Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Why Do Boattail Rifle Bullets Fail?

I'm less interested in reopening a discussion of whether boattail bullets fail on game than why they tend to fail. I'm willing to believe that using them is a risk I'm not prepared to take, but I don't understand what makes the boattail so fragile that noted writers refer to them as "sorry."

What makes them fail? What physical mechanism makes them different from flat-based? I've found plenty of opinions that they do fail, but no discussions as to why they do so.

Jaywalker

I've probably killed fifty (or so) head of American and African game animals with the .308-180 Hornady Interlocked Spire Point Boat Tail in the .30-'06. I've never experienced a single failure. Great bullet.

Some writers tend to generalize; some even opine when they have no field experience. To say a bullet is going to fail on game just because it is a boat tail exposes a vein of stupidity.

Steve

I haven't checked this out for myself, so I have no index of its validity, but I've been told that boat-tails with lead cores as far down as the bottom of the "tail" deform under high chamber pressures. IF this is true, then the boat-tails with solid-copper "tails" shouldn't deform.

Another possible explanation is that most boat-tail bullets are meant for use on paper, not on flesh, and therefore don't have either strong jackets or soldered-in cores.

Two features that attracted me to the new Nosler-Winchester AccuBond bullets are their solid "tails" and bonded cores. I've also noticed that the "tail" seems shorter than those on many other boat-tail designs.

I shoot alot of boattail bullets, and I am amazed that some would think they "failed". To know whether or not the bullet failed on game you need to have the dead animal, if you have the dead animal and find a bullet , then how do you determine where it failed?
Alot of the stuff about bt's failing somes from using a target bullet on game, but then again they had a dead critter so there's that failure thing again.

The assumption here, of course, is the taper at the inside/rear of the bullet somehow causes the core/jacket bond to fail. The source of this grand information is, in my lowly opinion, a noted writer who believes that things are so just because he says they are so.



The guy should know better, but he loves to be the source of an argument. He has high credentials, but this part of his "information" is just plain untrue.



Field experience, killing loads of animals and translating the results, gives the writer great karma. Dreaming up crap like this, and writing about it, damages the writer's craft. Thank goodness for the Campfire forum, where we can all get together and talk about it.



Steve

I use GOBBS of boat tails and they don't come apart on critters. I think it is a false claim. Flinch

Well, I'm certainly in no position to make the claim either way, though with doubts expressed, I tend to credit them until the risk can be mitigated. I hope to determine why those who say they fail believe that they do.

FWIW, it's more than just one writer. I recall Ross Seyfried having a strong opinion on it in a magazine, and Mule Deer has posted on the 24-Hour Campfire about this very issue.

His statement, "There's no reason for them to stick together on impact, despite the heavier jacket," referring to the Hornady Interlock Boattail, implies there is a mechanism that holds flat base bullets together. My question is, "What's the difference between them?" I'd like to know why they believe it - what's the mechanism?

Jaywalker

You can darned well bet that Johnny Mule Deer reported precisely what he experienced and that his deductions were based on true field use of the bullets in question. John is the finest outdoorsman and writer I know.



The fact that my experience has been somewhat different is not at all surprising. Frankly, it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of field kills to come to a totally valid conclusion.



Given the choice between two structurally identical bullets, one a flat base and one a boat tail, that shot equally, I would choose to kill with the flat base. However, if the accuracy is better with the BT and the construction is rock-solid, like it is with the Hornady Interlocked, I would choose the BT.



Steve

The only boattails I've had "fail" pencil-holed through without expanding. Not sure what that was about, but I quit using that particular caliber and weight of that brand. (OK, it was a .257 117 gr Hornady boattail spitzer fired from a .250-3000 at about 2650 fps. Shot one deer at 25 yards and another at 250, with similar undesireable results. Think I was driving it too slow, or maybe that particular lot was too hard, but I quit using that load in that rifle.) I have killed a lot of deer and antelope with boattails, mostly in .257 and .284 diameters and mostly of Nosler Solid Base or Speer manufacture. Most of the bullets I have recovered have been nicely mushroomed in more or less classic form, though most of the bullets fired have not been recovered at all.

That all having been said, I tend to use Speer Grand Slams for serious hunting for larger game, with a small nod to Hornady RN bullets in the .35 caliber genre. For deer and suchlike, though, I harbor no fear of using boattails designed for shooting big game animals. And of course, boattails with "X" in their brand name ain't too likely to slip a core...

(I do wish Nosler would bring back the original Solid Base bullet and quit making that plastic-pointed imposter. Just a personal thing...plastic points just don't look right...)

muledeer- You're in luck, Nosler is making the Solid Base

IMHO the basis for this claim was founded several years ago when bullet were not as well made as they tend to be now.

I think we need to first establish the fact that not all boattails are equal, and so no answer will equally apply to all boattails.

The "potential" problem with boattails of "conventional" construction is that as the bullet peels back in a mushroom the tapered base of the bullet does nothing to hold the core and jacket together. As soon as the core slips front a little there is an airspace between the jacket and the core and nothing to prevent the jacket from squirting out of the core--or in another way of explanation--because the core weighs more than the jacket it has greater momentum and will continue on after the jacket has stopped. This again only applies to conventional BTs like the Gameking.

The Nosler solid base boatail design in reality is no different from a flatbase (internally) in the way that the jacket relates to the core--for the BT part is all solid copper and the core is firmly held internally by an internal flatbase design. It is that Plastic tip (on the B-tip, not the boattail part) and the hollow cavity behind it which causes the problems of rapid/over-expansion and occasional disintegration on bone. The old solid base bullet did not have these problems and in some respects was some of the best of both worlds for a conventional bullet--having a boattail for higher BC and an internal flat base for greater core grip.

The Hornady BT usually works quite well and does not exhibit the common problems of a BT because it uses a cannelure and an interlocking ring to prevent the core from slipping out of the jacket. Even when the core starts to slip these two rings will continue to resist the slippage. The whole rear core of the shank will have to be shaved off to the BT juncture until it releases the core from the jacket. In my bullet tests comparing the 165 FB and the 165 BT both shot into media at 3240 fps (300 win mag) I could not detect any significant discernable difference between the behavior of the two--just as the Hornady tech rep proclaimed. The only potential advantage of the flatbase is that the friction of the base will also assist the interlocking ring in holding the core after the bullet mushrooms beyond the cannelure. Another slight advantage of the FB is that interlock ring is nearer the base of the bullet on them then on the BT, therefore they could mushroom further before they passed the ring and released the core.

In summary the dreaded "boattail syndrome" is largely applicable to the Speer and Sierra boattails which depend alone upon the friction of the jacket against the core to hold the core--and when the core begins to slip--it can be quickly separated from the jacket. This scenario has much less relevance to the Hornady BTs which use cannelures and interlocking rings, bonded BTs, solid base BTs, and monolithic bullets.

I tend to agree with my friend Steve Dogzapper on this issue. While I have seen some boattailed bullets "fail"--meaning the core separated from the jacket sometime after striking an animal--it has been a rare occurence. In fact, it has been just as rare as having a conventional, flatbased bullet separate. In perusing my notes from several hundred game animals, it happens just about as often with one as the other.

The first time I saw this happen was 30 years ago, when I shot a forkhorn mule deer with a .270 Winchester and a 130 Sierra boattail. The little buck was bouncing up the opposite slope of a hill about 100 yards away when I put one in his short ribs. He went right down, but when I skinned and butchered him, found the jacket at the ENTRANCE hole, and 30 grains of remaining core in the front of the chest. Yes, the bulet failed, but it killed him darn quickly. This didn't give me confidence, however, as it seemd that a bigger buck might not react so surely to 30 grains of lead.

A couple years later saw basically the same thing happen with a 105-grain Speer Hot-Cor FLATBASE and a similar-size whitetail buck.

Have seen a few other bullets come apart on deer shoulders, including two boattails (117 Hornady from a .257 Roberts and 130 Ballistic Tip from a .270 Winchester) and two flatbase (150 Federal Classic .30-30 and 150 Silvertip from a .30-06). From all this evidence we might surmise that boattails and flatbases are about equal, and that other factors in bullet construction make far more difference.

There are a bunch of boattails where it makes exactly no difference whether they're boattailed or not, including several bonded-cores, the Barnes X, and the heavy-jacket Ballistic Tips from 8mm up. Have shot a bunch of animals with the .338 and .375 Ballistic Tip and only recovered two bullets, one of each caliber. In each case the bullet had lost it's core, but still retained around 60% of its weight because the jacket's so massive. I must also note that in each case the jacket was recovered on the far side of the animal, and both happened to be gemsbok, which have very tough hide.
The .338 bullet was at the opposite end of a frontally shot bull, the .375 under the skin on the opposite side of the biggest bodied gemsbok I've ever seen, a 550-pounder.

This .375 Ballistic Tip is what inspired a noted gun writer to compose a rant about boattails. Trouble is, the "test results" he got by shooting this bullet into wet newspaper were totally divergent from those of anybody else who tried it. I shot it into both dry newspaper (a tougher test than wet newspaper) and several African animals and couldn't get it to fly into smithereens, in fact could only recover the one bullet. My friend Phil Shoemaker, part-time gun writer and full-time Alaskan Master Guide, shot it into three different kinds of media (including, I believe, a dead whale) and found that it "acted just like a 260 Partition."

Over the years that I've come to know the gun writer who wrote the boattail rant fairly well. More and more, I've come to discount almost anything rant he writes. First, because he always has a "perfect" tool for every job--and everything else is [bleep]. In my experience I have found several ways to get at the same problem. This indicates to me that said gun writer may not have quite the vast array of experience he claims, or perhaps just isn't able to evaluate it rationally.

In the end, I am boattail neutral. They don't hurt anything, but then again at normal hunting ranges they don't help much either. Their best feature is sliding into the case mouth easily!

JB

It should also be noted that Speer warns pretty thoroughly that their BT's are of "softer" construction. This coincides with my own experience with Speers.

In the few cases where I have actually used the same mfr., same weight, same velocity (Ie: Sierra 165's in 30 cal) I have noted similar performance comparing a BT to the coresponding flat base. I typically choose flatbases, but......not really sure why.

JimF

John your explanation here is one of the many reasons many of us consider you to be the finest gun writer of our time. Many thanks for your common sense approach and tell the way you see it ways.

Thanks, all, for your insights.

Thanks particularly to Thunderstick for describing the mechanism for failure, and to our resident authors for putting it in perspective.

Jaywalker

JB,

I seem to remember another time this came up, when you thought you might get together with Nosler and/or said writer and figure out if there was a change from early to late production -- do I remember right? If so, did anything come of that?

John

Nothing happened, mostly because once said writer makes his mind up, it's set in stone.

Plus, about the time this difference of opinion occurred, Nosler turned the .375 BT into an AccuBond (as they probably will with many of the bigger Ballistic Tips, according to what Bob Nosler told me recently), making such arguments irrelevant.

JB

Standard cut baotatil, not premiums, do a have a tendancy to separte the core fromthe jacket. I ahve a whole bttlle ful of them taken fromelkmand deer. It is a failure? No, the animals all died in short order. Do I still use them? Yes, but only on antelope and similar smmaler animals, with the velocities of the bullets used kept in the range of the standards they were desined to.

Any cup/core bullet, if you peel the jacket back, will separate jacket from core unless they are some way fused to each other. I think one of the reasons why boattails 'fail' is because of this. Before premium types of controlled expansion and bonded bullets were so common it seemed that one of the principles in bullet selection was to choose a bullet that had enough length to match both the velocity and the resistance of the anticipated target. By so doing it wouldn't "use up" its length in the process of penetration which would result in the bullet being "used up" and coming apart. Due to the internal taper of the boatailed bullets they need a bit more length to prevent this occurence. Any bullet can be made to fail under certain circumstances if you try to make it do something it isn't designed or intended to do. Sometimes they work in spite of this. There are few bad bullets but there seem to be many occasions where people have tried to do bad things with good bullets that weren't designed to do what they are trying to do.