Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting 180 grain AccuBond for deer?

I noticed that you are the same guy who got the locals stirred up in the SST bullet thread. This is a fun place but you have to take all the BS in fun and with a grain of salt. People act like whatever flavor of 30-06 ammo you take deer hunting is going to actually change the equation...it won't.

Killing a deer with a 30-06 is strictly an exercise in shot placement.

Heck yeah it will work, been loading BIL's and UIL's 308's and '06's for years with the 180 Partitions, they've been killing deer, elk and pigs for decades so loaded, I have received no complaints, only fresh game meats and empty cases to reload.

Gunner

I have tried and gone away quickly from 180 Accubonds in my .300 Weatherby on deer.
I find the 180 accubond does not open up quick enough on white tails.
The animals run quite a distance, something I can not afford because I hunt adjacent to old growth poplar with lots of dead falls, alder and crotch high slough grass. Very hard tracking in that stuff. So I use 130 grain Nosler partitions in my 270, always expand rapidly, exit and leave a wicked blood trail on broadside shots. I am sure there are other excellent alternatives, I have not tried but this works for me.

Never used Accubonds in any flavor.BUT a 180gr.in any form of hunting bullet,when placed in the boiler room will cause skinning,gutting,n eating of many tasty meals...ScottyO.

I have shot three deer with the 180 grain AB impacting around 2700 fps. All shots were through and through with exit wounds a bit smaller than a golf ball. The internal organs were completely devastated with massive tissue damage. Image of exploded heart.

Suddenly, I have a hankerin' for strawberry preserves.

I've only run one AB through a game animal to date, and that was a 200gr version from my 300RUM through a large WT doe at about 250 yards. Centered the lungs, and she dropped in a heap. Never even twitched.

Interesting thread. A few notes:

When Nosler first started making AccuBonds they were such an immediate hit that one guy in the production line tried to speed things up. This caused faulty bullets. Some lost their tips in the box, and some blew up on game. The problem was quickly traced, because Nosler does both accuracy and expansion testing on regular basis during any production run, but some did get through.

Apparently the performance some of those early "bombs" still makes some people avoid them. I've run into some people who feel the same way about Ballistic Tips, Hornady SST's, and even Speer Grand Slams, because of early problems. But they were long ago solved, and I've yet to see an AccuBond come anywhere close to failing, and I've shot a pile of animals with them, from pronghorns and deer to large African plains game and a grizzly bear. Have recovered very few.

As far as difficulty in only bonding the rear part of the bullet, I suspect it would be easily done by leaving the front end in water while heating the rear. I don't know if that's the way Nosler does it, but that's one method for annealing brass, though with brass the rear end's in the water.

As for original question, back when the AccuBond was pretty new I chose the 180 for a New Mexico pronghorn hunt with the .300 WSM. I like pronghorn meat a lot and didn't want to shoot a lot up. The bullet did a perfect job at about 230 yards on a beautiful 15-1/2" buck. He went about 10-15 yards before piling up after a carefully placed rib shot, and there wasn't any blood-shot shoulder meat.

Here is why I won't use them again. This was 2 1/2 weeks ago. .270, 130 grain Accubond @325 yards. Mind you, this is the entrance, not exit wound. LOT'S of blood-shot tissue there, and a gaping hole. It did kill him in rather spectacular fashion though:

Looks perfect to me, you want an itty bitty hole or a dead deer?

Much prefer the AB over the BT but often my shots are steep downward angles.. I would rather have a exit wound to pull the cork out leaving a solid blood trail being that we are in a swampy region. On many different occasions I have had to witch doctor track deer shot with BTs as they didn't exit and still ran 100 plus yards which in our terrain can be hell. I hate to direct shoulder shoot anything due to meat loss but it does break them down for bang flops. Thus the AB and the TTSX are my go to bullets placed 2nd rib showing behind shoulder...Have never had either the AB or TTSX fail to exit on steep downward angled shots.