Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters ELD-x vs Hornady SST

You've never hunted fungi??

blue arrow
[img]https://i.imgur.com/4pV0D7p.jpg?1[/img]

Cost isn't the deciding factor, availability is. Nosler bullets in the diameters and weights I want seem to be .. imaginary. Speer is as bad or worse. So it is more or less shoot Hornady or collect bolt action paperweights.

Regarding the orginal question, I've picked up a few SSTs in configurations where varmint bullets aren't available.

Sometimes it’s a problem and sometimes it’s a blessing.

When bullets are available in calibers and weights I stock up. I’ve made a mistake or two regarding buying a good quantity just because that bullet shot quite accurately. In one case long ago the bullet was acclaimed to be the best big game bullet available and there were quite a few writing the same thing. But, it seems no one tried that bullet on game. The front of the bullet would shear off and the rear would act like a solid.

Buying bullets in bulk when available have pros and cons.

Pro: I have those “not as common bullets” on my shelf when I need them.
Con: I’ve bought several bullets in quantity and found out they were a very poor game bullet.

Now, I read what knowledgable people write about them, before I splurge. I guess I should have been doing my own expansion/penetration studies.

This kind of post in “ask the gunwriters” was a good thing to post.

tdoyka,

It looks like to me that you mean any lead or lead-cored bullet that's designed so the front end expands when hitting game. But "monolithic" bullets, without lead cores, and generally made out of copper or copper alloys, also expand when hitting game.

Please spare me the Youtube videos. I know Ron Spomer very well--in fact he's one of my oldest friends in the gun/hunting writing business, though these days he works more on Youtube than writing. We also have hunted together a LOT, in various states and countries.

But for many years he didn't get very deeply into the technical side of rifles, partly because he was writing too many articles and traveling too much spend enough time to do more technical research. His youtube videos are good--but like most Youtube stuff are also relatively superficial. They have to be, because the attention-span of most viewers is short. Which is why his bullet video is only 15 minutes long.

The attention span of chat-room posters is also short, because they generally want THE answer on many subjects compressed into a 3-4 a few paragraphs.

Mule Deer,

i unfortunately got into mono bullets too early, early to mid '90s. i used a 85gr Barnes X bullet in my 243 Win on a doe. all it did to the deer was a pencil-like wound channel (lungs). i tracked the doe about 300 some yards thru thick brush and mountain laurel. there was blood, but a drop or two every 50 - 75 yards kept me going. later, after i was done field dressing and dragging, i figured out that the bullet did not expand. so i said no more premium bullets, i'll go cup-n-core for whitetails. 10-12 years ago, i "discovered" that cast bullets are the way to go. i use 130gr Speer HP in my 30 Herrett (10" Contender barrel), 140gr Hornady SST in my 270 Win, 150gr Speer RN in my 30 Remington, 139gr Hornady FN and 140gr Hornady SST in my 7x57s and 7-08s. the SST bullets are going 2800fps or less. i want them to mushroom, not fragment like a hand grenade. if the deer does run, i'll find the leakage from a mushrooming bullet.

If that works for you then great!

However, it's part of my job to test all sorts of bullets, and eventually I not only tested them in several kinds of "media," but also realized that even though I hunted a lot, taking 25-30 animals a year for quite a while, the best way to obtain plenty of field results was to go on big "cull" hunts, in the U.S. and other places. This was because I could not only get definite results from the animals I shot, but from other hunters I observed, or question.

The biggest was a month-long hunt in South Africa in 2007, where another dozen hunters and I took 180+ animals, ranging from springbok (very similar to American pronghorns) to a pile of elk-sized animals, and a few Cape buffalo. I only took 13 animals, but was alongside several of the other hunters when they took 59 animals, and spent time after hunting each day not only asking about their results, but going to the skinning barn and seeing animals taken apart. (One of the interesting things about Africa is they rarely gut animals in the field. Instead they take them to a tent or building where several people do the entire job of reducing them to meat, hides and trophies.)

But also done similar hunts not just in Africa but several states, primarily Texas for deer, wild pigs and sometimes other non-native game, and also in places such as Ireland. That sort of deal provides far more information on how various hunting bullets work in the field than any other experiments I've made--and is how I learned various monolithic bullets not only worked but often improved over the years.

Thanks for explaining what you meant by "mushroom" bullets.