Real gel testing of CBs for Hunting

[curioushooter]

I don't know about others but I am simply unsatisfied with the present state of terminal ballistic data on cast boolits. It's not that it's insufficient, it's that it is usually done with substitute mediums for real gelatin. Shooting milk jugs of water or wet newspaper is a waste of time IMO because deer are not made or jugs of water or wet newspaper/phonebooks. They are made of hydrated protein--gelatin.

Having now a hollopoint cast boolit mold I will be undertaking some experimentation and reporting back if there is anything worthwhile to report. I will also be doing testing verses the Hornady XTP JHP bullet.

I was curious if anyone has undertaken this sort of effort and if they have any pointers or recommendations.

My initial experiment will be in 357 magnum using the 359 Hammer Mihec mold loaded to ordinary book loads and shot out of a 5" 686 and a Marlin 1894c.

I am going to use unflavored gelatine and water to a concentration that will calibrate near FBI protocol using 17 caliber steel BB.

I have not yet decided if 4 layers of denim will be used or if I will use a layer of buckskin.

This effort will be undertaken at my own expense entirely for the benefit of myself and anyone else interested. Possibly it will be expanded to other calibers like 30-30, 44 Mag, etc.

Please make any suggestions in the comments. I have procured most of the necessary goods so far.

[quilbilly]

I absolutely agree that soaked, slightly compressed phone books are not natural tissue even though that is what I use. They do establish an inexpensive baseline when I do multiple calibers and boolit weights or alloys plus are very convenient to acquire. I look forward to your results especially after you do your 30/30 with both round and flat nose 160-ish grain boolits hopefully launched at about 1600 fps.

This winter I will be testing a 200 gr. RNGC 30 cal boolit launched from a 308 at about 1250 fps which should prove interesting for penetration. I am theorizing that I will get about 14" of penetration with significant tumbling but little expansion with my favorite alloy. All tests have been at 40 yards.

Also to be tested will be a 357 cal 184 gr RF PB launched at 1320 fps.

[jmort]

Wet newspaper is as good as any test medium
The best in my opinion
Look at the Linebaugh Seminars and the Bone Box
I use the Clear Ballistics blocks
Brass Fetcher has video comparing it organic gel blocks
It gives you some rough ideas, they are close enough

[Larry Gibson]

I look forward to your results.

I also favor using wet newsprint wet pack bundles as a test medium. Except I use a known performing bullet shot into the same test bundle. For example when I tested my 311041 HPs of various alloys I fired a round of Winchester 170 gr Power Point into the wet pack. That gave me a known example of performance to compare the results of my 311041 HPs to. I was able to compare; expansion, penetration and wound channel between the Winchester PP and my own bullets performance. In a wet pack of newsprint I was able to shoot 2 rounds of the factory and 4 test rounds of a load/alloy. I had an Oehler chronograph back then so I knew the velocity. The test bundle was at 25 yards and once I had selected an alloy that expanded, held reasonable weight retention with the same penetration as the Winchester factory rounds I loaded then down to replicate retained velocity out to 200 yards and tested again.

I've done the same test procedure on all manner of calibers/cartridges including most handgun cartridges.

That testing was done many years ago and my field results since then on deer and other like animals have verified the value of the comparative results.

[NyFirefighter357]

All those tests may be good but they lack one thing, bone.

[quilbilly]

A 3/16" to 1/4" piece of plywood can be placed in the stack of phone books or newsprint about an inch in to simulate a rib. It does in interesting things to a round nose boolit causing it to veer or tumble violently. In my tests, flat nose boolits, even a small me plat nose, usually expanded more and changed direction less. My most vicious wound channels came after hitting the 3/16" plywood and the round nose boolit started to tumble.

[curioushooter]

Bones can be placed into gel. Not so with wet newsprint. The thing about bones is that they are quite incidental and random in how they will behave, which ruins much of the comparative utility.

[curioushooter]

Wet newspaper is as good as any test medium
The best in my opinion

So is it as good or better. Why? AFAIK everbody recognizes gel as the gold standard. Ammo companies and ballistic labs ain't shootin' newsprint.

[bmortell]

they use it cause it looks professional and they have money and can measure data to exact numbers. I bought gel and made a block before, its cool but its expensive and the prep work was kinda allot. and when it spoils you'll get evicted from your town. I don't think fast objects know much difference between squishy water based things. if I really wanted a "realistic" hunting expansion test id just put a small section of meat and ribs right where the bullet will impact, then paper mush, water, fabric to slow it to a stop.

[bmortell]

some of my HP's ive compared in just water, to fruits, to paper mush, and a very freshly dead chicken in front of a water jug, some the shape of the deformed lead was slightly different but the amount of expansion was all similar

[NWPilgrim]

CuriousShooter, this is a great topic. I would also be interested in seeing any comparative test results of CBs with powder coating and at different hardness day 12 and 18 for example.

[John McCorkle]

Just a thought, ballistic gel isn't exact medium to target animals either.

The benefit of ballistic gel is that it is very similar and most importantly....of most importance is it is a very specified medium for scientific testing.

Bullet makers, law enforcement agencies, military R&D all rely on these tests in this very specific medium because it gives consistency by which to test.

It may be much more similar that phone books or water jugs but it's not flesh. Animals are not one density throughout...skin, bone, connective tissue, organ tissue, muscle, nerves and arteries all have varying densities from one to the other much less where on the animal you actually hit...the best medium is post mortem dissection and a wide sample size. I think you do get both here...though often coupled with a healthy dose of "small sample size analysis"....ie, this bullet did this once so therefore it will not perform in 'x' expected manner in the future. Could be true may not be.

Gel test for cast boolits is very lacking....I think given the consistency and year round availability (not hunting season depending) gives is an opportunity to test alot and not many folks have.

For one there's no money in it. By default casters are tightwads and with YouTube getting very picky about who they allow to profit off videos in our interest field not many folks can spend the money on gel, testing environment, video equipment or spend the time to do so....some could....maybe someone will. But with a thousand variables the test script would get real long....I can think of at least a dozen bullets I'd like to try at different velocities in gel off the top of my head right now... I'm sure we all could

Wondering if we couldn't put together a pool to donate a few dollars to here and there and coax someone with the time to run some gel tests for us?

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[megasupermagnum]

I tried ballistics Gel. It was a royal pain to handle. All said and done, I'm only checking expansion if I'm shooting media. The final word for me is shooting an animal, breathing or roadkill. Water is the easiest, but is too hard on a bullet. Bullet expansion is increased in water compared to organs. Clay works pretty well, but it's very difficult to recover bullets from. Wet newsprint works great. The only problem is having enough. Ballistics gel is not a body simulant, and nobody knowledgeable makes the claim that it is. It is simply the most uniform media used to test bullets comparatively (key word).

[John McCorkle]

I tried ballistics Gel. It was a royal pain to handle. All said and done, I'm only checking expansion if I'm shooting media. The final word for me is shooting an animal, breathing or roadkill. Water is the easiest, but is too hard. Clay works pretty well, but it very difficult to recover bullets from. Wet newsprint works great. The only problem is having enough. Ballistics gel is not a body simulant, and nobody knowledgeable makes the claim that it is. It is simply the most uniform media used to test bullets comparatively (key word).Ding ding ding, exactly... consistent test medium

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[trapper9260]

If one puts bone in the news paper or what ever.Make sure it is not cook ,just raw because bone gets hard after it is cook ,it is soft when alive or in the raw . Just to give some idea.

[kingrj]

Uh..I just shoot deer with them...Haven't lost one yet! That is the extent of my testing...

[white eagle]

Uh..I just shoot deer with them...Haven't lost one yet! That is the extent of my testing...

real world testing

[SSGOldfart]

Not a real test by any means I shoot a 2x4 stuck in the ground at the same distance I expect to shoot my deer if the bullet goes through it it will kill the game I'm shooting it not maybe I need a better load.it's worked for more than 50 years I'd still like to see the OPs test results[smilie=w: maybe a old dog can learn a new trick....

[Outpost75]

In American Rifleman early 1980s there was an article on cast bullets for hunting in which they used water-soaked Washington, DC phone books, which were thoroughly saturated, such that the books swelled up and burst their bindings, then they were stacked on a gurney while the water was streaming off them, being shot at 25 yards and velocities being measured concurrently. Factory .30-30 and .30-06 Remington Core-Lokt and Winchester PowerPoints were used as controls. Tests were conducted with cast bullets of various alloys and velocities. If you have access to bound volumes of American Rifleman pre-Internet, the article(s) are worth lookng up. Another article by George Martin entitled Cast Bullets In Africa showed results of cast bullets fired from the .375 H&H on plains game, impala, kudu, warthog, etc.

Complete agreement with Larry's post above.

[Dinny]

I use and will continue to use wet newspapers, magazines, and any other paper to test my bullets. Is it perfect? No! Is it cheap and easy? Yes! Does it provide the data I need? Yes!

I nearly lost a deer back in 2008 that I hit with a Barnes 225gr XPB launched from a 45 Colt rifle at nearly 1700fps. The bullet wasn't designed for that much velocity. Since then I've tested all my bullets in a box of compressed wet newspapers and haven't lost a deer since. My tests have proven which bullets hold up to the velocities I shoot and that's all I could ever ask for.

As a reminder, most ballistic gelatin is considered 10% density for shooting expanding bullets into. 20% is military grade and made for shooting non-expanding bullets into.

Good luck with your test! I look forward to the data.

Thanks, Dinny247565247566247565247566247565247566

[Bigslug]

I've been to a number of LE ammo mfg sponsored gel shoots, and also pseudo-scientifically ruptured more than my fair share of milk jugs. A couple of relevant points that might help you out:

*typical police pistol hollow point loads will penetrate about 14"-16" in bare gel, give or take. They also typically seem to stop in 3, sometimes 4 milk jugs very consistently. Since numerous sources will tell you that full expansion is almost immediate (first few inches), we can reasonably expect that X depth in gel will roughly equate to Y depth in water. Obviously, with jugs, you can only really measure in 8" increments, but figure the dual layer of plastic at the juncture between two of them is a reasonable approximation of hide or clothing on the exit side. Probably not much difference in resistance than a spindly little deer rib.

*I consider a one gallon milk jug to be the rough equivalent of about 4-5 inches of gel. If you're playing with hollowpoints, a 4 to 5 jugger would probably make for a DANDY deer load.

* I've gotten nine jugs out of hard alloy LFN/WFN format bullets in both .45 Auto/230gr/830fps and .32/130gr/1250fps. In the case of the .32, changing the alloy to 20-1 but leaving the load alone created a nice mushroom that stopped in 4 jugs.

*Also got 4 jugs and a nice mushroom from a 20-1 .40WFN/180gr/1350fps.

*Have fired a hard alloy Lyman 358430 (195gr round nose) into FBI gel at 570 fps to see what the old British Webley concept was all about. I ran out of gel at 18" and recovered the bullet off the hard rubber backstop.

*clearly from the above, expansion or non-expansion will be a major influence to depth.

*With cast hollowpoints, I think your major design criteria are going to be (1.) does the bullet expand and penetrate adequately at the distance you expect the impact to occur?, and (2.) does your bullet/alloy/impact velocity combination allow your HP cavity to stay together, or does it fragment off? You might need to download to simulate your impact distance.

*My own two cents: a large meplat slug that does NOT expand, or expands minimally, delivered to the right place is going to be a VERY consistent performer, regardless of impact speed, and expansion can be a variable can of worms. Deer taking a solid pass-through cardiovascular hit that does not also take out a supporting bone structure seem to consistently take about 10 seconds to fall over regardless of what you hit them with. If it sounds like I'm saying "save yourself the trouble with the gel", maybe I am just a little bit. Such experiments are fun for their own sake and worthwhile for the knowledge gained, but fact is we're learning in LE circles that energy transfer isn't really a useful thing; hyrdostatic shock doesn't really start helping us until we've got impact speeds of over 2,000 fps; shot placement and initiating rapid blood loss is what it's really all about; and the main "advantage" of expansion is that it chills out those who are more concerned about "over-penetration" in an urban setting than they are about stopping the threat. A solid flat nose will drop your deer just fine and be easier to cast.

[bmortell]

Im not sure hydrostatic shock really helps at all. Between deer taken from 3 or 4 people i know, theres many examples percentage wise of lung shots with extensive damage from bergers in 30 06 to 300 wthby making huge exits lots of shock and bloodshot and the deer dont really seem to care if it has lungs and a bloodshot torso and runs 100yds. Never had a 25 06 but the few people i know that used em say it shocks deer a lot but they dont die and they stopped hunting with it. Then the 5 deer me and my father got with muzzle loaders all just fell down even though the energy and shock is about 3 times less. So to me it seems the best indicator of effectiveness is just mass and diameter.

[skeettx]

curioushooter
You are to be commended for your efforts
I stand by to watch for a report of your tests
Mike

[rking22]

Yep, same here. Ain’t never going to discourage someone adding to the collective knowledge. I don’t do expansion testing, well other than on critters, but comparative data adds to the knowledge base. Since critters aren’t made of jell, using a known baseline bullet as a control will give a good comparison value. Looking forward to your testing.

[Tripplebeards]

Water is too hard. I tried some 44 mag 265 grain HP’s with 80/20 mixed with 16% pewter through water filled totes. They made perfect mushrooms. The same boolit never expanded with complete pass throughs through three deer last year within seconds of each other. All recovered with boolit diameter entrance and exit holes. 50/50 and 16:1 pewter and pure lead mixes literally flattened to a thick penny at the same 1750 FPS velocities in the the totes and peeled back the pedals like a banana. I shot the same soft HP’s in dirt and they looked like perfect mushrooms...dirt/ mud is softer that water...and that’s not saying a lot.

You can see some of my testing and expanded boolits on my home page photo albums.

[Treetop]

I'm subscribed! Thanks in advance for your testing, curioushooter.
Two of my favorite posters here on castboolits are Larry Gibson and Outpost 75 because of their extensive cast boolit testing protocol and the generous sharing of their results. Anything that you can add will be great, IMO! Semper Fi, Treetop

[Tripplebeards]

Here’s a water test with a 7.5 BH 265 grain (started as) 44 cal Lyman devastator at 1750 FPS shot out of my Ruger 77/44 into water filled milk jugs.

https://i.imgur.com/voYsBiZ.jpg

Pretty flat expansion looking like a penny and very shallow penetration. It would stop in the 3rd to 4th milk jug.

Here’s the same boolit and alloy and velocity shot into a dirt backstop at 25 yards. Nice mushroom that that peeled back. The chunk next to it was a pedal on the other side that broke off. Weight is around 180 grains VS about 130 grains in water above.


https://i.imgur.com/peQgVov.jpg


Water is WAY to hard of a boolit test.



Here’s a water test of a 15.4 BH Lyman devastator with a MV of 1875 FPS. I filled up two monster totes with water and put them back to back the long way. This boolit stopped in the first tote and bounced off the opposite end leaving a white stress crack in the tote. The second one sailed through both totes. I slowed the load down to 1750 Fps and shot three deer last year at 20 yards to point blank with zero expansion, Evan after shattering the backbone and rib bones. I posted the boolit diameter exit holes on previous posts. So imo making an alloy that expands perfectly in water is going to be to hard of an alloy to get expansion on thin skinned game. I had two of the three deer run 100 and 120 yards with perfect archery shot placement (broadside lung shots) before expiring with very little kinetic energy transfer. IMO I would have got a quicker dispatch and shorter travel before expiring with a softer boolit.

https://i.imgur.com/jJ8f3cF.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/5HMRIuF.jpg

[reloader28]

Wet paper, milk jugs, jello all work perfectly fine.

But I dont care which one you use, you HAVE to have 2 or 3 commercial bullets close to what you are replicating for a comparison. That is a must. As far as a test media, they all work fine

[303Guy]

When I was developing loads for my hornet I used saturated wool furniture padding rolled tightly into a beer can (with the end cut open). The wool was rolled into the cans before saturating. These were placed in a containment cylinder one behind the other. Penetration and bullet expansion was identical to critter tests. I gave up on that test method simply because it was too much trouble and I had in any case progressed onto critters and new I had a super hornet, fit for goats. I came up with the saturated compressed wool in an attempt to mimic muscle and it worked.

[dverna]

I commend you for taking the time and effort to do this work. It is a labor of love. It will be interesting to see your work.

[Riposte1]

I've been studying the effects of bullets for more than 50 years and I've shot about everything one can imagine. I gave up on gel testing mostly. It just isn't worth the effort and can be very misleading.

First off the penetration is "optimistic", yes I've seen some bullets go as deep in flesh as in gel but not most. Wet newsprint otoh can be sort of "pessimistic" bullets often go deeper in flesh but not always. We've had two shootings in our county with .45 230 gr. FMJ - neither exited the victim shot in the chest (and neither was a large person), also have shot deer with .45 ball - have not had one exit though certainly it would depend on how much bone was hit or how big the deer were. I've seen .357 magnum 125 gr. JHP penetrate less than 1" and 3", but I've also seen them go completely through a small deer with very little damage (and the deer ran 400 yards!).

Secondly, as someone mentioned above, there is no bone. For self defense a well directed bullet will hit the sternum which does not have much meat over it. When I started testing modern handgun bullets with something hard over them (I use hardwood flooring which give the same penetration with BBs as rib bones - but those are dead bones, I've not tested them with live or fresh killed) I found that most of these do not expand at all.

Thirdly, flesh and bone has grain - it resists bullets differently depending on the path of the bullet. Gel does not.

Fourthly, the wound channel in gel is grossly exaggerated and some people just cannot get past that.

That said, at least it is consistent if you monitor the temperature and test it with a BB at 590 fps. It is just difficult to deal with.

Just bear in mind, it is not what the bullet does to the gel that matters (because it is not a direct simulation of flesh and bone - it is in fact designed to give reasonably close penetration and expansion to pig muscle) but what the gel does to the bullet (like stop it, or expand it).

Charles Schwartz, an engineer, has a good little book out called "Quantitative Ammunition Selection" in which he provides a formula for converting the results of bullets shot into water to gel and says there is no qualitative difference between the two mediums. I tend to agree.


Still, we need bone or something resembling it.


Just Ramblin'


Riposte