Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Am I overthinking bullet construction?

Yep! My wife would see the CC bill and, after years going by, asked what is ‘Shooters P’and who is buying what from them? (I guess the CC slip only included those letters) I said they were hunting bullets. She wondered why the bills kept coming, coming & coming - I assured her that they were bought at quite a ‘discount’. She shrugged and luckily we’ve never spoken if it again.

Hello Mr. Barsness:

Since there are sooooo many threads about which BT's (Ballistic Tips) are considered "heavy jacket" I would like to compile a secret decoder ring of the jacket thickness of common BT's. I am selfish by nature so please respond with a simple yes/no of my commonly used BT's diameters:

The question is: "Are the following BT's considered heavy jacket"?

Is the .264 diameter 120gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no
Is the .264 diameter 140gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? Yes/no

Is the .277 diameter 130gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no
Is the .277 diameter 140gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no
Is the .277 diameter 150gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no

Is the .308 diameter 150gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no
Is the .308 diameter 165gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no
Is the .308 diameter 168gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no
Is the .308 diameter 180gr Ballistic Tip considered heavy jacket? yes/no

I would really like to compile this for my use. Thanks in advance.

Merry Christmas!

If you're not overthinking bullets, you have no business on this forum.

OK, since we're not having fun anymore, let's go to work. Say the 284 has a 8 twist and the 7mag has a 10 twist.

Go

The 35 caliber 225 grain nbt's I have are white tipped not buckskin they gave me good groups but for some reason I still used the 225 npt on game....mb

Old School,

I would hate to list which on your list are heavy-jackets BTs right NOW, partly because Nosler (and a lot of other bullet manufacturers) continue to tweak specific bullets without making press announcements. (I know this because I've talked to many bullet-company guys, sometimes across campfires. From test-media and field results, have yet to be misled.)

There are apparently two major ways "Hunting" (big game) Ballistic Tips have been tweaked since they appeared around 1985: Heavier jackets, and harder lead alloys in the cores. (These are also the major ways manufacturers of other cup-and-cores tweak terminal performance.)

SomeBT's have also not been tweaked, at least very much. As an example, I always got great results from the 140 7mm, right from the get-go in the late 80s. Years later the late Chub Eastman, the Nosler writer contact for many years, told me that was one they never felt they had to tweak.

But can state with confidence that the 165, 168 and 180 .30s have the heavy jackets. Have also witnessed many excellent field results with the 6.5mm 120s shot from cartridges ranging from the 6.5 Creedmoor to 6.5-.280 AI.

Thanks Mule Deer for the reply.

Gonna do some load development with the 140gr BT's in my .270 WIN this winter yet. The 130gr BT's in my .270 end up with a little too much meat damage on deer and antelope.

Also got a few boxes of the 140gr BT's waiting to be tinkered with in my 6.5x55. I've got some RL-23, RL-26, IMR4955, and Norma URP that is begging to be tried in my Hawkeye African 6.5x55.

I gave up trying to figure out bullets a while back and just go with what I like ! LOL
This came from shooting a whole pile of different cartridges to basically just one, the .303 British.
I know this may be hard to believe, ( I am not a gun writer don'tchaknow) but I have found that when II put the bullet where I want it to go, the deer or moose dies! Go figure!
The cartridge that I have pretty much used virtually since 2009 is the .303British in a Ruger single shot built by Greydog, but I have also used it for about 30 years before that , just not exclusively.
I have made one shot kills DRT ( or just a few yards) with bullets from 150 to 220 grains , and everything from old 215 grain C.I.L. KKSP's and Sabre Tips to modern 150 grain TSX and 220 grain Woodleighs. Barnes.

Ranges have been from 20 yards to over 360 yards ( 372lasered). Both the shortest and longest kills were with Barnes BTW.
Like I stated, every bullet killed well, went where I wanted it to- which is important, and meat loss was not overly huge.
critters were shot with lung shots and shoulder shots.

The end result of all this wondering , discussing and thinking has been that if I put the bullet where I want it to go in a certain situation ( high shoulder or lungs) , the animal will die quickly and I will have no problem finding it.
So yeah, I quit overthinking bullets a while back, come to think of it my old man told me to not worry about it about 60 years ago! LOL

Thanks for trying the pic for me on the thread.

That said I've shot enough to where I've seen failures. One did not kill. Other failures did but leave you wondering if on a given different shot you may not kill. Almost all the bad incidences if not all of them, have been Sierra game king bullets. Which have done everything but the actual pencil through that llama dreams of, to blowing shortly after impact. In fact a pistol bullet of Sierra game king in 30-30 penciled through a bucks heart for my wife. I'm thinking had it not hit the heart the hole in the lungs would have been small enough to heal.

I"ve ZERO bad issues with barnes FWIW.

I've also had no issues with berger target bullets knowing what I'm dealing with and staying off bones.

Those two have been most consistent results by far.

Sierra Match Kings have been super consistent for us. but we have not used them that often. And know others that have had issues now and then.

Partitions have always killed. But have had less than stellar penetration.

Of course you can have the best bullet in the wrong place and nothing can make up for that.

Well , like you said in the Creedmoor thread, many would call this unexpanded, but that is a pretty good sized hole compared to an unfired 6.5
How far did it go?
Cat

Regarding Bergers, I have seen a few very dramatic kills on deer from friends using them, the last one was at 409 yards this fall.
The danged deer simply folded its legs and went straight down without a twitch, dead before it hit the ground, didn't even roll over!

Rifle was a 7Mag, bullet was a 168 I think?
Now, the exit was softball sized, but it was a lung shot.
My friend has used the same rig on 4 moose so far, but he explained that he takes lung shots only, NO shoulders with that bullet! LOL.
because I shoot a .303 as my main cartridge, I am a bit limited in bullet brands and selection, but am planning on trying some of the new Hammer bullets next when they come out in .311 .
No idea why, except the curiosity thing !LOL
Cat

A profound truth.

I was just holding two bullets in my hand yesterday, looking for the "best" route in another 7mm-08. I've got a couple boxes of 145 Speer BTSP that I know are soft and work great at 2,700fps or so. I've also got a couple of boxes of 120TTSX, which I also know work great at 250fps faster. The Speer knocks very nice holes in ribcages and often leaves big blood trails, but it sometimes doesn't exit when you aim for the offside shoulder (stuff generally drops with that combo though). The TTSX acts like a "smaller" bullet, but it pretty much always exits, and is pretty reliable on bad angles. Still not sure which way I am going to roll with that one, but I like trying a lot of rifles and bullets each year. If everything falls to one load from one gun, that sure seems boring in my book.

To get wrapped around the axle about bullet construction I'd have to be pretty unhappy about a bullets performance. I use a fair share of different component bullets to take deer and have had so few bad experiences that they are not generally worth remarking on

I did experience a bit of a goat rope twice with the Remington .243 80 PLHP factory load. Once on a deer and once on a hog. These bullets were never meant for anything but varmints and I knew it going in

But I know a couple of guys using the Nosler .243 70 Ballistic tip, or the Hornady 75 gr .257 Vmax very successfully on deer over a number of years

So hard to go wrong with bullet choice for deer...

140BT's aren't likely to solve what you dislike about 130's. I shot them from '89 through '03 @ 2850ish. I didn't ever have one fail to reach the vitals when I hit a rib or scapula, so in that respect, they held together well enough. I shot roughly 40 white-tailed deer with them over that timeframe. I lost lots of off-side shoulders due to bloodshot/exit-wounds.

True, IF.....you know what you are working with and how it is designed to perform. I hunted with a guy once that bough several boxes of 270wby ammo on his way to the hunt. I was helping him unload his gear and asked if he knew he bough varmint loads (they were 100 or 110gr factory loads). He was pissed, but we checked his zero and told him to only shoot lungs. It worked like a charm, but he knew it was a bomb and where to stick it. It might not have been good on some shot angles if he was thinking he'd bought his usual 150gr loads.

The ONLY bullet failure I have ever really witnessed personally that I can attribute to the bullet itself, was with a 145 Speer BTSP.
This was three years ago, using my dearly departed father's P14 Enfield with a Douglas barrel in 280 Remington.
Big fan of that bullet and still am ,regardless.
We were in a ground blind and the buck was walking straight to us.

When I whispered said "now!", Portsider284 hit the grunt tube and the buck stopped dead at 134 yards.
I had a solid rest, and the buck was just slightly quartering to us.
The buck went straight down at the shot like it was hit in the spine.
While we were trying to get out of the blind, the danged thing up and ran away into the deep swamp ( of course!)!!
I didn't sleep that night that all and the next morning , left the Enfield at home, grabbed my trusty Ruger single shot, and took the scope off and put it inn my pack. Using the express sights on it, I tracked that buck for 3 1/2 hours, until I caught up to it and managed killed it.

On inspection when we had it hanging, the bullet hit the chest and actually broke in two, the bigger piece skidddiing aliing between the hide and plate eat, exiting out the back and breaking the hock on the right rear leg.
I have never seen anything like that before , and both Portsider and I agree that we likely will never again.
Strange, for sure.......
Cat

One of my friend's rifles is a Remington Model 7 in 7mm08 and he has used several different handloads of mine on deer and hogs. One with the 139 grain Interlock and another with the 120 grain Sierra flat base. I didn't call those Sierras Pro Hunters because they were made long before Sierra used that name. They were made when Sierra was in Whittier, California.

This year he used a load with the 162 grain boat tail Interlock. Those bullets were 80's leftovers from my 7mm Wby days. I had loaded them in necked down Hornady 308 Win match cases two or three years ago using Lyman's suggested potential accuracy load with IMR4895. When I asked him why he switched to them he said he liked the way the recoil felt when he shot them. Pretty scientific.

The 162 Interlock worked great for him the morning of 12/12 when he shot a 148 pound doe through the shoulders. Her front end dropped and she plowed a bit and it was over.

Really good information here. Thank you for all posters!

I am impressed with Hammer bullets, both at the range and on deer. They're not cheap, but they do perform as advertised.

DF

I think nosler coulda come up with different names for their varmint BTs, and their Hunting BTs. Saved a lot of confusion, for some.
I'd lay good money on the bet that there are guys who don't know the difference.

Sierra pro hunter, GameKing, Hornady interlock, Speer Hot-cor are all good to go, for me.

But I have truly come to enjoy and appreciate the hunting ballistic tips
.243/95
.257/100
.264/120
.284/150
&
.308/180

Can't say, for me that the winter will be harder If I bloodshot a little meat. Which, admittedly, can happen.

For a particular hunt, 25 year or so ago, I loaded up some 30-06 200 partitions. The one I used on that hunt did very well. I selected the bullet based on the fact that there were grizzlies in the area.
But we met some of the guides friends. I think that every one of them had a box of Remington cor-lokts in his truck

I can recall days, back when, when I mulled over the load I carried, even as I hunted.
Nowadays I have better things to not think about...