Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 300 Sierra 44s and 45s Overlooked. Why?

It seems of late that I read great reviews for the 300 grain Speer as an ideal heavy jacketed bullet in either the 44 or 45 caliber applications. The Hornady XTP also gets good marks. What I don't understand is why we don't see the Sierra 300 grainers mentioned. Of the three this latter bullet seems to be harder and tougher than any of them but with a generous meplat. The Speer, a very fine bullet - I'm not disparaging it, seems relatively soft, the XTP, at least in the 45 magnum version is impressively tough but the Sierra seems even tougher to crack. So why, when tough deep penetration is needed, do we not see the Sierras mentioned?

That's a good question, I've wondered why the Sierra 300 JSP never got any press either. I'm loading that bullet in my 45 Vaquero with very good accuracy at around 1140 fps.

Well, I tested some of the common bullets this past weekend to see if I could see any objective differences. Unfortunately I only had time and materials to do one test of each sample a single time so the sample size is suspect. Here is what I found:






Left to right the bullets are Hornady XTP (standard, Colt), Speer, Sierra, Hornady XTP (magnum, Casull), 325 grain cast. All the jacketed bullets started at 300 grains.

The penetrations in the common test media (wet newspaper) were (respectively): 12", 19.5", 24", 24", 25" at a distance of 27 yards.

I was firing the loads from a carbine but I wanted to compare penetration at revolver velocities so I guessed at some lesser loads (10.5 gr. 800-X) which gave me 1121 fps averages, just a bit lower than I wanted.

Since expansion was minimal at most for all but the standard XTP I would have thought the penetration would have been similar. The difference between the Speer and the others seems to beg for additional tests. I do know from previous experience comparing the various bullets informally in failure media that the Speer is softer than the Sierra.

A footnote:

I also tested the Speer 350 FN (45-70) in the same media at the same distance. I was firing these bullets in a load that generated over 1900 fps. This is how they ended up:




They accomplished 16-17" penetration.

Sierra clearly states that their 300-grain revolver bullets are among the hardest they make - in fact they say that the .452" bullets is "the single hardest bullet Sierra has produced." When I called the Sierra tech he told me not to expect expansion from this bullet even with a .454 carbine. No wonder that these bullets are not recommended for deer, etc.