silly-wet shooting with the blackhawks

[mainiac]

Have a nagging question for you folks,,, been shooting my .357,45 colt, and the 32mag,at steel animals,and having a blast!! Finally settled on most accurate loads for each,and am now just trying to wear the guns out!Sorry,back to my question, all these guns are going about 1100-1200 f.p.s., and am shooting lead s.w.c. type bullets out of W.W. material,water dropped. These guns dont do any damage to the targets,other than a slight dent. (this is good,because i just made this set,and dont want them shot up to quick!) Shooting them with jacketed bullets in rifles, the bullets drill right threw them. How come the rifle loads drill holes,and the cast bullet handgun loads dont? Is it because of 3100-3400 f.p.s. velocity, or the copper jacket???? Picking out my cast bullets from the backstop, I find that some of them could be loaded again,so assumed that they were pretty hard????Got long winded again,sorry

[felix]

Velocity first and foremost. Momentum second, and quite far behind. ... felix

[BOOM BOOM]

HI,.
FELIX IS RIGHT! But copper is also 4x's harder than lead.
Also vel. & momentum are of course directly related w/ the forumla factoring in massx vel. sq. so vel. is the biggest factor.

[StarMetal]

Velocity is definately the answer with factory jacketed rifle loads. You take a water quenched WW cast 311284 bullet and send it at those targets at high velocity and see what happens.

Joe

[Bucks Owin]

HI,.
FELIX IS RIGHT! But copper is also 4x's harder than lead.
Also vel. & momentum are of course directly related w/ the forumla factoring in massx vel. sq. so vel. is the biggest factor.


That's right. Lead will penetrate steel if it's moving fast enough!

FWIW,

Dennis

[waksupi]

There must be something, to that momentum thing. A friend stopped me from shooting his 200 yard half inch steel target with my .358 Win. I knew it was giving it a hell of a whallop, but didn't realize it was making holes, until he checked with the spotting scope. It was punching holes cleanly, starting with a 2070 fps muzzle velocity. I don't know how fast it was going at 200 yards, but imagine it had to be down to at least 1800 fps.

[bisley45]

3100-3400 f.p.s. velocity yep

[Bucks Owin]

Try shooting a piece of 3/8 steel with a .220 Swift sometime. It's an eye opener!

Dennis

[mainiac]

thanks for the replys, mark BTW, i shot some more today,and was shooting the old smith target model 38 with 3.0 gr. bullseye and the lyman 358091 (740 f.p.s.) and this pip-squeak load doesnt knock the silly-wets over,, just makes a tink sound!!

[cherok9878]

just makes a tink sound!!
And you know that you have connected, but you do not have to reset the steel. Best of both worlds................larry

[David R]

A 60 grain linotype boolit going 2684 will penatrate half way through a 1/2" steel chicken at 25 yards. Done it.

David

[9.3X62AL]

Just an FYI on the steel penetration bit--for those of us shooting in forested areas or brushlands. When a steel target gets penetrated, VERY hot particles of target metal are scattered about. These metal particles can easily start vegetation fires, so be careful about where you run these sorts of tests, folks.

A number of otherwise very knowledgeable and experienced fire service people have opined that gunfire itself has been cause and origin of such fires, when it was more likely caused by energy-displaced steel target media. Penetrating steel targets or steel-jacketed ammo has no place in wildlands shooting activities--PERIOD.

[fourarmed]

The real bottom line on this is a physical quantity called Stress, which is force divided by area. (Same units as Pressure, but that is normally used when the force is applied by a liquid or gas.) In this case, area is approximately the cross-section of the bullet. Force is the rate of change of momentum, so you're basically talking about mv/t. I would guess that t (the time the bullet is in contact with the target) could be approximated by the length of the bullet divided by its velocity. Thus, stress looks like mv^2/LA. Now LA (length times cross section) is about equal to the volume of the bullet, and m is density times volume, so if all bullets have about the same density (lead alloy) stress is roughly proportional to v^2.