLokt

Never Use - Sierra anything

Prior to retirement I legally culled deer on large plantations down this way. 99% if not 99.9% were does. I won’t mention numbers here but I took deer with every caliber from 222 up to 300 RUM with virtually every bullet made.

Our bullets made now are all very good. Hit a deer well and they all go down...period. I was required to keep records on caliber, bullet, range to target, etc, including notes on reaction to the shot (DRT, ran 50 yards, etc). Noslers all worked very well with exactly one failure. Sierras were fine as were Hornady’s and Speer. Barnes TSX’s and TTSX’s worked fine but occasionally you had cases where the deer ran very long distances before being recovered. Corelokt bullets worked amazingly well. Swift Sciroccos were iffy in their first iteration. Inconsistent at best. Scirocco II showed much better results. VLD’s worked better with heavy for caliber bullets. Just my observations from real world situations.

CoreLokt’s were my bullet of choice in all of my 280’s.

I'm shooting 130gr trophy copper(nosler e tip) and they are the best bullet I've ever shot unbelievably acccirate and just flying outta the 270 wsm

I used Sierra 180’s for a long time. No problems.
Used lots of Hornadys. No issues.
Now using 200 grain partitions, mostly, in my 30-06. No issues.

My favorite deer bullet is one with proper shot placement.

After hundreds of deer from 222 through 375 I can say that I have never had a bullet failure. Wish I could say the same about improper shot placement!

Have used C&C, bonded, to monos. Have never used Bergers or Lapua style on deer.

My thoughts continue to evolve, but right now I am liking bonded or stout C&C, for best effect, or mono's when meat processing is a concern

I tend to keep it simple...... all new rifles start out with Hornady flat base bullets in the proper weight class per caliber, for the game to be pursued. Never had a failure and most were plenty accurate for their intended purpose.

If all I could get were the Hornady Interlok bullets, I wouldn’t bat an eye......

Seems to be a lot of good bullets these days, the modern day NBT is a fine deer bullet, I have had spectacular result with Hornady A Max but my preferred bullet these days is a 6.5mm 129 Lapua Scenar or a .308 155 Scenar

250 savage 117 grain round nose, 308 150 grain SST30-06 180 grain SST 358 win 200 grain IL 9.3x62 232 grain Norma Vulcans. Can’t reall say I have had a bad experience but let’s just say I was not satisfied with 100 grain corelocs in 243. Both shots resulted in dead deer but no exit wound and only found empty jackets inside.

Past few seasons, I have been using Nosler Ballistic Tips. Bang flop on deer. Might be trying something different this season.