Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Barnes TTSX, dissapointment

UPDATE! OKAY GUYS! I went out this morning for another test. Today was pouring and the pigs were all over the vineyards rootin' around. They were mostly sows with piggies and a few small boars. I decided to hunt the other side of a ridge where big boars are known to hang out. 4 hours and nothing until this small dude came out, I decided he was good enough. This is a down hill shot @ 133 yards quartering away. It hit the 6th rib behind the right shoulder, punched through the top of both lungs and exited the high left shoulder. No bullet to recover but this time much better than the first experience.This time the bullet seemed to work, punching a good size exit hole, the lungs were torn up good too. The boar took off for a 100 yard dash, lots of blood. I would like to shoot more pigs and test it more but the rain was pouring hard and I was wet and cold so I called it a day. Here are the result, not a big boar but good for a test.

i shot this one with a 180 AB out of the 300wm at 198 yard. he was facing me the bullet hit dead center between the eyes about two inchs down from them. bullet didn't exit on this one

Vital Kill,

Great job there, man! Good shooting and looks like a good one for the freezer.

What you are showing there is what I have been seeing for years. I do not have a good explanation for what may have happened with piggy number 1 but good on ya for giving a great bullet a longer testing period. Do keep the test results coming.

Good hunting,

MARK

That is got to be one of the strange color combinations I have ever seen!

"he was facing me the bullet hit dead center between the eyes about two inchs down from them. bullet didn't exit on this one "
WOOF!!!
I'll be that smelled pretty...

You guys are so lucky to be able to shoot feral piggies, I'd love to my christen 500 Jeffery on a piggy. I guess I'll have to wait for elk season ...



Chuck

Lucky? Not if your a landowner, they have long since reached plague status here.

vital kill, did I understand you to say you still had two tags left for hogs??!! Please don't tell me California requires tags for a pest thats gonna take over half the damn country if we're not careful.

Perhaps they need the hogs to feed their protected mountain lions?

They are considering bountys on hogs here in Central TX because of the damage they are doing.

I admit they are fun to shoot though.

Bill

Well tags for pigs started out at $5 for 5 tags simply as a means of trying to track the total population and number killed. I think they have now moved up to $5 each.

Unfortunetly I have never seen any signs of lions taking pigs other than piglets (or the turkeys crapping all over my yard). Instead they prefer to wipeout our blacktail population.

I agree. We're seeing them more and more here. I grew up on a farm with hogs and they have a lot of power to uproot everything. We thought the cold may limit them some but they appear to do fairly well. Our current laws are you don't need tags but need a valid license of any kind. Guess I'll be going squirrel hunting with my 358 Win..

Bill, have you been reading the papers lately? THIS STATE SUCKS A$$!!!!!!! If you're a hunter residing in the state of crap-o-fornia, you are shiet out of luck! It used to be $7 for 15 tags, now it's $19.70 for 1 tag! Our budget is out of control, "AH-NO" is driving this state crazy, they are taking away our guns and banning the whole state of lead bullets because of a ugly worthless bird, and the DFG is doing a really bad job of the wildlife managment. Our deer herds are declining every year, and they are going to kill off the stiped bass. The list goes on.....Montana, Colorado, Wyoming here I come!

I haven't seen this being reported in the media, but the Feral Pig is experiencing such a population explosion in some areas because these feral pigs are hybridized and have genetics that can be traced back to the Russian Boar that is a lot more rugged species.

These pics here don't look exactly like them, but the characteristics are age dependent... They are larger, with longer snouts, larger tusks, a lot more aggressive, and smarter....you guys that live in those areas have probably seen this already.

In their original habitat, they are a prized game animal. In Russia the Fish and Game equivalent has to support the population there to keep the population up. The environment is so harsh there the piglets don't survive winters, and the ones that do survive end up being the really tough ones and are much larger to withstand the cold winters. That keeps the numbers down over there, but in the US that control is non-existent.

Like the problem with other non-indigenous alien species, the wolf and killer bees, the problem will likely get a lot worse before it gets better...and there is not a known solution at this point.

TC

They've made inroads into Oregon, I hear.

I can't help but think it'd be fun to be able to hunt a big game animal 24/7/365... grin... but it sure sounds like they are the devil incarnate.

you can't kill'em fast enough to stop the damage they do. sows start breeding at 6-8 months and have 2-3 litters a year

Oh believe me I know, my mom grew up in Mexifornia, got out as fast as she could. My brother left his brain somewhere and moved there about 6 yrs ago, my sis-in-law had alot to do with it though. She's not anti-hunting or anything but lets just say otherwise her mentality fits right in, she grew up here and I guess it was to normal for her here ! I still have an uncle and a couple cousins there.

If all my family was out of there I could give a ratz a$! less if a giant quake hit and the whole damn state broke off and floated about 1000 miles into the Pacific and stayed there.

My apologies to the folks from California here, no personal offense meant. I know there is some good folks there, but you are the minority (no pun intended).

Bill

That was the official line behind their addition. However, it seems rather obvious that with all the plain ol' TSXs still out there it wouldn't be good for marketing endeavors to suggest that the tip was necessary for maximum reliability. However, I suspect that is the bigger reason behind the tip. That said, it's obvious that even the tip can't completely correct a problem that is undoubtedly always going to be an issue with relatively hard mono-metal bullet design.

I won't pound on this too much, but many hunters think that shooting half a dozen animals with a given bullet (usually deer from the same rifle and box of bullets) provides an idea of that bullet's capabilities. I have also heard more than one hunter talk about having killed 30-40 head of game in their lifetime as if that is a great amount of experience.

I dunno what the base-line is but it is more than 2-3 dozen animals. That is a beginning, but not really adequate to judge even one bullet design. Unless, of course, a high percentage "fail."

100 animals starts to provide a real look at bullet performance, especially over a period of several years, and includes a wide range of animal size---plus various weights, diameters and production lots of bullets.

That's how it works???
I thought it worked like this- You shoot a deer in Virginia with a 270, two antelope and an elk in Montana with BArnes bullets and a 300 magnum over 25 years- Then, you have the claim that you have hunted from coast to coast with the 30 calibers over 3 decades, taking several species of big game. This gives you expert status on all deer, antelope and elk rounds in general, and Grand Poobah status on all Barnes bullets in every weight and caliber, all 270 bullets and all all 30 caliber bullets. Bingo! Instant expert staus, just by changing the way you reframe your hunting experience!
That is, of course, all tongue in cheek.
Not tongue in cheek is this- Two dozen animals is probably the very very least number of animals that would yield any reliable information of bullet reliability, and may be so low that it actually gives more mis information than true information. Stop and think- If a bullet gives less than satisfactory perfomance once out of very 50 times, that certainly isn't going to be acceptable, yet AIN'T gonna show up often in your sample of 24.
Yet, there are people here, that pounce on every bullet question with with the conviction usually only seen in Televangelists, about the suitability and comparitive performance of every bullet weight and manufacture in every caliber on every game animal. Lacking, almost always, is how many animals at what range they have killed or seen killed with said bullet.
To say with any actual veracity that a bullet A is better than bullet B for elk, for example, given that both are fairly reasonable choices for elk, I think you would have to have samples of at least 5 shots for each bullet placement for each bullet, ie five shoulder shots, five lung shots, five quartering shots at 25 yards, 100 yards, 200 yards, 300 yards and 400 yards., at a bare minimum. That's 75 shots with each bullet. The average hunter may in one career garner enough info to talk with authority about one or two bullets. And, by the time the avergae hunter gets that info, the bullets have been redesigned so that info isn't valuable.
The more info we get about new bullets the better, but wrong info is worse than no information. Professional hunters, many gun writers and the experiences of fellow hunters THAT ARE GOOD OBSERVERS are valuable. Vaguely described "failures" while interesting, are nebulous predictors, at best.
The point of all this is to throw more weight behind the opinions of professional hunters, guides and gunwriters that work seriously at their trade on predicting bullet performance. And, perhaps, to suggest that when someone begins pontificating about bullet performance, to ask exactly how many animals of what species and what range they have seen killed with said bullet.

Royce

Royce and Mr. Barsness,

Is credible information, as presented by the original poster on this thread, considered reliable enough by you to serve as a data point?

I ask, because just this year there were at least 3-4 unexpanded TSX's pictured "on the internet" that *I* saw. All seemed credible. As does this thread's originator.

Curious as to whether or not you give ANY weight to stuff you read or see a picture of. Thanks.

-jeff

Jeff O
I should not be mentioned in the same sentence with JB
-
JB is a gunwriter and hunter of enormous experience and impeccable qualifications- I, on the other hand am a hunter of less than average skills and expeience-
I find the bullet experiences posted here to be valuable information. They state exactly what happened and give added insight to that bullets performance.
What I am Ping and moaning about is two things that happen on most bullets threads- People with a little experience with a bullet claiming that their small experience defines that bullets performance- and secondly, people reframing their hunting experiences to make it sound as though they have more experience than they actually do-
Example- I could truthfully say that I have carried the 338, 30/06 and 270 for deer, elk, antelope and bears using Barnes bullets, Patitions, Ballistic Tips and Interlocks from Maine to Montana to Alaska. That is true. It also sounds as though I have tons of experience- But, I never killed anything in Alaska, only have killed two little black bears, and have only used Barnes bullets on some diminutive deer and one hapless cow elk. So, when the spin is taken off, my actual experience is pretty paltry. It's called "reframing".
Sorry for the rant-

Fred

Fred

Royce, no worries, I wasn't attacking you in any way. I was just trying to get a read on how others view it when, say, you see a pic of an unexpanded TSX or, for that matter (to pick on my favorite bullet) a blown-up Accubond.

The internet is one heck of a social experiment, unheard of in human history. I think it dwarfs even that of the printing press, though the one was a necessary precursor to the other. There is SO MUCH information out there. How one filters it becomes the real question.

Thanks for the reply, Fred.