NOE .403-180 WFN Penetration Test

[Bigslug]

My plan was to do this with a 10mm Glock 20, but on the first pour I had some technical difficulties with my "mystery metal" dropping a bit too large out of this mold. My old man, however, wanted to feed some to a 38-.40 lever gun, and so cast them out of 20-1. THOSE fell out exactly where we'd expect them to be. Ran the first ten over the chronograph and got an average of 1357 fps, and then turned them to the rows of milk jugs:

130341

130340

It took four one-gallon jugs to stop them, and they hit the back wall hard enough to dent the fifth. Expansion (measured by wooden ruler) is an honest 9/16th's of an inch. The neat thing is that they didn't round over AT ALL - it's just a nice, flat tabletop of doom. Blows them up nicely!

[3leggedturtle]

Pretty impressive performance. Always thought the 38WCF is about the best looking of the original cartridges from the 1800's. What powder were you using?

[Bigslug]

Triple 7 FFFG on top of a card wad. No reason we couldn't run the gun on smokeless, but since it's an auto bullet with no crimp groove, we figured a compressed charge of BP simulant would help prevent the bullets from setting back in the cases under recoil.

This has got me wanting to try a couple of things. My LBT 230 grain LFN 1911 bullet did not deform at all when shot at 830 fps when cast of 23 BHN Mystery Metal, and it took 8-9 jugs to stop those. I want to switch the alloys for both guns and see just how much of the deformation is alloy and how much is speed. Gotta find some serious milk drinkers. This science stuff sucks up a lot of jugs!

[3leggedturtle]

One thing i do when shooting bottles or jugs, is I put a big piece of cardboard about 5 feet behind so I can see what kind of shape the boolit is when exiting, or if it completely blows up if using a varmint bullet.