Expansion properties of cast vs. j-words

[awaveritt]

176686176687
As a young man, back in the '70's, I started hand loading for 38spcl and 30-30. I drank all the industry cool aid regarding the controlled expansion properties of j-words, which served to limit my appreciation for the age-old functionality of lead boolits. A few months ago, I purchased the NOE version of 311-041 with both PB and GC cavities. Using a 50/50 alloy of WW/range scrap, I did an informal expansion test and was amazed with the result. The gas-checked boolit over 16gr 2400 was fired in my 94 Winchester (20" bbl) into a five gallon bucket of moist dirt. The result is shown in the pic below. I think I may have purchased my last box of jacketed bullets for this rifle!
Yup, drinking Cool-aid really can mess a feller up! Now I know I'm preachin' to the choir here, so I'd love to hear your insights into this subject.

[OS OK]

176688
Yeppers...show me a J-Type that'll do this at 863 FPS...and...keep all it's weight..."That's my story and I'm sticking to it!"

[Outpost75]

I'm not sure how consistent "moist dirt" is as a test medium. I use water jugs. Not perfect either, but reproducible. Below soft 6.5 BHN hollow-point bullets at various velocities.

176689176690176691

[OS OK]

Nice work there Outpost...

I wish that, if you are so inclined...that you'd post those pictures in my thread on HP's, Im trying to get a continious thread going of everyones efforts and results...like you have done here so factually.


Casting Hollow Points...Best Pic's...Your Success Tips...? (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?314670-Casting-Hollow-Points-Best-Pic-s-Your-Success-Tips)

PS...that's a great idea to keep those pesky milk jugs in line...drink a lot of milk...do ya?

[DougGuy]

176686176687The gas-checked boolit over 16gr 2400 was fired in my 94 Winchester (20" bbl) into a five gallon bucket of moist dirt.

Moist dirt and moist deer are totally different mediums, and if you just want to see a boolit expand, shoot it against a piece of 1/2" steel plate. Or a bucket of dirt. Game is more or less hollow in the chest cavity, and less dense than water in the gut, unless you hit a rumenated sack of alfalfa hay.

I don't think you will catch that boolit in a deer, I think it may expand slightly but nowhere near what the moist dirt shows, and it will simply keep on going right on through the far side of the animal. If you piled up enough boston butt to catch the boolit, you will have comparable expansion to the moist dirt but again, deer aren't made out of boston butt so that test would also be without merit for obvious reasons.

You may catch it in a hog, possibly, but it would have to be a longitudinal shot and only one out of many will stop within the hog, the majority completely penetrating.

Just my thoughts because I have seen how much seasoned oak firewood a Lee 300gr boolit will go through fired only marginally faster than 1000fps from a short barreled Vaquero. You would be surprised to know that it will easily achieve greater than 36" of penetration.

[runfiverun]

one of the cast boolits greatest attributes is the ability to penetrate and make two holes in a relatively straight line.
you have to manipulate it from there to make it do something else.
softening the alloy helps.
pre-disposing the front to make it do that mushroom thing for sure helps in soft tissue.
you can make holes to thin out the area, or use a cup point to initiate a bulging affect, or change out the alloy at the front to as dead soft as pure lead.
you can also manipulate things through velocity.

all of these things affect a jacketed bullet too, only there you can also manipulate the jacket
[thickness-softness] to enhance or retard the leads function [varmint bullets/nosler partition] as well as manipulate the core material to make the whole package work within a velocity window on target.

higher velocity? more jacket strength at the nose, add some tin or antimony the core, or put a partition in the jacket to control the mushroom diameter.
low velocity? thinner jacket, expose some softer lead at the tip, or add an initiator tip.
the trick is finding a decent balance and to stay within the velocity window of operation otherwise you have a perfectly good bullet fail at it's intended purpose.

cast works pretty much the same way, slow that boolit down to 900 fps and it becomes a drill.
speed it up and it fragments.
change the test material and you get another set of returns.

[gwpercle]

It's just amazing what the old school , not too hard , flat pointed boolit can do.
Hard cast , heat treated and water cooled to make boolits harder is way over rated.
All the experts have brain washed everyone into thinking only the latest , J-word, high tech , super bullet will cleanly take a deer.
After viewing many photo's of game , taken with 50/50 COWW - range lead and simply air cooled ...it convinced me hardness and hollow points were way over rated, I'm a 50/50 flat point convert .
Gary

[dverna]

It is a lot of work, but ballistic gelatin would give a better indication of bullet performance.

Those companies selling the "Kool aide" do a lot of testing. If their bullets did not perform, they would be in trouble. The bullets they produce for the .30/30 class are different than those for the harder hitting .30 cal's.

I purchased 500 Sierra Gameking bullets for the .308 hunting rifle to get the same lot number - they will last my lifetime. Load work up was easy and they are accurate. They are more accurate than I can get from a cast bullet at the same velocity. That matters to me. Not saying cast bullets cannot be accurate, but it is not easy when velocity gets over 2400 fps. I am too lazy to put the effort into doing so, when for less than $200 I have all the hunting bullets I will ever need.

I drink the Kool aide because of the advantages of the modern jacketed bullet in high velocity rifles. Cast bullets have been around for centuries. If they were superior to jacketed bullets, more people would be using them. YES, cast bullets will kill anything....but in most situations, jacketed bullets have an edge in accuracy, velocity and longer range shots. I can use the same bullet/load for a 50 yard shot or one at 400 yards.

[awaveritt]

Thanks for all your replies. Yes, I am aware of the endless number of variables that will affect the way a projectile does or does not expand. Case in point, I actually fired three of those boolits into the same bucket of "moist dirt". Each successive round yielded different results as the dirt was loosened and churned up. This pic shows all three, the first result in firmly packed undisturbed dirt on the right, last one on the left. The three 180 gr bullets retained 131g, 116g & 92g of weight, respectively. Btw, the last, most violently expanded one (far left), did exit the bottom of the plastic bucket.

I hope to do some more controlled tests in different medium in the near future. I'm not really a jacketed hater; this was just an epiphany, after years of selling the cast bullet short, with respect to its versatility and potential!

I am still in load development phase for both PB and GC versions. I'm focusing on 2400 for the checked ones and I'm using 9 gr Unique for the plain based ones. Y'all really gave me a lot to think about. I really love tinkering with this stuff.

[OS OK]

Yep, pretty cool stuff huh? Today more so than ever I think we can call our 'casts' a designer boolit especially now since they get PC'd in every color under the sun.

I'm enjoying your thread.

[44man]

one of the cast boolits greatest attributes is the ability to penetrate and make two holes in a relatively straight line.
you have to manipulate it from there to make it do something else.
softening the alloy helps.
pre-disposing the front to make it do that mushroom thing for sure helps in soft tissue.
you can make holes to thin out the area, or use a cup point to initiate a bulging affect, or change out the alloy at the front to as dead soft as pure lead.
you can also manipulate things through velocity.

all of these things affect a jacketed bullet too, only there you can also manipulate the jacket
[thickness-softness] to enhance or retard the leads function [varmint bullets/nosler partition] as well as manipulate the core material to make the whole package work within a velocity window on target.

higher velocity? more jacket strength at the nose, add some tin or antimony the core, or put a partition in the jacket to control the mushroom diameter.
low velocity? thinner jacket, expose some softer lead at the tip, or add an initiator tip.
the trick is finding a decent balance and to stay within the velocity window of operation otherwise you have a perfectly good bullet fail at it's intended purpose.

cast works pretty much the same way, slow that boolit down to 900 fps and it becomes a drill.
speed it up and it fragments.
change the test material and you get another set of returns.
Hard to deny this. I see 2 jugs only and just a small spit in the first. Would I hunt deer with that, I hardly think so.
Some are enamored by quarter size boolits but you might be so wrong on game. I can't get into this endeavor. It is the Energy Dump myth.
How do you know what works 100% of the time? You shoot animals!
You need massive internal damage and an exit. Some of those great mushrooms shown are that, POISON.
Some boolits shown would lose 90% of deer hit.

[Outpost75]

Nice work there Outpost...

I wish that you'd post those pictures in my thread on HP's, Im trying to get a continious thread going of everyones efforts and results...like you have done here so factually.


Casting Hollow Points...Best Pic's...Your Success Tips...? (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?314670-Casting-Hollow-Points-Best-Pic-s-Your-Success-Tips)

PS...that's a great idea to keep those pesky milk jugs in line...drink a lot of milk...do ya?

Done. And truth be told, jugs are spring water used for making ice cubes which will not chlorinate the whisky.

[44man]

The screwiest thing I watched was a .44 mag shot at hanging balloons, Bullet stopped in the third to the fifth, don't remember but would you shoot deer with it?
My best deer killer ever is the .475 BFR. It blew four jugs to mush and split the fifth like the one shown and penetrated 17 jugs. Catch a boolit in jug 3 is a wood chuck gun.176810
Yeah 17 jugs in a straight line.
I can't show boolits because I never catch one after a deer or water jugs.
Those silly flat boolits just boost your expectations. I think I was 16 or so when I thought that way.
I fail because I see this stuff all the time. Those flat things FAIL.

[runfiverun]

hey Charlie I swage most all of my jacketed bullets.
I can make a 44 mag open up just like that at the lower velocity's.
the trick is to pre-open the jacket and core with a notch die then re-close everything back into a rnfp shape.
as soon as it hits any resistance the petals start to push back and open all the way to the cannelure.
it's repeatable and isn't overly sensitive to the media I use to test it in.
the only thing that varies is the depth of the wound cavity.
the biggest factor in how fast it opens and how far it penetrates is the striking velocity.
except on steel then I just get a 2" wide 'star' of jacket material.

[OS OK]

I may be under the wrong conception of HP's functionality. There are different applications...
I thought that we wanted a boolit that would open up and cause a wider wound channel and stay inside preventing it knocking a big mass of meat and bone out on the other side. Granted that would double the opening for bleeding out and make it easier to track the wounded animal but, a wide wound track is still going to bleed out inside just as well and drip from the entry...still quite trackable in 'most' instances.
The other aspect was to transfer the kinetic energy to the innards and jellify them causing even quicker demise of the animal.
When it comes to 'self defense' rounds, I think it would be best to keep the round inside the perp, not exiting and making me liable for further damage to people and places it goes after leaving the perp.
HP's in hunting big tough thick boned animals need penetration first then the wide wound channel and deliver the kinetic energy too...for me that's up to interpretation. I don't think just one design and weight and speed will apply to all game across the board. I dunnoh really...a nicely placed hard cast will blow right through and kill them deader than a hammer...maybe it's all about preference and whose hype you are more inclined to buy into?

[runfiverun]

in your case [situation] keeping the boolit inside is beneficial unless the penetration is poor.
the 40 short is famous for being a survivable gun shot wound especially when a hollow point is used.
the opening of the bullet used inhibits depth and the bullet just doesn't make it to the vital internal organs.

there is a fine line between damage and damage.
I prefer two holes.
without the second hole the chances of leak out are much less.
the entrance wound is very small compared to the exit wound even with no or minimal expansion, the skin going in just tears open whereas on the way out it expands and pulls away from the object before tearing open and letting go.
this is why you hear about the bullet being found under the skin on the off side of animals, the skin actually pulled away from the body then sprung back, and the bullet isn't right in the opening of the meat hole but off to one side.

[mdi]

Several mentions about medium being used to test bullet expansion. But bullet stopping/testing media are just "relative". I've never seen a deer with polystyrene skin and liquid innards. Nor have I see any animal with a jello body. I shoot into wet magazines/newsprint, but that only tells me what happens to my bullets when shot into wet newsprint/magazines. I can compare bullets when shot into my medium, but that tells me little about how my bullets will act on game. Not condemning anyone's methods, but also not condemning anyone's objections to the OP shooting into dirt.

I never figgered my cast lead bullets would reliably expand in game, so I chose a bullet that had a good shape, that would inflict damage due to its shape and not how it deforms...

[OS OK]

in your case [situation] keeping the boolit inside is beneficial unless the penetration is poor.

Yep...there's the big dilemma. My results show a beautiful mushroom...but...where did that mushroom 'bloom', 1/2'' deep upon entry or 1/2'' before it would have exited or 1/2 mile downrange? My testing in a 10' water column doesn't tell me anything about this aspect, it just stops the boolit and makes it easy to recover without further damage from bouncing off something...all this time I was pretty proud of having thought I'd mastered my first HP mold and Pb mix...hell...I'm just starting...I might need a Jeanie in a bottle!

[OnHoPr]

Like what was mentioned, there are just to many variables. A lot of these expansion test really are just some form of imagination regardless of what the media is. I have used magazines and newspapers. One thing it will tell you is if your boolit is hard or soft and possibly fragile or tough. A lot of consideration comes down to the characteristics of the hunter and his/her style. First jacketed will provide more speed with accuracy at longer distances with less ballistic calculations. But, if you do not choose the right bullet there you can have problems from bullet blowup to pin hole wounds just like cast. The general size of the game animal comes into play as well. Half this country deer being shot are in the 100 lb range where in other parts of the country deer can be over the 200 lb range, that makes a difference. The style of the hunter, the hunter may be sitting on a feed pile or food plot where shots should generally be calm and broadside standing. A right behind the front shoulder just hitting ribs and lungs a HP would be more appropriate. That same boolit might not be so great if still hunting, grunting & rattling, or on drive scenarios where any angle on a 200 lb animal needs to be addressed to get to the boiler room with more than an arrow field point tunnel wound. With cast or jacketed it can get complexed. I would rather shoot soft cast in my mzldr than all the fancy jacketed, but would rather shoot jacketed in the 30 cal from my hunting scenarios. It sorta leaves me to believe caliber has something to do with it in MY scenarios.

Additional note: I believe the vintage deer cartridges like the 30-30, 303 sav, 30 rem, 32 win, 35 rem, to the 38-55, 375 win, 44, 444 up to the 358 win where velocities can go beyond 2500 fps with jacketed that these cartridges can be cast to the hunter's characteristics to be more lethal than jacketed up to the 250 yd mark. One more thing to consider is there are so many designs of metplat for the cast boolit beyond what is available with jacketed.

[44man]

in your case [situation] keeping the boolit inside is beneficial unless the penetration is poor.
the 40 short is famous for being a survivable gun shot wound especially when a hollow point is used.
the opening of the bullet used inhibits depth and the bullet just doesn't make it to the vital internal organs.

there is a fine line between damage and damage.
I prefer two holes.
without the second hole the chances of leak out are much less.
the entrance wound is very small compared to the exit wound even with no or minimal expansion, the skin going in just tears open whereas on the way out it expands and pulls away from the object before tearing open and letting go.
this is why you hear about the bullet being found under the skin on the off side of animals, the skin actually pulled away from the body then sprung back, and the bullet isn't right in the opening of the meat hole but off to one side.
There you have it! I shot 3 deer with 240 XTP's and was fortunate to be able to see them fall, over 60 yards. I recovered all 3 bullets against the rib cages. Nice mushrooms and good damage but no blood trails back tracking. Entry holes mean nothing, need 2 holes with damage in the middle.
Hunting deer gets like movies where a BD gets blown 20' from a nine. We have movie shooters too. Big mushrooms in sand, dirt and water give you POWER. But none have shot game. A 90# deer can make you wish for better when she gets away and dies for buzzards.

[Bigslug]

176812

20-1 can be fun stuff. NOE's 40-180 WFN loaded to about 1350 in a .38-40 lever gun after 4 milk jugs. Got a nearly identical picture/result from a hybridized .32-20 with a 130 grain LBT at 1250fps. Doesn't group as well as the harder stuff when the velocities increase though, which leads me to generally think non-expanders with larger meplats are the better answer.

I've hardness-tested, air and water-quenched the alloy rendered from segregated jacketed range scrap which was probably at least 99.9% from pistol bullets. I don't know what the preferred alloys are for jacketed RIFLE bullets because I typically only find fragments of them on the berms I scrounge from. Since they have to be swaged during production, however, I can only assume it's similarly soft stuff that's relying heavily on the copper sheath to control expansion at the higher impact speeds encountered.

Since I live in CA and am subject to the will of the Condor Cuddlers which will have us hunting totally lead-free by the 2019 season, I've personally seen three deer shot and had similar reports on a couple more - all killed VERY quickly with the Barnes TSX and TTSX expanding solid coppers. In putting a lot of the pieces together, I've concluded that a lot of the Conventional Wisdom we grew up with regarding "ideal" bullet weights (150 grains for deer for a .30 cal, 180 grains for elk, etc...) was largely to do with fragile, early-era jacketed bullet construction. In short, if you're going to lose 30-50% of your bullet mass on impact, you need more starting mass to do the job. Making the bullet sturdier - either through solid copper, or with extra tin & antimony - and giving it a task-appropriate nose seems the ideal answer.

[M-Tecs]

I have been shooting cast since the late 60's. I have had great performance from cast and some not so great performance. This was due to improper alloys or improper design/velocity selection by me. Same has happened with jacketed bullets.

I have never had poor performance for a Barnes TSX. They truly are a better mouse trap but I still hunt with cast at times. For deer a Barnes TSX would not improve my 45/70 hunting load. Out of my 6mm's a cast bullet will not come close to the performance of the Barnes TSX.

[44man]

A tremendous amount has been spent and years and years to get jacketed right for each animal. You do not shoot moose with a varmint bullet, each is specific. Cast is the same, you have control but to expect one to do all is a fairy tail. I am so glad I can work lead to do what I need. It will NOT be a soft HP for deer.

[Blackwater]

44man's comments are, as usual, dead on. All I can really add to this is that if expansion is what you're after, tin seems to really enhance bullet performance. According to some moderately extensive tests I did years ago with the Lee 358-150 SWCHP's, hollow point cast seem particularly needy of tin if you want the bullets to hold together. Straight WW's often to sometimes tend to break apart, while those with a goodly dose of tin seem to hold together much better and penetrate and perform better and more consistently. The tin seems to increase the alloy's malleability, or tendency to "brad" our or expand, and yet still hold together. Some experimenting along these lines may well help you to find the "ultimate" alloy for your gun and your purposes. This isn't good news for many, myself included, because tin's gotten rather expensive, but it's still the answer to some casting "problems" and our wants and desires. Tin also helps produce some mighty pretty bullets, if that matters to you. FWIW?

[runfiverun]

well bullet performance become a secondary hobby when you start swaging.
and it also opens your eyes to how an alloy behaves under pressure.
I think someone mentioned what are jacketed bullet cores and the answer is just about as varied as our scrap alloy is.
is varies from pure lead to small amounts of tin and up to 3-4% antimony.
if you have a core comprised of nothing but lead and antimony it will actually extrude and flow rather nicely under pressure.
if you have a core with about 1-2% tin it become a much stiffer thing to deal with and promotes better penetration.
Tin does not like to move under pressure and requires much more force to make it move as freely as just an antimonial core will.
mix a small amount of the two together and things get even tugher especially when covered in a jacket.
but it works almost the same way as cutting and shooting ww alloy with soft lead naked, only at a velocity 50% higher.

[Blackwater]

That's an interesting observation, Run. Since I've never swaged, I've not run into it, but thinking back on my own limited expansion testing, it kind'a makes sense, since that would sort of explain why higher tin alloys tend to stick together rather than fracturing. Thanks! I used to get to talk with the metalurgist at the foundry I once worked in, and he was full of observations that I found fascinating and edifying, but he had little experience with lead and its alloys, and was mostly experienced in irons and steels. I think every element has its own peculiar contributions to alloys, and sometimes it's strange how tiny differences can yield very significant differences in results. Lead's probably the simplest of metals to work with, but even it has its peculiarities. And the more we know about them, the better we can utilize that knowledge in our casting and hunting. Great observation, and one I'll think about for days now.

[Hickok]

As a younger man, we would "drive" deer to standers in the woods. Shots would be anywhere from "danger close" to maybe 75-100 yards. Using 30/30s, .300 Savages, 30/06, etc., there was never a case of a jacketed bullet not expanding, most of the time it was too much expansion, and bloodshot meat.

As I started casting in the late 60's and started using the .44 Mag and .45 Colt in handguns and lever guns with a nice flat meplat, deer went down as nicely as with high powered rifles loads, with none of the meat damage. Just a nice clean thumbsized hole "in and out."

[44man]

Years ago I had the C-H swage tool. I bought pure lead wire and half jackets from Herter's and made flat nose and HP's. They were good shooting and explosive on wood chucks and water jugs. I would not shoot deer with them if I still had the outfit. I don't think an alloy could be put through it.
Jacketed today uses all kinds of alloys to control expansion and then bonding the lead to the jacket did wonders for penetration.
Fellas still did wrong and I remember a guy in PA long ago. I helped him drag a little buck out, he was beat from a long haul. The deer might have made 90# and there was snow.
He dropped the deer, it got up and ran so he tracked and shot, again and again. All good hits behind the shoulders and I could cover all with my hand---6 shots! He was using 180 gr Silvertips. I told him he had a moose bullet and to go to a 150 gr.
Without the snow he would have lost him.
Cast is as important and you can go wrong both ways. You can make a bomb or a sharp stick.
I will always feel the test is on game, not anything else because you get the wrong impression. The wonderful flat boolits can cost you animals. It has been 30 years since I could use revolvers on deer and I have seen it all. I did hunt PA with them but had to shoot a buck only, never seen one even with 80 does walking by.

[44man]

There is an impression that a revolver NEEDS more then a rifle but it is not true. Guys look for too much expansion, thinking a revolver is weak. I had my eyes opened with the destructive power long ago. You can do as much as a Weatherby mag right quick. I learned more with each deer with a necropsy on each. Took a long time and many deer to see what each caliber, boolit weight and velocity does. I am getting close but work never ends. The best teacher is a loss after a good hit.
Leave the quarter size boolits home. You look at them and say, "Darn, that would kill like gangbusters." You can spend hours on your hands and knees and go home with nothing.
Why do you figure so much expansion is best? Maybe reading about ME and velocity!
Then too hard for the gun is as bad with a pencil hole. Each gun has a need to work. Bear with me, I want you to do the best, a loss never is forgotten. PLACEMENT can fail. The wrong boolit in the right place is not the answer. Make the boolit work.