The 44 Devastator on game

[6pt-sika]

I have some Devastator boolits loaded up for 444 Marlin. No field experience with it yet, but I expect it to live up to it's name.

Over the last eight or so years my casting has gone almost exclusively to the 444 Marlin in variouse Marlin leveractions with both 1-38 Micro and 1-20 Ballard rifling . Anyway as to HP bullets ,

I used the 429640 Devestator a couple years ago to shoot a small buck at about 35 yards . My bullet was air cooled WW's and pushed with XMP5744 at about 1700 FPS . The bullet hit where I aimed , the animal went down regrouped and got back up to stagger maybe ten yards and lay back down where I put a finisher in it . I was not overly pleased with the result although that animal had no possibility of getting away from me .

With that being said I have a Lyman 429244 HP mold and that one cast of wheelweights and pushed a bit with H322 did a wonderfull job on two whitetail doe at about 50 yards .

Before either of these I used the NOE/RD 432-350GC HP on another doe at about 60 yards pushed pretty good with H322 hitting where I aimed and I needed to shoot her a second time . Again I do not think she had a chance of getting away from me , but to make it a quick death she required a finisher .

Before that I used the MiHec 434-295GC HP again pushed with H322 and it pretty much hammered a 5 pointer at about 40 yards .

At the moment I have a NOE/RD 432-265GC HP to try . I am of the opinion for the 444 in a rifle the HP cavities in the Lyman Devestator and NOE HP's are perhaps a bit to large as the Lyman 429244 HP and the MiHec 434-295GC HP both worked very very well with the smaller cavity . The Devestator and the NOE bullets seem to blow up a lot easier etc etc then the other two . In a 44 MAG handgun or rifle I doubt if this would be as big an issue . But this is only my opinion as the last 44 MAG levers I owned I didn't shoot the HP bullets in .

[pls1911]

The HP bullets in general are an interesting pursuit and good reading, but I cannot see the advantage of this design over a well designed SWC or Flat Nose like Ranch Dog profiles.
While it is true that I've never recovered one from game, I will assert that they are profoundly destructive, penetrate into next week, crush skulls, bones, and joints while cutting whorish holes, leaving excellent bleed out.... notice I didn't say "blood trail", as my experience remains singularly bang... SLAP....Flop, one shot drops, or I pass the shot.

[jimb.]

depoloni: Nice data. I'm assuming that the velocities you're showing are muzzle velocities. At what distance from the muzzle to the target are these bullet impacts?. In other words, what are the impact velocities that gave these results? If we know the muzzle velocities, and the muzzle-to-target distances, we could figure out pretty closely what the impact velocities were. Thanks much.

jimb.

[depoloni]

Thanks Jim.

The media was set at 10 yards, the chronograph was set at 5 yards... essentially making the impact velocities listed accurate (sans 5 yards).

I vary the loads to represent different muzzle velocities to simulate longer impact distances (slower velocities) rather than move the media further and further from the muzzle. Makes everything simpler, less likely to shoot a chrony if I moved it way out with the media, etc.

[jimb.]

Got it. Thanks, Depoloni. Good stuff. Now, I just wish for more opportunity to use my NOE & Lyman Devastator bullets (with hp pins lathed down to produce hp cavity mouth diameters of .140") from my 7.5" & 10.5" barrelled Ruger Super Blackhawks (.44 Rem. Mag.) on deer & elk, especially elk!

jimb.

[gutpile]

folks,
what is the crimp groove to nose on this boolit? please tell me its under .315 and loaded it is not over 1.605 inch
Gutpile

[depoloni]

I'm getting about .412" sticking out of the case on one of my loaded rounds here... OAL is 1.690" with the bullet seated in the crimp groove.
It does appear that there is about .100" or so of full-diameter shank ahead of the crimp groove, which makes me believe you could probably seat these to 1.600" or so while still having a .430" bullet diameter to crimp onto.

I have not tried that however, and will leave that answer to someone who has.

[bikerbeans]

My loaded 44mag rounds with the 44 devastator have pretty much the same dimensions as depoloni's ammo. FWIW, these rounds cycle fine in a 1979 Marlin 1894, I don't have a 44 wheel gun anymore to check them in.

BB

[Fenring]

Happy with the Devastators for pigs. Loaded to 1650fps from my Ruger 96/44 they expand more than readily - viciously in fact and they mangle smaller pigs. Mine are cast from air cooled clip on WW's and end up at 275gr ready to fly.

Left three are Dev's that have lost about 100gr of nose cone, that's rolled right back. Recovered from pigs around 40 - 50kg shot close in, and found just under the skin on the opposite side of the chest.



Other boolit is the Lee 310gr FN launched @ 1500fps.

Pigs hit good and proper with the Devastator tend not to go too far - that said the biggest I've taken would be around 80kg or a bit more, if you were after real big boars with solid armour you may want something harder.


And another Lee. These lose no weight.

[crawfobj]

Great thread. Dopoloni, awesome work. Thanks for sharing.

[Bongo]

Thanks for the awesome photos of the recovered boolits Fenring. I've taken nine wild hogs so far and the two biggest were 110 kg - 125 kg. (250-275 lbs.) There are some that have been killed in my hunting area that went 225kg (500 lbs.). Not many but they are there so I want to be prepared if the opportunity presents itself. I may have to invest in the LEE 310 mold. I like the results with that mushroom with almost total weight retention. I'll be pushing the Devastator at a muzzle velocity around 1,400 fps out of my SBH. The only hogs I've taken with cast boolits so far have been with the Lyman 31141 weighing 173 grains at 2,000 fps out of a Win. model 94 30-30. They worked great but, I was not able to recover the bullets.

[Dogmann]

I wish a ruger 44 auto would feed these !

[Boyscout]

I shot a doe with the Devastor at 60 yards. She ran 15 yards and piled up. My alloy is air cooled WW +1% tin, 22.5 gn Win 296 and WLMP. Accuracy is excellent. The bullet passed through but left a lot of lead fragments in the opposite shoulder. This was my first kill with this bullet. My plan is to cut my wheel weight with pure lead. The Lee C429-240 SWC shoots very well out of my Handi-Rifle also. Anyone have experience with that bullet on deer?

[chrispy]

Whats your alloy?

Theres a guy here from Australia (dont remember his name) but he uses them all the time on hogs and likes them.
I would think you would have to tweek your alloy and powder load to get a certain performance. You need to test and tweek, test and tweek.

Thats what I do anyway. I've only used a hollow point on 1 deer (usually solids). Didnt catch the boolit so I dont know what it looked like, but the performance was great from my 44 mag rifle at 120yds. Most guys use 50/50/2% alloy.

you'd be thinking of Fenring

[Larry Gibson]

I would suggest a softer more malleable alloy for your GC'd HPs, especially at magnum rifle velocities with handgun cartridges. The COWW alloy, even with tin added is still too brittle. That's why we are seeing examples of the nose and expansion petals blowing, shattering or sloughing off. I suggest, if CWWs are used that 2% tin be added and then mix at 50/50 with lead. Even a 30/70 mix can be very effective depending on bullet design and firearm. Even better is just us a 16-1 lead - tin alloy. I have found it to be excellent for top end handgun and rifle HP bullets such as the Devastator in the 44 Magnum.

Larry Gibson

Attachment 157125

[Idaho Mule]

I would suggest a softer more malleable alloy for your GC'd HPs, especially at magnum rifle velocities with handgun cartridges. The COWW alloy, even with tin added is still too brittle. That's why we are seeing examples of the nose and expansion petals blowing, shattering or sloughing off. I suggest, if CWWs are used that 2% tin be added and then mix at 50/50 with lead. Even a 30/70 mix can be very effective depending on bullet design and firearm. Even better is just us a 16-1 lead - tin alloy. I have found it to be excellent for top end handgun and rifle HP bullets such as the Devastator in the 44 Magnum.

Larry Gibson

Attachment 157125

I believe 16:1 Lead:tin was ol' Elmer Keith's recipe too. And if I have read my history books right that was also the alloy used in 45-70 back when it was service issue. It is fun to me to see how stuff that once worked well still does. I believe the binary alloy of lead/tin really makes it want to stick together on impact. JW

[Ramjet-SS]

Larry

I have allot of plumbers lead and Linotype. What I have been doing for my mix not knowing if it is even close to what you are suggesting is in a 20 lb pot 15 lbs of plumbers lead and one roll of 50/50 solder and 4 lbs of Linotype. Any ideas it seems to work well with the HP I am casting but rarely do I recover them on deer pass thru and allot of damage to the boiler room.

Thoughts?

[Markbo]

So the .44 Devastator HP is ~ 260gr right? Using a little different alloy would this be a good boolit for a Marlin .444 and a Ruger Redhawk? It would be nuce to have a single bullet for both, even if the alloy has to be tweaked for different velocities.

[Blackwater]

This is a subject that's generated extra heat around campfires for ages, and isn't likely to be settled here. FWIW, if anything, my experience with HP's always indicated that extra tin, to the tune of 4-6%, always seemed to help the bullet to hold together and mushroom instead of fragmenting the front off. Not sure which is the better way to go on game, though, but in .44, and on our southern whitetails where a 200 pounder is a big one, I think I'd go with Larry's advice and soften WW's with a good dose of nearly pure lead, and salt it further with a good dose of tin. Then I'd drive it as fast as I could get really great accuracy with, and have at it. I believe if it didn't work right, it'd most likely be my fault in placing it on the game animal. YMMV, and likely does, though.

One of the things that has long mystified me, is the simple number of folks who've had such great results with hard cast WFN's, like 44man advocates. I have absolutely no qualms about his honesty in his reports because there are so many more out there reporting almost exactly the same average results. When he explained his theory about deer having very strong clotting agents, and that cut blood vessels and capilaries bleed a lot longer and are harder to stop, as when we cut ourselves shaving with very sharp blades, than those that are torn, as with HP's of any type, it suddenly started to make sense. The hard cast WFN type seems to me to do exactly what he says. Take a look at them and they always seem to have very much sharper ojives at the FP's than expanding bullets do, so it seems a no-brainer that they would tend to cut rather than tear or squash blood vessels. When he posted this, the light went on in my head, and I did a bit of a "Eureka!" This seems to explain the differences between the HP's and the WFN hard casts.

What has remained a question for me, at least, is the variability of the performance noted with HP cast in various calibers at various velocities on actual live game. I've come to suspect that much of it is likely (?) explained by differences in shot placement, alloy (which controls rate of expansion and where maximum shock is effected), and velocity. What many call "perfect shot placement" varies widely, and in my experience, small differences in shot placement CAN make big differences in results, and most especially with handguns and handgun like velocities. Just how it all fits together I cannot say, at least yet, but I suspect a faster pistol load with softish lead and good velocity will put down deer the fastest, IF (big "IF" there!) it's placed very precisely in a high heart shot location where it takes out the aorta. In all the well over 300 autopsies I've done on deer, it's long seemed that this is the fastest killing, most reliable shot one can make on most deer with an expanding bullet. The closer the expanding bullet is to the heart, the more "pressure" it'll put on that organ, and the more damage it'll do to the aorta. No blood vessel will leak as much blood as fast as the aorta! This seems to maybe at least explain at least a good portion of the variability in reported results with expanding bullets in pistols.

The fact that the hardcast WFN's seem to do nearly as well seems to give credence to my little theory too, but it's still just a theory. All I know for sure is that killing game sure can produce some widely varying and unexpected results at times. If we've been in the woods much or for very long, I'm sure most of us have seen deer or other creatures that just simply "took a lot of killing" to bring them to bag. Though mystifying, it does tend to cause one concern when hunting stuff, like big, mean boars, that DO have the ability to hurt you. A really big wild boar with its gristle plates CAN sometimes "take a lot of killing" to stop it, not to mention kill it permanently, and where it's recoverable. Penetration seems to be the key, and now that I think I have at least some sort of handle on the WFN's, I'm going to be trying them more, and likely would use one of that type if hunting hogs, or where hogs might be. The reassurance of very deep penetration, no matter what it hits, is reassuring on animals like this. I'd have no problems whatever using cast HP's on my little deer here, though, so I guess I'm kind'a ambidextrous and could go either way on deer.

Now that I have a Ruger FT in .44 Spec., that'll make some interesting testing as well. There should be little problem with it on deer as to penetration. A buddy put a 250 gr. Keith bullet from stem to stern through a decent whitetail buck of about 145 lbs. or so with a 4" S&W Mtn. Gun in .44 Spec., and I doubt the Devastator will be penetration challenged in it, either. Big, heavyish bullets at good, decent velocities are pretty hard to stop, at least from what I've observed with them.

If anybody gets it all figured out PLEASE explain it to me. Until then, I'll continue to be fascinated by it all, and I'll keep on trying to place my bullets as precisely as I can. That's all up to me, of course. I long ago found it much more satisfying to simply let myself be amazed at all this than to try to let my ego intervene and make me adopt any given theory. They all seem to have their applications, and again, if anyone gets it all figured out, please contact me immediately, because I've been trying to figure it out for a very long time, now, and have met with only partial success in the endeavor. It's still fun, though, and very mystifying when you take in all the data available.

[Markbo]

The older I get, the less I know.