Question for 44man and anyone else

[arcticbreeze]

Below is a quote of you from "The Gates Extreme" thread that I found very interesting. I just pulled the trigger on a new Marlin 444 with Ballard rifling and a 1-20 twist. The question I have is related to terminal effect (hunting wild pigs) and not accuracy. I am just starting to develop a hunting load with the Mihec 44/444 GB in the flat point configuration. I want to use an alloy of 50/50 acww/pb which I have successfully run as fast as 2080fps in my MG 35 Rem with zero leading. My question is velocity. Based on your experience what velocity would you feel would be most effective? Based on the below quote I am thinking around 1500-1600 fps MV. Down range ballistics are almost irrelevant for my hunting needs as most shots here in thick, dense FL swamps are 15-50yds and usually closer to 15yds than 50yds. However I want to make sure I can break a big old boar’s shoulder to make tracking a little easier (I hate crawling through Palmetto tunnels after a hopefully dead tusker). I would love to hear from anyone else with some real world experience with large meplat boolit kills and what the wound channel looked like.

I for one have no pat answer! Meplat is VERY important but from what I have been seeing, there is an optimum velocity range.
My .44 with the hard cast WLN (320 to 330 gr) at around 1316 fps destroys lungs and blood pours on the ground, deer seldom make 30 or 40 yd's.
The .45 Colt busts deer as good with heavy, hard cast WLN or WFN boolits (335 to 342 gr) going 1167 fps.
The .475 is best of all at around 1340 fps and either the WLN or WFN (400 to 430 gr) just smashes deer, most hard put to make 20 yd's.
The best part is that internals are destroyed but meat damage is mild and just a little trim is needed around the holes.
As soon as I get over 1600 fps in the 45-70 (317 to 378 gr), things change drastically with little blood sign, sometimes no blood on the ground for a long distance, deer going 100 to 200 yd's. An 80% meplat did not help. Too many deer tested to make me want to try another.
What happens with a WFN, hard cast at 1800 to 2000 fps?
Sure, shoot the deer at 200 or more yd's and they become killers again but what happens to the 30 yd deer? How many guys would revolver hunt at 200 or more yd's?
We have much to learn and I have been doing the testing on animals where it counts. Theory and shooting into test media proves nothing.
Some are just going the wrong way looking for faster and faster boolits, after all, flat trajectory with a revolver is a silly thing to look for unless you are shooting targets.
It is better to look for heavier boolits at the correct velocities to make use of a large meplat and gain penetration.
As far as nose angle I firmly believe you want a good fit to the forcing cone and forget about it's effect on boolit flight. The boolit needs to stay straight when it impacts the cone. That is why I do not like the Keith because the first thing to hit is the little shoulder. The nose provides no guidance.
Accuracy??? I can keep all of my 45-70 revolver boolits on a ram at 500 meters by aiming at a tree branch 26 or more feet, depending on the boolit, above the ram using a red dot. Does the WLN or WFL shoot poor at range? Can't prove it by me!
Killing power at the higher velocity---ZILCH, need expansion to slow it in the animal. Notice guns like the .454 and .460 depend on jacketed bullets to kill. Too fast for hard cast. They need heavy boolits slowed down and is why a .45 Colt will do the job as well once the .454 and .460 are slowed down.

[44man]

Below is a quote of you from "The Gates Extreme" thread that I found very interesting. I just pulled the trigger on a new Marlin 444 with Ballard rifling and a 1-20 twist. The question I have is related to terminal effect (hunting wild pigs) and not accuracy. I am just starting to develop a hunting load with the Mihec 44/444 GB in the flat point configuration. I want to use an alloy of 50/50 acww/pb which I have successfully run as fast as 2080fps in my MG 35 Rem with zero leading. My question is velocity. Based on your experience what velocity would you feel would be most effective? Based on the below quote I am thinking around 1500-1600 fps MV. Down range ballistics are almost irrelevant for my hunting needs as most shots here in thick, dense FL swamps are 15-50yds and usually closer to 15yds than 50yds. However I want to make sure I can break a big old boar’s shoulder to make tracking a little easier (I hate crawling through Palmetto tunnels after a hopefully dead tusker). I would love to hear from anyone else with some real world experience with large meplat boolit kills and what the wound channel looked like.

I don't think velocity will matter much as long as you have accuracy. Boolit work is what is needed at the higher speeds. Make it mushroom and slow in the animal. Too hard and too fast for the hardness seems to be the trouble.
I shot a deer with my 45-70 BFR this morning using Babores 350 gr hollow point cast of 50-50 and oven hardened. It worked perfect and did massive internal damage. It went into the shoulder and came out the other side without going past the diaphragm. The entire body cavity was full of blood and it knocked all the corn out of her stomach and the boolit never went there. There is just a hole on the other side of the chest.
This gun sucks on deer with hard cast even with a WFN. Anyway, I proved to myself that the boolit is the key and needs to be tailored to the velocity. Either that or slow the velocity if you use a good meplat, hard cast. Just from what I have seen, I would say to stay under 1400 fps with hard boolits. The meplat does funny things if too fast.

[arcticbreeze]

Thanks for the reply 44man. I intend on trying many of the suitable powders I have on hand (somehow I have accumulated many over the years) to achieve the greatest accuracy I can but at a target velocity range that I had not determined to this point. After reading The Gates Extreme thread my concern was the results you achieved when pushing the boolit apparently too fast. This is the first year I have hunted with cast boolits so I do not have first hand real world results to compare. From what I have learned my J-word kills and velocities are really irrelevant to this new for me venue. From my experience with this boolit in the HP configuration at 1200-1300 fps from my NMSB hunter with a softer boolit is in order. But at the higher velocity of a rifle I am just not sure. Hopefully I will have some comparisons I can make this season.

Happy Turkey Day to you and yours and to all the fine people here.

Marc

[runfiverun]

marc.
you probably read my opinion on the subject in the other thread.
but the meplat/hardness/velocity question is a key one for hunting.
for deer and hogs it's two different answers.
usually just a hardness question with the same boolit for the two is the answer.
for deer i like the softest boolit i can push to 12-1600 fps depending on whether i use the revolver or levergun.
for hogs i'd target the same velocities but with a bit harder [not brittle] alloy or a waterdropped/heat treated boolit.

[44man]

I don't think you will have a problem with AC, 50-50. It should do very well and upset enough without losing penetration.
Even though every deer I shoot teaches me something, I need a boolit trap behind them to see what happened!

[Bucks Owin]

44man, my respect for your sixgun and bullet savvy continues to increase all the time. And your point regarding the sacred "Keith" bullet design is well taken....Dennis

[44man]

44man, my respect for your sixgun and bullet savvy continues to increase all the time. And your point regarding the sacred "Keith" bullet design is well taken....Dennis

Thanks Dennis. I wish I had larger animals and hogs around but all we have are deer. I open and do a necropsy on all of them. It is amazing what a small change in a boolit will or will not do.
Things change as the animal changes and it will be the same for hogs and the size of them. Seeing a few shot, I seen they are not hard to stop when they are around 200#, but what works fine on them might be a bee sting on one of those big brutes. So my question is, how do you prepare for the exceptional monster when all the rest are small?

[chaos]

I don't think velocity will matter much as long as you have accuracy.

Agreed!

We regularly ( as in Weekley lately) take hogs with 44 mag loads, with dreaded Keith boolits as well as SWC. My kids use Moderate loads of Unique and I use full doses of W296.
Using WDWW's, I actually think the Moderate Unique loads make a more impressive Wound channels. At least on the last 60 or so that we've taken. Have yet to recover a slug.

Size of the hog doesnt matter, they are not any tougher to bring down than deer. They do get a bit more testy than a deer when injured though.

Chaos

[Bucks Owin]

Agreed!

Size of the hog doesnt matter, they are not any tougher to bring down than deer. They do get a bit more testy than a deer when injured though.

Chaos

Well, there are Javalina and then there are feral HOGS! After seeing a 300+ pounder soak up a couple 180 gr '06 rounds square through the lungs and not appear greatly bothered and in fact look "ready to rumble", while a half dozen of his kinfolks appeared "from nowhere" to see if they could get a piece of the action, I tend to think they may be best handled like any other potentially dangerous critter. I want them broken down with no means of locomotion! Eg, smashed shoulders. (And a nearby tree would be comforting at times too!) Call me a sissy if you must....Dennis

[crabo]

marc.
you probably read my opinion on the subject in the other thread.
but the meplat/hardness/velocity question is a key one for hunting.
for deer and hogs it's two different answers.
usually just a hardness question with the same boolit for the two is the answer.
for deer i like the softest boolit i can push to 12-1600 fps depending on whether i use the revolver or levergun.
for hogs i'd target the same velocities but with a bit harder [not brittle] alloy or a waterdropped/heat treated boolit.

This was the conclusion I had come to, but had not tried it out for my 45/70 Guide Gun.

Thanks for spelling it out so well.

[chaos]

Well, there are Javalina and then there are feral HOGS! After seeing a 300+ pounder soak up a couple 180 gr '06 rounds square through the lungs and not appear greatly bothered and in fact look "ready to rumble", while a half dozen of his kinfolks appeared "from nowhere" to see if they could get a piece of the action, I tend to think they may be best handled like any other potentially dangerous critter. I want them broken down with no means of locomotion! Eg, smashed shoulders. (And a nearby tree would be comforting at times too!) Call me a sissy if you must....Dennis

Javelina are not even part of the Swine family.

I am talking Feral Hogs.
Their boiler room is in a slightly different place than a deer. Put it truly in the boiler room, or Central nervous system, head/spine and the lay down just like a deer. Miss the shot and well, you get what you describe.

Have never taken a javelina. These are all Feral Hogs. The East Texas porker in the tree is a bit larger than 300 LBS......... he was taken with one shot in the boiler as well.






I hunt them across the State when I get the time and take them on a regular basis here at home.

There are a great deal of Myths all over the internet about them, such as Bullet proof armor plating on their shoulders, ability to soak up lung/heart shots, etc. Many of the old boars have scar tissue on the leading edge of their shoulders or " The Shield" but I can tell you that it aint bullet broof either.

I've had hogs charge me and have even been treed as you describe. You get between a sow and her young, or foul up a shot and it happens. You hit a big hog on the point of the shoulder and fail to get penetration from bullet frag or what not......... same thing.

You punch a hole in their lungs, and they take the permanent Dirt Nap.

Maybe your Kaliforny hogs are more bullet proof than the swine we have in Tejas?

Only slug I have ever recoverd penetrated through 2 large hogs and bounched off a piece of metal behind them. It was a wdww slug of 253 gr fired from a 5.5 inch Ruger SBH at approximately 50 yards. It was grossly defored from hitting the metal so I dont count it as truly recovered as there is no telling what it looked like after only striking the animal.

We are OVERRUN with the damn things. Take every one you see.

Chaos

[chasw]

Well, there are Javalina and then there are feral HOGS! After seeing a 300+ pounder soak up a couple 180 gr '06 rounds square through the lungs and not appear greatly bothered and in fact look "ready to rumble", while a half dozen of his kinfolks appeared "from nowhere" to see if they could get a piece of the action, I tend to think they may be best handled like any other potentially dangerous critter. I want them broken down with no means of locomotion! Eg, smashed shoulders. (And a nearby tree would be comforting at times too!) Call me a sissy if you must....Dennis

Yikes! Talk about dangerous game, this is the real thing. Out here on the West Coast, we have some big wild pigs too. Someday I hope to harvest a trophy boar. The mental image of a 300 lb tusker turning towards you, ready to rumble, is scary. Great field report, thanks - CW

PS: What Texas needs are wolves and/or big cats to take care of the "overrun with pigs" situation. Without top tier predators, wildlands go to pot, IMO.

[waksupi]

Yikes! Talk about dangerous game, this is the real thing. Out here on the West Coast, we have some big wild pigs too. Someday I hope to harvest a trophy boar. The mental image of a 300 lb tusker turning towards you, ready to rumble, is scary. Great field report, thanks - CW

PS: What Texas needs are wolves and/or big cats to take care of the "overrun with pigs" situation. Without top tier predators, wildlands go to pot, IMO.

Trust me, they don't need wolves. Deer harvest is down over 25% this year due to the wolves in this area. A friend used to feed over a hundred head of elk every year. Now he seldom sees any, once again due to wolves.

[Onty]

Trust me, they don't need wolves. Deer harvest is down over 25% this year due to the wolves in this area. A friend used to feed over a hundred head of elk every year. Now he seldom sees any, once again due to wolves.

I agree with what wolves are doing. In some other parts of world wolves’ population went up dramatically, but they don’t bother with boars, instead, started attacking livestock on unprecedented scale, especially sheep and goats. And as a rule, they kill several times more than pack could eat for days.

At the same time, wild boar population exploded, they became pests attacking gardens and vineyards, stripping them from anything they could eat, next to houses, in backyards, even cemeteries.

http://www.wemjournal.org/wmsonline/...e=02&page=0117 http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=226276

Now, if you put on top of all that human stupidity feeding them in large urban centers, I guess nothing will change until pictures of mutilated bodies of kids, elderly and others not fast enough to escape, hit front pages http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1229...icleTabs_video .

Also, here is video what some nuts are doing when they encountered them in forest, provoking animals on attack, just preparing them for future attacks on unaware hikers; http://noolmusic.com/youtube_live/wi...and_people.php .

Even Brits have serious problem with them, and started giving instruction to police how to deal with wild boars. Seems to me that on the end Bobbies will have to forget their 9mm semiautos and start thinking about large bore wheelguns:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/cultur...ightings.shtml

[mroliver77]

I was always led to believe "Bobbies" did not carry guns. huh Why do they need guns against an unarmed populace? oops rant off!
Anyhow the piggies have a predator of the highest order. Man, redneck!
Hunting can provide all the population control you need IF yhe hunters are not too restrained. We have a large deer population here to the point the are issuing nuisance tags. Price went up for hunting license and deer tag.Way too many rules and wardens out looking to add more cost to it. Turns many off from hunting. Dang I thought I turned the rant off.
Anyhow I am jealous of all the pigs. I had to drive hours and pay to shoot one.
Jay