Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Real world 230 gr ELDx 338 experience?

Coolest guy down kgb, chief Paul Theodore. He was the grandson of Chief Wasilla. My friend Paul died of cancer back coupla years ago.

He was friendly most of the time, but very intimidating when he was angry. He survived cancer once, but then it came back few years later.

How I met him, I was volunteering to help with a Potlatch. I messed up a minor formality of the Potlatch culture and I thought he was going to wrip the esophagus out of my fkn throat. Few mins later, I came back over and poked a bit of fun at him with coupla "inside jokes". He smiled and never showed me any anger since.

He had worked on getting alot of roads diverted around his tribes gravesisites, when wasilla started booming. He liked having all the new neighbors and claimed the wasilla country was really sparse and a bit lonely in older times. He liked a 30-06 for moose and traded me a brand new husqvarna chainsaw for one of my 30-06's.

He was adopted in and close friends with Chief Andrew Isaac up here in interior. When I moved up here, he contacted a bunch of that family to check in on me. He was always nervous about the cold.

That south central foundation logo with the fireweed, he drew that symbol on a drum in the late 1980's, thats where it came from.

Hey Sitka deer, no disrespect intended, but bleeding doesn’t happen without energy… Try throwing the bullet at the animal.

The discussion around energy dump is relevant, as lack of it is the exact complaint regarding FMJ bullets for hunting. Granted no one wants explosive bullets for big game…

Energy is so variable in results. 2 holes and bleeding is by far better. Get both even better.

But the only "energy dumps " I've ever noticed are on big bears and it's 416 and up. Sometimes 375. Almost everyone has been barnes but not all. It's the caliber is the only thing I can come up with.

You do have to expand some and destroy some stuff. But to rely on secondary fragments is a mistake as a rule IMHO. They have never hurt. But who knows where they go, how many etc... just hard to rely on.

I've been watching it play out. If bleeding was the only thing, why complain about all the bloodshot meat? Isn't that indicative of more bleeding? You don't need an exit hole to have bleeding. But I agree, exit hole is better. In a perfect world, every bullet would expand to twice its normal size, retain >90% of its weight and exit the off side with just enough energy left to flutter to the ground. I'd guess there are bad experiences with pretty much every available offering out there. Best thing is do your homework, diagnose your field results and rock on.

Entry AND an exit hole are extremely important, at least to me.
Fill up a gallon zip lock bag with water and seal it shut. Punch a hole in it with a pencil and water the water dribble out. Punch a hole on each side of the bag then watch the water flow out much faster.
I’ll take entry and exit holes every time if possible.

Hopefully here in about a month I can give you some first hand knowledge of how 230 eldx work on big bears.

Wish you all the best running ELDX on bears. I've had people tell me they blow up. I have no first-hand knowledge of this.

This is why, I said; wish you all the best. I'm really wishing you the best.

Take care.

How much “energy dump” can one get from a broadhead?

That's my nightmare. Client showing up with those. LOL. They will work. But what I've seen in 30 cal around 208 IIRC weight wise was no exits on moose shot behind the shoulder. Did not like that all that much. Moose didn't quite make 100 yards though.

bottom line, if it works then its all good. "dangerous" game is a bit different in my. books but in reality its all the same I suppose.

. Depends on if it exits or stays in or just barely passes through and weight of the head and shaft......
Wanna get into a theory on that topic? Theory would be you shoot a large angle so to speak and cut as many organs as you can, vs just broadside through the lungs. AND have the head stop in the lung/heart area so when the animal runs it just wobbles around cutting stuff the more the animal runs the more cuts the more bleeding. And I"ve had that happen twice. It worked great. Neither one planned.

But to rely on perfect worlds...

I stick to bullets that expand. Retain 100% of weight basically IF you ever find one. And exit. Not really worried about how much energy I "wasted"

And if I need a DRT shot then I shoot CNS. Simple as that. Sometimes it's not easy to get to the CNS so in those cases I rely on penetration to get there or to the vitals.

I'm almost 60. I still have seen no personal or client failures on barnes bullets. Other than horrible first accuracy when they came out in SOME guns. I've never seen no expansion. I can't recall ever loosing an animal. I have seen a few that had minimal blood trails but were dead when we got there. And had been for some time. For edible game I get very little bloodshot meat. And we still shoot some Bergers these days on deer just because they are a great long range bullet etc..... but there is much more blood shot around the holes. FWIW.

in all my years I've seen some really wild examples of cup and core. Way erratic. Like FMJ to early ballistic tip from one shot to another on game kings for example. I've shot the wrong partition weights and had more destruction than I wanted and no exit wound on deer. I've seen partitions never exit the ribs on moose from 338/250s.

When it really matters it's going to be a Barnes for me. Whatever works for you is cool too. But one reason to beat a dead horse is no failures and over the years that's something I cannot say about Barnes. It's kind of like mechanical broad heads. I think we quit shooting em before they got em right. But had enough failures there that we went back to COC heads and just decided that they killed as well and penetration was never an issue with them at that point.

Lots of fun things to talk about anyway. Keeps the world moving and selling products.

You illustrated my point.

The arrow kills by cutting, causing bleeding, not “energy dump”.

Just how much “energy” does a broadhead impart? Ft/lbs energy is pretty much a fallacy! Now if we’re talking Kinetic Energy or use the Taylor Knock Out system…..it’s far more reliable than is ft/lbs energy! memtb

Here’s some info that you may find interesting and helpful.

https://rathcoombe.net/sci-tech/ballistics/politics.html

https://n4lcd.com/calc/

There have been all kinds of tests done on rifle cartridges and their bullets. I've done a fair amount myself. Their results do teach us some things in a comparative sense, but not everything. Nor does hunting. But KE is a factor, and so is momentum. Both can be measured.

This a.m. I was at the range shooting two rifles for final sight-in of an up-coming bear hunt in a couple of weeks. To cut-short my take on bears and hunting them, I killed my first (trophy black bear) wiith a handloaded 400gr Speer from my first 1895 Marlin in .45-70. The effect on the bear and the kill was impressive to say the least about it. Since that first experience, I pretty much decided that a .45-70 would find a permanent spot among my meager collection of rifles that all had variable, but smaller bores.

Today, my two rifles were a .375 H&H and a Ruger No.1H in .458. The .375 load was the 250gr TTSX at ~2850, and the .458 load was the first ever factory product to be used in any of the three .458s I've owned - The Federal Premium 400gr TBBC at an advertised 2250 fps. In a former test for five they averaged 2282 fps/4624 ft-lbs. That rifle weighs with scope and one cartridge = 10.25 lbs. The .375 is 1/2 lb lighter, and the handload makes about 4500 ft-lbs, so calculated recoil is similar. . .

HOWEVER! The momentum of those two dissimilar loads was very different in actual recoil. And that was due to the fact that the momentum of the 400gr load was such that the 250gr load at 2850 from the .375 who have had to leave the muzzle at 3651 fps to match it! Impossible! Momentum is the main factor in TKO!

The .375 H&H load "felt" normal. That 400gr load was a handful, if I may say so due to the fact of shooting much, much heavier loads in the .458 - like a 500gr at plus 2300 fps.

The point I'm trying to make IS that there are many factors in harvesting an animal from small to large, and no one formula or definitation, or experience, begins to explain it all!

I once shot a coon with my Ruger No.1 in .45-70 with a long throat. A 500gr Hornady at 2185 fps. The coon was a family member of a group stealing our bear baits. A friend shot a couple with his .308 Win. That event was "normal". "My coon" exploded with bits and pieces hanging from branches of the trees. It was that load for bear that I'd use the previous week on a bear.

Bob
www.bigbores.ca