Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters 270 Accubond or SST for Whitetail Deer

Yes, between the SST and AB I would run the AB

Faint praise, indeed <g>.

Well, I mean...I have a pile of the 140 7mm AB's;killed my biggest bodied mule deer ever with one.Lotsa damage and penetration from on side shoulder to off side ribs; good frontal area. Sorta like a Partition which is to say they both kill good,which is what I mean by "no magic" Same- same, on deer anyway. I have never used them on elk....I'd use them again for deer.

My partner uses 140gr Nosler Accubond for his 270 WSM. After two deer, we've seen two very different results. The first deer was hit too tight to the front leg and the bullet glanced off the leg bone and took a turn and clipped the back of the lungs and the liver as it hit the last rib on the off-side and stayed under the hide until it stopped against the off-side ham. We lost most of the off-side ham to blood shot. The deer ran about 100 yards from where it was hit to when it fell dead.

The second deer was hit a bit too high. The deer froze and began wailing loudly. Then it fell over dead. The entrance and exit wounds had blood shot areas the size of a softball. However, this was in the ribs and didn't lose a anything really important. Both shots at 200 to 250 yards.

I use 140gr Nosler Ballistic Tip loaded on top of 54gr of H4350 out of my 270 Winchester. It seems like the innards get a lot more soupy with this bullet than with the NAB. Same amount of blood shot. As long as I don't shoot meat with it, I don't lose any meat. My buddy used my rifle to shoot a nice blacktail buck. 140gr Accubond factory load through the neck left a 27 caliber hole entering and a 30 caliber hole exiting. DRT. Same thing with the same rifle and a forest grouse.

Shoot whatever is more accurate from your rifle.

I'm not sure where all the talk of "frangible" SSTs comes from. That hasn't been my experience. If anything, they tend to produce through-and-through wounds and terminal results. In reality, just about anything you push down a barrel in .270 is going to kill deer in acceptable fashion, and most modern .270 fodder will tear things up at close range. A lot of hair-splitting goes on in discussions such as this. IMHO, to cut to the chase... if you like to shoot deer in the shoulder, use a TSX or similar. If you shoot them in the boileroom, use just about anyhing else -- including the good, cheap, old-fashioned soft points that have been killing deer for most of the last century -- and be happy. My personal preference leans more toward whatever shoots most accurately out of given rifle.

Where the heck do you get this stuff? Blue scares deer, SST's won't shoot, etc., etc. You're more full of [bleep] than anyone I know.

Last Friday - 150 SST, 60 yards, broke 2 ribs going in, mashed everything in the middle and broke 2 ribs going out. Last group I fired measured .671 @ 100 (150 SST, 46.5 RL 15, out of a 7 pound rifle). Oh yeah, the stock is blue to boot.



Guys - don't listen a [bleep] thing Jeff_O posts.

You don't understand though...it was the BLUE STOCK that stunned him in the first place!!!

Have you ever had an SST do any "coming apart" that you did not expect?

I shot another little buck a couple of weeks ago with the same load that was quatering hard to me and the entrance hit the point of the shoulder. The entrance was huge and I figured the bullet had nuked. To my suprise, I found the perfectly mushroomed SST in the opposite rear quarter when butchering him. It looked like it came out of Hornady add and probably retained 60-70% of it's weight (just a guess, didn't weigh it). They do expand rather rapidly, but hold together after that intial violent opening.

I shot 3 deer this year with 140gr 270cal Accubonds. On the first deer I saw the bullet impact and could see a yard long shaft of blood squirting out the entrance hole. It left a baseball size exit wound and there was an enormous blood trail that went further than I'd of thought but probably because it hit about right on the entrance but angle back because of the way the deer was standing. The other two were similar, large exit wounds, bullets penetrating side to side as expected on animals as light as deer, lot's of blood at the impact site.

My freind I was hunting with shot a small doe last week with a 95gr SST out of a 240 Weatherby. He shot it straight on facing him. The bullet penetrated to the chest cavity and shredded the heart but didn't penetrate past the diaphram into the guts. I was quite surprised that it didn't penetrate any further than it did. I'd be a little leery of using at least that bullet in that gun on anything larger than small deer. The heavier SST's may well perform quite differently at lower velocities but the 95gr SST was pretty frangible out of the 240 Weatherby.

That's just what I saw, YMMV. I'm going to keep shooting Accubonds...................................DJ

A 150 SST out of my .06 blew right through this guy a few weeks ago at about 120 yards. He ran maybe 50......

A 240 Weatherby is a smoking and I'd probably use a premium out of it too. Standard velocity rounds, deer, and SST's are a great match though.

Accubond without a doubt!

The originator did not say which 270 he was shooting. Was it the 270 Win, the 270 WBY, or the 270 WSM?

The only reason I ask this is the 250fps makes a big difference at close range.

I shoot a 270 Win, Sierra 130gr SBT, 2930 fps, and it has never - ever failed me, even out to 386yds in 2008, that is close enough to 400 for me.

.270 Win and as I posted in my previous thread, I am very pleased with the 140 SST. I would like to try some Accubonds and I would also like to load some 150 grain SST's

DJ,

That 240 Wby. may be a little hot for the 95 SST, but the one my buddy put through the shoulders of a doe using a 243 this Saturday did a nice job. Here's part of my writeup from another post:



mathman

I shot a whitetail last Fall with a 140AB out of my 270 Win.
Impact velocity was around 2700fps. The bullet hit the deer low and forward(right where the bottom of the neck meets the shoulder) and passed through hitting a little bone on the way.

Bloodshot damage about like most bullets, golf ball sized exit.
Ideal performance IMO.
The buck was DRT!
(grin)

I suspect the SST has gone through some of the same transformation the Ballistic Tip did when it came out. The early BT's were pretty tender, and so were the early SST's. But Nosler soon modified the BT's, and probably Hornady has modified the SST's. A little extr antimony in the lead core goes a long way in toughening up a bullet.

I took two critters the past couple weeks with a 270 and 130 gr. SST's launched at a solid 3100 fps.
A fair sized whitetail at about 100 yards. DRT'd with a high shoulder hit. There was a lot of damage on the entrance side with a plug of fur pulled into the entrance hole. The bullet exited in the front edge of the opposite shoulder with much less damage, about the size of a quarter.
I also shot a nice sized hog through the shoulders on the Campfire hog shoot. That was about a 50 yard shot and the hog also DRT with a couple of kicks.
That bullet did not exit. The guide did the gutting and I spotted the jacket when he was pulling the lungs/heart out. the core had dropped out but from the cleanliness of the front of the bullet it was apparent it was still there when the bullet came to rest.
I didn't see anything to make wonder about it's suitabilty as deer bullet.

I shot this guy this year with a 180gr. SST from a 300 WBY at 110 yards. Hit the shoulder blew it to pieces (the Shoulder) bullet traveled up the spine and out the neck. He didn't so much as bat an eyelash after he was hit.

Like the others I suspect the SST's have been improved and are now more like the interlocks which is a good thing. First box I got two mystery performances in deflected shots but still dropped the animals quickly.

I have only taken a couple animals with the Accubond and like them. I am going to go out on a limb and think that the Partitions at higher velocity might be the faster killer. This is sheer speculation and although I have shot a bunch of stuff with partitions I don't know how many more would be needed with the Accubond to even come close to a valid comparison.

My thought is the semi fragmentation of the Partition might beat the slightly larger frontal area of the Accubond. Maybe maybe not, all three are good for their intended purposes.