Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Core Lokt or Silvertip?

Just that . . .

We still have 1 1/2bx of original .270 Win with 130gr silver tips. We switched to CoreLokt after had a few blow up on us.

I’ve always considered them softer than the CoreLokt - could be wrong - this was probably 40 years ago lol. Soon after I began reloading and never went back.

Core Lokt

I had crap luck with both. Pass the Federal if I have to shoot cheap factory ammo.

Just posted above about my failure with Cor-Lokt bullets. I have not shot game with but a few Silvertips. All Silvertips are not the same. The early ones, the silvertip was made of hard nickel silver and the cap reached all the way to the base of the bullet. A true controlled expansion bullet. Then around the early 1950's IIRC, the inner jacket was shortened to about half way to the base. Then in the mid 1950's the nickel silver was replaced with a lightweight aluminum cap that barely covers the exposed tip. These are the ones that fail people. Saw a cow elk shot with a 200 grain silvertip from a 348 Win. Range was @200 yards, and the bullet struck the knee and exploded. Long follow-up to say the least. Many people have reported failure to penetrate and bullet disintegration even with slow moving cartridges like the 375 H&H. A gun writer used such a caliber and 300 grain Silvertips to try to kill a grizzly bear. Many shots later it finally fell over. I recall a gun writer shot a porcupine with a Silvertip from a 300 Win Mag and the bullet blew up and failed to exit.

I liked the 170 gr. Silvertips better in my .30-30. They were consistently more accurate IN MY Marlin, you could load them in and out of your magazine a bunch of times without mashing out the bullet tips and they never gave anything less than stellar terminal performance.

Silvertips. I still have a box of 30-30 and 308 Silvertips. I took a Moose with 170 grain Silvertips in my 30-30

I've never heard anything really good about either of them. But I've never shot factory ammunition in my life. Dad started me reloading my own .243 Win and .308 Win ammunition 33 years ago at the age of 10 and I haven't stopped yet...

The old fasion Silvertips were a lead tipped bullet

They new Silvertips are plastic

with some respect i have seen some bad things happen with the older Core Lokt bullets ,i work in a wild game processing business in Gillette, Wyoming for 10 days per year seen about 300 animals in those 10 days for about 10 years so that was close too 3,000 animals that were shot. i seen antelope ,deer, elk ,some bears even a few moose that many were shot with a core-lokt bullet and many other bullets, even met people from Hornady , Nosler ,Federal ,Leupold . Core- Lokt bullets in those days and maybe yet today are not consistent buy a different brand ammo . good luck,Pete53

Corelokt

Since I started the thread . . .

WW Silvertips out of a .300 WM (35+ years ago) was the impetus to get into handloading. Didn't get pass thrus on backtail deer standing broadside at 25 yds - 150 gr IIRC. Opposite side hide looked like a shotgun blast. [I think they construct two different bullets in .30 cal nowadays] Not much experience with the Core Lokt bullet. Have some .30 cal / 180 gr / Core Lokt Ultra Bonded that I need to try out.

Silvertips were the ones I grew up fondling from grandpa’s 35 Remington. Those were, to this young boy, everything a bullet wanted to be. They were silver tipped so that confirmed that werewolves were a valid consideration and a definite concern for me back then.

My nostalgia loves the Silvertips, in fact I have Silvertips in various calibers, not for hunting but for nostalgia since they always remind me of grandpa and the endless hours we spent in his wood working shop. I long for the cigarette smoke, coffee and lacquer smells that were only bettered by the addition of Hoppes #9.

For hunting I’d prefer Corelokt between the 2.

After years of testing 35 cal bullets in the 35 Remington the best is still the 200gr round nose core-lokt. Getting harder to find them.

My experience with Silvertips from the 60s and 70s was mostly very poor. Oddly, they were quite accurate in the rifles I tried them in, but they would blow up violently on impact. The 2 that seemed OK were the 300 Grain in the 375H&H and the 170 grain in the 30-30. But I only killed 2 deer with the 30-30s so that not a very broad test and I only killed one bull and one cow elk with the 375s. Again not that much of a test, but those 4 kills were quite good and I got exits on 3 of them. The cow elk was shot facing me and I didn't recover the bullet but there was no exit, so it was somewhere in the guts. I didn't find it. She dropped after turning to run but only went about 15 feet.

The ones that were bad were the 100 grain in 257 Roberts, the 130 grain 270 Winchester, the 150 grain 300 Savage. the 150 grain 30-06 and the 180 grain 30-06. All blew up badly

The Corelokts however were all good until Remington started to make the jackets thinner. The later ones were not up to the old standards. At what time exactly Remington started to make them with thinner jackets I am not sure. Mule Deer may know that answer to that question.

I used a lot of them in the very late 60s through the early 80s and all were made in the period of time from 1978 and backwards. The oldest ones were factory loaded 300 Savage ammo my Dad bought in the mid 50s around the time I was born. When I was 8 - 9 I was using that ammo. Nearly all the rest were handloads. The Core Lokts I have used were:

257 Roberts, 25-06, both the 120 grain.
270 Winchester in both 130 and 150 grain.
7X57 and 7MM Rem mag 150 grain
300 Savage. 308, 30-06, in 150 and 180 grains.
300 H&H, 308 Norma in 180 and 220 grains.
8X57 175 Grain
35 cal 200 grain in the 35 Remington,
270 grain in the 375H&H.

The old thick jacketed Core-Lokts made in the 50s through the 70s were excellent.
So to me the answer would be Core_lokts but the new ones are not the same as what I used, so my high praise my not be merited anymore.

The big problem with BOTH bullets is they've varied considerably over the decades. Have seen both "blow up" and both penetrate well, retaining significant weight.

One of my eye-openers was when Remington sent me some "Core-Lokt" factory loads in the early 1990s to test, which had bullets that looked suspiciously "pencil-pointed," as Elmer Keith used to call Hornady's secant-ogive bullets. So I pulled one and sectioned it--and gee, it had something that looked a LOT like an Interlock ring inside the shank-section of the jacket.

Also had a 150-grain Silvertip (NOT Ballistic Silvertip) bullet from a factory .30-06 load break up on the shoulder of a forkhorn mule deer buck at around 200 yards. (The buck was quartering toward me.) This was in the mid-1980s, and I did manage to track the buck down and put a second one in the ribs as the buck stood broadside, which dropped him and exited. Found the empty jacket of the first one lying against the ribs behind the broken shoulder.

But have seen some 130-grain Silvertips from dead bull elk that were "perfect" mushrooms, found under the hide on the far side of the chest.

The Ballistic Silvertips are Nosler Ballistic Tips with different colors.

Same here Aces. My grandfather used 180 ST’s in his 300 Savage, dad used 180’s in the 30-06 along with Core Lokts here and there, 270 and 308 shooters I knew used ST’s.

I wouldn’t cross the street to hunt anything serious with either but for deer, I’d like to have a bunch..

No matter their performance, I've not seen a cartridge that looks more "right" than a .300 H&H loaded with the 180 gr Silvertip bullet. Have shot a few things over the years with that combination mostly because I like the way they look. Have a mid 50's vintage model 70 standard grade, filling the magazine with those Silvertip loads generally makes me grin a little.

I bet! I’d hunt them myself!

An old friend of mine used to use 220 grain Silvertip in his 300 h&h