Can you believe this?

[badgeredd]

I am amazed!!!

I wouldn't have guessed a cast boolit could do so much damage to a piece of steel!!! The boolit is a 225438 cast of 50/50 mix of lino & WWs. I didn't check the speed with a chrono, but would be surpized if it was over 2200 fps. The cartridge is a 22 Super Jet out of a 22" barreled modified Mauser 93 based single shot rifle.

http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee338/badgeredd/dc5004.jpg

http://i533.photobucket.com/albums/ee338/badgeredd/dc5005.jpg

Like I said it really surprises me. The range was 50 yards!

Edd

[HeavyMetal]

Try a 300 grain RCBS 45-70 boolit at 2000FPS and see what happens!

That little gong will have a fold in it for sure!

[badgeredd]

Try a 300 grain RCBS 45-70 boolit at 2000FPS and see what happens!

That little gong will have a fold in it for sure!

OK...I'll try one or two this weekend!

Those bigger splats on the gong are 35 caliber 250 grainers doing 2100 out of the barrel at the same range.

Notice the steel that is curled out around the edges of the 2 divots in the center...STILL is amazing me!!!!!!

Edd

[AZ-Stew]

Just curious. What's the twist rate in your Cotterman Super Jet?

Regards,

Stew

[badgeredd]

Just curious. What's the twist rate in your Cotterman Super Jet?

Regards,

Stew

Stew,

It is a 1-12 twist (if I remember correctly), but it may be 1-14. I can check it for you if you want. Let me know. It was a take-off from a Remington 223, I think.:confused: CRS again!!!!!!!

Edd

[trk]

WHen shooting steel targets with ANY bullet take great care to put a loooonng distance between you and it. Fragments can come straight back - I'm speaking from experience.

Velocity is the key to penetration.

[HWooldridge]

Many moons ago, I was at a friend's place shooting .44 mag pistols with straight linotype, Keith-style slugs. They had some old abandoned storage tanks on the property that had been rolled out of 1/4" steel plate. He asked me if I thought it would penetrate and I allowed that I didn't know but was curious to find out. We were both surprised when every shot punched right through. The bullets would turn to lead dust so nothing bounced around or dented the other side but the front side was a clean hole. This was a real healthy load of Blue Dot that was probably close to factory velocities.

[JIMinPHX]

Cast boolits start taking chunks out of steel around 2,000fps. Even soft 12bnh boolits do it. As the speed goes up from there, so does the amount of destruction. By the time you get up to 3,000 fps, even a little .22 will be poking holes right through 1/4" cold roll 1018 steel. Heavier boolits punch through at lower speeds than lite ones do. Be far away if you try this. Some of the steel spall is often deflected back in the direction that the boolit came from when the boolit makes the initial surface deformation.

[454PB]

I once made a swinging plate target using 3/8" thick mild steel round plates 4" in diameter. I welded four of them to heavy wall 1" pipe and the frame was a 4' long piece of 4" X 3/8" angle iron. It held up well to every handgun I own until I used my .454 Casull with 335 gr. boolits at 1500 fps. They didn't penetrate completely, but nearly so. The worst damage was breaking the welds and bending the plates.

[Jim]

Got invited to a Gunstock event in Columbia, SC a coupla' years back. I took my Gibbs Summit with some hot 500 gr. RNs to play with. They put up a gong to shoot at and the first time I popped it, I broke the chains.

"Dammit, Jim, he's dead!!"

[NoDakJak]

Yep! Be far back when testing on steel. Way back in the mid sixties a friend was testing penetration with his new 340 Savage, chambered for the new 225 Winchester. The steel was from a collapsed windmill tower. It looked as if a drill had penetrated it. When he finished I decided to try my Ruger 357 Blackhawk. The load was military, 38 Special brass with the Speer half jacket. I don't remember the exact load but it was probably either eleven or eleven and a half grains of 2400. At the first shot I was struck in the throat and blood was flowing everywhere. Thank god it was just flowing because it just missed my juglar. The half jacket along with some lead had sheared off and come back and hit me. Penetration was shallow. Swelling was great. Pain was severe.
I must be a slow learner because about twenty years later I leaned over the rail of a bridge and fired a 1911 straight down into the ice. The bullet came back and hit me dead center in the chin and then fell at my feet. Incidentally, bullet penetration in the ice wasn't much more than an inch and a half. Penetration in my chin was zero but it certainly bruised.
My father told me that he and a cousin were shooting an old Stevens Favorite at a dime braced against a section of railroad rail. His cousin missed and my father took his turn. He evidently hit it on the bottom edge because it came spinning back and hit him below the lip, cutting competely through to the teeth. He wore that scar until the day that he died. Runs in the blood I reckon. Needless to say, my penetration tests are run at a bit longer range today. Neil

[44man]

Hey fellas, watch splash back from those guns at 50 yards! That steel is too soft and the craters can turn lead back at you.

[Bret4207]

Myself, I was just glad to see someone shooting "a 22 Super Jet out of a 22" barreled modified Mauser 93 based single shot rifle". These days seems all I ever hear about is the latest factory superwhizbangmagnum. Well done!

[pdawg_shooter]

I shot a 1/2" steel plate (mild steel?) @ 50 yds. with a 430gr paper patched bullet from a .458 Win. mag over 80gr of H335 and it sailed right through. The bullet was straight ww. I was impressed, to say the least!

[Junior1942]

I was shooting my RBH 45 Colt with 255 gr cast @ 900 fps maybe. Targets were atop a log at 30 yards or so. I fired a round and a sledgehammer suddenly hit me in the leg. The bullet came straight back and hit my left lower leg in the muscled area just left of my shinbone. It hurt like H E Double L and left a nasty bruise. Had that bullet hit my shinbone instead of the pliable, adjacent muscle, it would have broken my leg.

[lathesmith]

Wow, with all the bounce-backs you guys are reporting from lead, just think what is going to happen when guys start casting from zinc!
lathesmith

[BD]

Steel targets should always be hung so they tilt forward a bit and deflect the debris down, or on falling plate racks they should tilt back so the debris goes up as the plates fall. I have a dozen steel plates I use for handgun practice set up like this and never have any splash back with cast lead SWCs. Folks collect jacket debris hits all the time at action pistol matches when vertical steel plates are used with jacketed ammo. Also some places will use steel plate to protect the edges of wooden "scenerio" sets. Any divots, or dishing of the plates makes this much worse.

I've seen .223s come back from dished out steel targets @ 100 yards. And I've walked out of matches where I felt the position and/or condition of the steel was unsafe.

Shooting at steel is fun, and you don't need to paste it, but you should stop and think about where the lead is likely to go before you pull the trigger.

BD

[archmaker]

I did not witness this one but the guys who told me seemed to be very serious and not joking about it.

50m sighting target FMJ bullet, 44 Mag Mid-range load.

shooting creedmore (Flat on your back, legs downrange, head up range.

Round bounced back and hit the guy where no guy wants to get hit. Did not even penetrate the jeans, but was painful.

[1Shirt]

A number of years ago, my son in law bought a set of the sil 22LR targets and set the chicken at 50 yds. I shot it with a hornet w 225438 over a lite load of unique. Couldn't have been much over 1200 fps. and it blew as clean a hole thru the thing as if it were punched or drilled. Had to be really mild stuff. Son in law was not a real happy camper, and I only shot it once. We now shoot at rail holding plates at 100 that will stop full power jacketed loads from 270/06 etc. They will crater it pretty good however. It is interesting to see the little disks of lead (some occaisionally w/a gas check) that are 15-20 feet in front of the plate. Depends on vol, alloy, etc. Don't think I would be very comfortable shooting steel at 50 yds, and know I wouldn't do it at 25. Good thread.
1Shirt!:coffeecom

[Echo]

I got hit with a lead washer at a military range. We were shooting .45 hard ball, slow fire stage. I had just finished my string and was resting the gun muzzle on the bench when something hot hit the back of my gun hand. It was the base of a hard ball bullet, about the size of between a nickle & quarter. Someone must have hit a steel frame, or whatever, and the base spalled off and sprang back. Didn't tell anyone in charge - safety police might have closed down the range. Still have the washer.

[Big Boomer]

Several years back an old bud and I were at the gun range shooting at his 9" hard steel plate 1/2" thick at 100 yds. Two pieces of chain with 3/8ths inch size links were welded to the plate at about the 10:00 and 2:00 o'clock positions. We used a taller than usual saw horse we made with large nails about 2 1/2' apart to hang the thing. The plate hung down a good 2' below the saw horse horizontal beam.

We were shooting .357s, .41s, and .44 mags and noting the difference in the amount of swing between the .357s (which barely made it swing) and the .41s & .44 mags. (which provided a good swing of the plate). We had accurate loads worked up with all our revolvers, shooting cast, gas checked boolits at max loads and were hitting the plate regularly, shooting off sand bags, a really fun, challenging thing.

Since it was my bud's rig, I asked him if it was o. k. to shoot the plate with my 5-shooter (a .45 Colt Ruger Bisley conversion from 6-shooter to a 5-shooter). He allowed as how it would be o. k. so I cut loose. The .44s had been providing the most swing of the plate and we were trying to calculate the swing and hit it again as it came back into sight and were having fun trying to do that successfully. With the first shot out of the 5-shooter (an LBT 340 gr. WLN gc bullet cast hard and moving at 1400 fps at the muzzle) the plate disappeared. It broke the weld on one side of the plate and threw the plate and chain back around the rear leg of the saw horse. We had to do some welding before we could get back into any more of that sort of thing.

We noted some interesting things about what had taken place on the steel plate, on the ground, and to the horizontal beam of the wood saw horse. The plate was covered with lead smears and only the one shot out of the 5-shooter made a slight dent. The ground was littered with dime-sized (and about two or three times as thick as a dime) remnants of the hard cast boolit bases. Lead particles were in a line across the ground roughly paralleling the beam of the saw horse and the face of the steel plate, with the greatest concentration right beneath the steel plate. Not surprisingly, none of the Hornady gas checks remained on the bases of any of the boolits - the bases were too distorted. Since we were lead scroungers, we picked up all those base remnants we could find and the largest pieces. We had nearly ruined the horizontal beam of the saw horse. The lead splatters had cut the pine wood to pieces in an arc right above the plate. It was only then that we realized how dangerous it could be to be closer to a steel plate struck by a boolit. 'Tuck

[badgeredd]

Myself, I was just glad to see someone shooting "a 22 Super Jet out of a 22" barreled modified Mauser 93 based single shot rifle". These days seems all I ever hear about is the latest factory superwhizbangmagnum. Well done!

Thanks Bret. I've built a 221 Fireball on an old 788 action, a 218 Mashburn Bee on a modified (shortened) Mauser 93 action (as is the 22 Super Jet) and a 218 Mashburn Bee on a 1885 Low Wall. One thing I've found is that these little guys give performance far above what one would expect out the little cases. Here in farm country of the lower penisula and the farm county of northern Indiana and northern Ohio, farmers are much more willing to let one chuck hunt when they see these little cartridges. The longest shot I've taken with any of them was right near 300 yards with the 221. Killed the old bore chuck just as dead as a 22 Loudenboomin Super Magic Magnum. AND it is fun to do a little gestimating and doping the wind to get the critter, besides the recoil is nill and the noise is considerably less.

For those concerned about boolits coming back at you, I ALWAYS shoot at an angled swinger, both to the side and toward the ground. Just common sense. THAT swinger above is made from abrasion resistant pretempered steel 5/8" thick; and it still amazes me that a cast boolit did that much damage!!!!!
A few of the other impacts were made with a 25-20 Jacketed bullet but at lower velocity. Did I mention the 22s weigh a light 44grains?

Edd