Exterior Ballistics Questions---Help Please

[HollowPoint]

In an effort to track down more information for an ongoing bullet design I've been working on I was hoping to gather some more info on Exterior Ballistics.

I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for by searching the internet or public library. I've even gone as far a contacting the Sierra Bullets Technicians with this same question but, although they were kind enough to reply, they really weren't much help.

Most likely there are few if any Exterior Ballistics experts that frequent this site but, I'm certain there are plenty of folks here with a whole lot more experience on this subject than I have.

Here's my questions.

First off let me say; I've always believed that when a bullet is fired, it's travel down the barrel (regardless of barrel length) imparts a certain amount of friction and that friction in turn, imparts a certain amount of heat to the bullet.

Now, after that same bullet leaves the barrel, does it seem logical to assume that as the bullet cuts through the air on its way to its target, the friction it encounters from the air itself, on its way to the target would impart even more heat on the bullet?

I have a "reason" for asking but, I'm reluctant to share that right now. I kind of just want to know for sure if my line of reasoning is a sound line of reasoning. If it's not, then my "reason" for asking becomes a mute point.

However, if a bullet DOES increase in temperature/heat, then my reason for asking becomes a potential way of improving my existing bullet design.

I hope that makes some kind of sense.

If a bullet does become heated by virtue of the friction it encounters both from its travel down the bore, then the air molecules it has to cut through as it makes its way down range, I'm wondering if there's a way to figure just how hot it would get?

I know there are may factors that would effect what I'm getting at; like barrel length, time in flight, ambient temp, atmosphere conditions and the like; but right now, I just want to know what some of you more experienced guys think about this.

Thanks for your help.

HollowPoint

[onondaga]

HollowPoint,

I experimented with Copper Jacketed Gallium bullets in the late 60s and donated to Uncle Sam a particular design for part of a specific delivery system that is still in use. I can tell you that in a 7.62 NATO like round , Gallium becomes fluid in slightly less than 100 meters from temperatures reached through air drag. Gallium melts near 200 degrees F. and is a heavy metal.

I could give you a lot of specific information about the project, but then I would have to shoot you.

[HollowPoint]

Greetings onondaga:

You have no idea how happy I am to hear that.

I more or less knew that a bullet would heat up due to the friction it encountered during flight but, short of being shot by that bullet myself, there was no way I could prove it.

Since this Gallium is considered a "heavy metal," would it be safe to assume that the lead that my bullet is cast from is also a "heavy metal?" (although with different characteristics)

In the experiments you refer to, were you able to come up with calculations that would help you determine in advance, the temperatures that your Gallium projectiles would reach at the various velocities, distances or conditions they were shot at? Or did you arrive at the 200 degree F measurements due to the fact that your projectile's Gallium makeup melted at less than 100 meters?

Since the bullets I'm working with are straight cast Stick-On Wheel-Weights, and they don't liquify in flight, I'm having to assume that if they do heat up, (even significantly) the temperature they reach is not enough to cause them to melt. At least not at the size or thickness of my cast bullet.

If I could figure out how to measure the amount of heat my bullet takes on during its flight, I might still be able to calculate the right modifications to my existing design to make it more aerodynamic at extended ranges.


Thank you for your input. I really appreciate it.

HollowPoint

[AZ-Stew]

Velocity and air density will be the big factors. You will have a tough time getting a cast boolit going fast enough to melt, pretty much regardless of the alloy. They're not tough enough to drive that fast. I don't know how hard the Bismuth alloy is that's used in Cerosafe, but I think it melts at about 158F (off the top of my head. I don't remember, but the info's readily available). If you want to intentionally melt a boolit in flight, that might be a good place to start. It may be hard enough to drive to a relatively fast speed (3,000 fps?). I've driven Hornady 50 grain SX bullets (thin jacket) over 3,500 fps and they leave a visible trail. There's no way of telling whether the bullet is disintegrating due to centrifugal force or whether the core is melting out of the jacket. 3,500 fps is in excess of mach 3, and I believe aircraft capable of such speeds experience surface heating. On the other hand, time is also a factor. The heat would have to affect the bullet for a certain amount of time to cause melting, depending on the temperature. If the time of flight is too short, melting will not occur.

I don't think the bullets get too hot. They don't set paper targets on fire as they pass through. They don't even leave scorch marks to indicate heating below flame temperature.

Regards,

Stew

[MT Gianni]

They don't even get hot enough to melt crayon type lubes. It is logical that they are heated, how much I have no idea.

[quilbilly]

I relate heat caused by air friction on a projectile similar to that caused on an aircraft skin going the same speed. 2000 feet per second is about 1400 miles per hour or nearly Mach 2. The skins of military aircraft at that speed do not heat up much beyond 300 degrees if memory serves therefore speed upwards of 3000 fps would not cause enough friction by air to melt the lead.
Heat within the bore is a different matter entirely since friction is much higher.

[HollowPoint]

Greetings Gentlemen:

And many thanks for your replies.

I'm not looking to melt my lead projectile in any way. I was just wanting to find out -more or less- if sufficient heat was imparted to my bullet in order to make it malleable enough so that if it were a certain thickness it would deform while in flight. (it would Morph; for lack of a better description)

For example: I know that there is not very much chance of my cast bullet becoming hot enough in its present shape to deform in any way during flight but, (remember this is just an example) if a cast lead bullet had lead-walls as thin as a jacketed-bullet's walls, might the small amount of heat generated by the friction imparted by the flight of this bullet through the air be enough to make the surface of this cast lead bullet deform in some way by the pressure of the air flowing against and around it?

I guess I'd have to draw up an illustration of the bullet design I'm picturing in my mind in order for those of you reading this to have a visual idea of what I'm getting at and where I'm coming from.

If I get the chance I'll try to draw up an illustration some time this week. With any luck those of you that can offer up some insight will not have lost interest in what I'm trying to achieve here.

It may just be shear folly on my part so I hope you'll bare with me.

HollowPoint

[cbrick]

As Stew said, time is a fator and an important one. Even at long range your projectile is on target in under 2 seconds unlike an aircraft flying for hours.

Another thing to consider is the metallurgy of lead, it absorbs heat very slowly compared to other metals. Given this and the time of flight heat in a lead alloy from the flight would be very minimal.

Brass absorbs heat relatively fast compared to lead. Anyone that has ever had brass ejected from a sem-auto shooting next to you find it's way inside your shirt will attest to this.

More heat will find it's way into your lead from the burning powder behind it and the friction you mentioned. But again the time frame is so short that this burning powder does not even char paper shot gun wads and cannot even come close to the melting point of lead or melt any lead off your boolit bases as some believe.

Not sure what your trying to accomplish here but the term "hot lead" comes to mind. It may be just a bit warmer than when you loaded it but "hot" it won't be.

Rick

[lwknight]

There is definitely a lot of air pressure on the nose of the bullet.
I would venture a guess ( cause no one can prove one way or another ) that if you fired a SWC bullet at 3000 fps at a trajectory that would allow the most flight time , that the nice square edges would not be so square when the bullet arrived at its destination.

I might add also that during supersonic flight the friction point will be mostly at the nose of the bullet because the most of the bullet is in a void till it goes transonic.

Sounds like a job for mythbusters.

[HammerMTB]

Maybe they heat up some, but I can say with authority that the .38 Special slug that hit me in the forehead wasn't hot enough to leave a burn. Cut my head open, yeah. Gave me a helluva headache. But no burn.
It was going ~800 FPS when it left the bbl, and some good deal less than that when it ricocheted into my noggin. I s'pose not enough speed to get very hot. Sure glad it didn't follow that trajectory at twice that speed! :Fire:

[lwknight]

Ouch!
How did you actually get a bullet to return to where it came from without a spring?

[cbrick]

I can say with authority that the .38 Special slug that hit me in the forehead wasn't hot enough to leave a burn.

Hhmmm . . . Now that just can't be a good thing. :coffeecom

The forehead I mean, not that it didn't burn you. :rolleyes:

I just gotta ask, was it you that fired the shot? I guess what I'm asking is . . . did you shoot yourself? :holysheep

Rick

[lwknight]

I hope we get an explaination for that. I have never had a piece of lead return 180 degrees. Sure shards and fragments can come back when shooting steel. They don't have enough velocity to go more than a few feet . But a lead slug ? Amazing!

[HammerMTB]

I hope we get an explaination for that. I have never had a piece of lead return 180 degrees. Sure shards and fragments can come back when shooting steel. They don't have enough velocity to go more than a few feet . But a lead slug ? Amazing!

We get lots of small shrapnel from steel too. Curiously, those are HOT, I suppose from the compression of metal and rapid shape change. I don't recall ever seeing one draw blood, but I have seen several burn- just small welts, but burns nevertheless.

Back to the .38 slug- no, I did not fire it. I was at a bowling pin shoot, and was standing 12-15 feet behind the firing line. I saw it come at me. Know how you can see a piece of gravel come at your windshield? but you can't do anything about it. It hit me near dead center in the forehead. Hurt like hell. I didn't know just what it was for a bit, just that I started bleeding from the forewhead and something hit me. Then one of the other shooters says "Well here it is!" and picked up the slug from the ground beside us.
We don't know the exact way the ricochet happened. We can say it was from a shooter in front of me and maybe 5-6 feet left of my position. There is heavy rubber matting that is "supposed to" reduce the ricochets, but in this case may have contributed to this one. If the shot deflected off either the steel table or a pin, then hit the rubber matting, then came back to hit me, that might explain it. I wouldn't have thought a ricochet could come 180 degrees either, but I saw a YouTube of a guy that got hit with a .50 cal that he shot 100 yards and returned to whack him in the ear.

I still have the .38 slug. I've thought of making a necklace of it, or something.

[waksupi]

I have steel targets here at home. I find if I don't stay back at least 40 yards, I am in very real danger of having bullets come back at me. I totally banned FMJ bullets here, as the .45 ACP was real good about coming back and hitting the cabin.

[44man]

I read long ago of a guy that put a can on a fence post. He hit a knot in the post and the bullet came back 180* and killed him.
A friend had a 7mm Weatherby bullet explode in a railroad embankment, hit him in the thigh with a 12 gr piece of jacket and tear almost to the femoral artery. Huge hole, but he was not burned.
I have picked up boolits that came back and they were not hot.
But boolit heat is not going to be enough to affect anything, the brass case might be actually hotter.
I have shot a thousand HDPE wads behind boolits and none melted on the edges even though they went down the bore as fast as the boolits. Dacron filler does not melt or burn.
I would say a bullet that is heated in the bore will COOL in airflow but that would depend on the pressure wave from the nose that keeps air away from the sides of the bullet. Maybe the nose gets hotter from air friction.
A question that can't be answered is my answer.

[cbrick]

Shrapnel coming back at you is a very real thing. In IHMSA Smallbore competition the chickens are at 25 yards and if the targets are pitted it's common for shrapnel to return to the firing line. Several years ago for this very reason the NRA changed it's rule book and in NRA competition the chickens are now at 40 yards in Smallbore.

I have never seen a complete bullet come back but pieces of jacket often do, pieces of lead less often. This is the prime reason that no one at our club is allowed on the firing line without safety glasses. It's a minor thing to get hit with a piece of this shrapnel but in the eye it could be a life altering experience.

Rick

[Echo]

Mach 3+ airplanes (SR-71, for instance) get danged hot, but not from friction. They get hot from compression - the air they are pushing out of the way is compressed, and you know what happens to a gas that is compressed - it gets hot. And SR-71's got hotter on top than on the bottom, because they had integral tanks, and the fuel in contact with the lower skin kept the temperature down to ~375F, while the top of the fuselage hit around 675F. Actually caused the airplane to warp. And some parts of the aircraft hit over 1,000F.

Re the boolits - jacketed bullets get hot due to friction in the barrel, but also from the heat of combustion and also from compression. If I knew what I was talking about, I would say that bullets/boolits lose heat as they leave the barrel, radiating more heat than they might gain due to friction. Try this experiment: take a boolit, put it on the concrete floor of the garage, or whatever, and give it a healthy whack with a single-jack. Grab the smashed boolit, and feel how hot it is - due to compression.

Remember the films from WWII, taken at dusk, night, or even in the day, when tank cannon rounds, or anti-tank rounds, could be seen glowing as they went down range - and they surely were not tracers. Heat generated both by friction and compression. I theeeenk...

Bottom line - IMHO, boolits don't gain heat from friction as they go down range.

[HollowPoint]

Interesting side note on that 38 caliber wound.

I'll add my two cents before I go on to give a little more info about the bullet design I'm eluding to.

During Quail Season a few years back I witnessed a guy get nailed on the back of the head with what turned out to be a 300 grain .45 caliber cast bullet that had ricocheted in from who-knows-where.

It instantly dropped him to his knees but it didn't kill him. I was watching from about a hundred yards away so it all seemed to happen in slow motion. He and his hunting buddy were walking down a small hill when it happened.

His buddy must have thought he was just kidding around because I heard him start laughing until he realized what had happened. He then made a beeline to retrieve their vehicle so he could take his downed hunting buddy -presumably- to the hospital.

When the guy ran for their truck, I walked over to see if I could help. The slug had impacted the back of his head then fell to the ground at his feet. It didn't break the skin but it sure did some superficial and psychological damage. This guy was visibly trembling with fear. I really can't blame him. Hell, I was a hundred yards away when it happened and it scared the **** out me too.

When I saw the slug that hit him I could clearly see the flat-spot where it had bounced off of some thing hard before striking this guy on the head. I didn't need to see any more. I packed it up and headed for home. It was a bad day to be in the field.

It was a pretty vast area. It boggles my mind to think what the odds were for this unfortunate guy to be standing in just the right spot, at just the right time to get hit by that 300 grain slug.

And in case any of you are wondering; I didn't ask if the slug felt hot or not. I just wanted to make sure he wasn't going die and then get the heck out of there.

Anyhow; back to my original reason for posting this inquiry.

An example of the bullet design in question can be seen on the last pages one of my other posts. It's titled ".45 Caliber Air Rifle."

In my inquiry I wondered if there was sufficient heat build up to alter the shape of this bullet over extended ranges. (200 yards or so)

The bullet I was wanting to test would weigh approximately 200 grains in .45 caliber. The barrel length is approximately 23 inches and the velocity would be somewhere in the high 700-800 Feet Per Second range.

Since it's being shot out of an Air Rifle, there are no hot gasses behind it to further add to heat that the travel through the bore may contribute. If you have the time you can take a look at the tail end of the bullet I'm talking about.

It's the tail end of the bullet I'm thinking of redesigning.

I was hoping to reconfigure the inside shape of the semi-hollow base in such a way that even a small amount of heat might make it malleable enough that at extended ranges the air pressure coming around the tail end would cause that semi-hollow base to constrict to the point of giving me more of a football shaped profile rather than the profile it had when it left the barrel.

I'm still working on the drawings. Bare with me.

HollowPoint

[lwknight]

I have seen the slo-mo videos of bullets hitting steel and liquifying. The lead and whatever else reverses back out of the pock. I can see that a fragment of copper would return as fast as it went in. Thats high velocity. Never be close to anything being shot wit ha high power rifle.

I find all my low velocity slugs laying on the ground in front of the target. hit , splatted and dead right there. I do not shoot jacketed bullets at steel less than 25 yards. Even the ones that are hot loads liquify and the jacket goes ?? who knows. All I find are the bases or maybe its the nose flattened out. The 38s just fall dead in front of the steel.

If there is a real danger , I want to know how it works and what to not do. Obviously something is different from my steel target shooting experience.

As for the fence post : I would put my money on someone down range objecting to being shot at and returning fire. Those kind of things get the truth shrouded in deep dark mystery. Especially if foul play was involved.

[lwknight]

Hollowpoint , I truly believe that 700-800 fps would not have enough pressure of friction to even show an effect on any bullet alloy.
Sounds like you are to be concerned with aerodynamics and nothing more.

[Centaur 1]

I wouldn't think that a bullet is in flight long enough to have any effect. Space Shuttle Columbia started out at 17,000 mph and it took several minutes before it came apart. The orbiters get so hot that they glow red during re-entry. You would probably have to put a lead nose cap on an air-to-air missile for there to be any changes caused by frictional heat.

[cbrick]

Kinda sounds like your trying to re-invent the boat tail bullet. :coffeecom

Rick

[legi0n]

Kinda sounds like your trying to re-invent the boat tail bullet. :coffeecom

Rick

My thoughts exactly.
The boattail approximates the shape of a water drop free falling which is considered the most aerodynamic shape found in nature. Guess what, the water drop deforms in flight to attain the least drag. The boattail just flies "backwards" from the water drop point of view..

About bullets heating... this past summer I picked a 45 jacketed bullet behind the firing line at the range and it felt about 120F. The bullet was in pretty good shape and I still can't figure out how it got there.

[44man]

From what I understand, the man was very close to the post. So it is possible the boolit did not bleed off much speed. It hit him in the forehead.
But anyway you look at it, it is scary. Strange how something going "that way" can come back "this way."
I have been hit in the chin with a piece of lead off a 50 yard plate and it made a nasty cut and was pretty deep. I would not like to get hit with a full boolit.

[AZ-Stew]

I'm still working on the drawings. Bare with me.
HollowPoint

I'll bear with you, but I think I'll keep my clothes on.


Kinda sounds like your trying to re-invent the boat tail bullet. :coffeecom
Rick

I think the idea is to have a hollow base to seal the bore, but then have it collapse inward to reduce drag, as you said, like the base of a boattail bullet.

Regardless, the bullet won't be passing through the barrel for more than a few miliseconds. Not enough time to impart much heat.

Regards,

Stew

[HollowPoint]

Greetings Stew:

I got the feeling that my description of why I was wanting to find out about the amount of heat that bullets take on while passing through the bore and during flight was probably way to vague.

Your latest reply has hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly what I was getting at; only, I had envisioned it happening over extended ranges. (say about 200 yards or so from a slow moving bullet)

I put together some simple drawing that may help some of you readers and potentially "More-Knowledgeable" Exterior Ballistics guys offer up some insight.

Please don't bust my chops about detail. These drawings are not exactly to scale. (hey that rhymes, LOL) They're intended mainly to give a visual idea of what I was hoping to achieve and needing input for with respect to a possible reconfiguration of the tail end of my bullets.

Re-inventing the boat tail bullet? Not really. I'm just trying to get it to an optimum configuration for my Sam Yang Big Bore Air Rifle.

Many thanks.

HollowPoint

[Southron Sanders]

Not wanting to burst anyone's balloon-but boattail bullets have been around a very long time. Why not make up a mould that throws a bullet that is football shaped and shoot it? That seems to be more practical than trying to design a bullet that will change its shape in flight.

Another option would be to use a football shaped bullet loaded into a sabot that would drop away as soon as the round left the muzzle.

I would recommend that if you do make up some football shaped bullets, you load them in a 45-70 round or .45 Long Colt round rather than a .45 Auto as the cases are longer and you have more room to seat the bullet.

BULLETS BACK AT 'YA !

I have had three bullets come back at me. The first occurred back in 1968 on a firing range in the woods on Wilmington Island, GA (near Savannah.)

(1) A friend of mine had a .58 C.S. Fayetteville Rifle. He was shooting it with a full military charge of black powder and a 500 grain Minie Ball. He fired at a target 100 yards away, we heard the round rickoshet off of three pine trees in succession and then heard the whining ball pass a couple of feet over our heads!
(2) I had a cheap percussion derringer. I put up a target on an old wall about 15 yards away and fired-the round lead ball hit the target, and bounced back striking me in the left leg. It didn't even raise a bruise.
(3)I shot a .45 Auto at a target in some heavy woods in Northern Virginia. No sooner than I fired I felt something hit the toe of my right boot. I looked down and was amazed to see that FMJ .45 Auto bullet spinning in front of the toe of my boot! Apparently the bullet had struck several trees and rickosheyed back to me!

[rhead]

Check the melting point on a group of different lubes. Lube some bullets with these lubes and fire them into a catch medium at a known velocity and known distance. The temperature reached by the bullet will be between the highest melting lube that did melt and the lowest melting lube that did not melt.

[Centaur 1]

I have no idea where you would go to have it made but the first thing that I thought when I saw the drawings is a plastic wad with a skirt. Picture the base of a shotshell wad that has a dimple on the top side that matched the teardrop shape of the projectile. Since it would be behind the projectile pushing it, I think that if it was designed properly that it would just fall off once it left the barrel

[HollowPoint]

I just wanted to thank those of you that took the time to add to this post. Oddly enough some of your ideas had already been considered before I made this inquiry.

You know the old saying, "Great Minds Think Alike;" It's good to know that alot of us are on the same page when it comes to thinking up fixes.

I guess what I was hoping for was that "One-Unique-Idea" that few, if any of us, have thought of. It's frustrating to think that, that "One-Unique-Idea" generally remains the property of the unknown geniuses within our ranks. For whatever reason, these silent geniuses rarely ever seem to contribute their thoughts, ideas or oppinions.

Centaur 1's idea of the "Plastic Wad-Type of skirt" has some merit. As I read it I wondered if I could make up a temporary mold out of Delrin and use Hot-Melt Glue as my medium for making the skirt. It's possible. That would require the building of a new football shaped bullet mold to cast football shaped bullets. I'll put it on my list of possibilities.

Thanks you guys.

HollowPoint

[HORNET]

I don't want to burst your bubble or anything, but wasn't the football shaped pellet in a sabot thing essentially what the Prometheus Pellets are/were, just scaled up?
Based on experience with hollow-bases in muzzle-loaders, I think that with Design No.4, you might have a problem with the skirt rupturing when the pressure hits it if it's thin enough to deform/collapse from the very small amount of windage force exerted on it, even after frictional heating. You're going to need to make sure that you have minimal muzzle pressure as well.
Maybe something in a serious hollow-base to get the weight down with a boat-tail chamfer on the rear to reduce drag? You'd have to make sure that you could keep the corner filled out to avoid the accuracy problems associated with casting bevel-based boolits, maybe keep the rebated-boat-tail for a clean edge for visual sort.

[HollowPoint]

Greetings HORNET:

And many thanks for your input.

"Bursting My Bubble?" I hear that alot. I really don't have any "Bubbles," just alot of different ideas and not enough time in the day to try each one of them out; so, in an effort to sort through them all I'll occasionally seek out advice or opinions from guys with a little more experience than I have.

That's not very hard to do because I don't really have all that much experience; as I stated above; I just have alot of different ideas.

Up until I read it on your reply, I'd never heard of the "Prometheus Pellets" before. I did a google search and found them to be very interesting.

I sort of jokingly eluded to the phrase, "Great Minds Think alike" in one of my previous replies but, I found it kind of uncanny that two or more different guys in different parts of the world would come up with similar ideas; like this Prometheus Pellet design and the suggestion that Centaur 1 made earlier. (Well done Mr. Centaur 1)

Just goes to show us that -given enough time- similar needs tend to make us gravitate toward similar designs; wether we're trained engineers or just do-it-yourselfers.

During the time that I've been playing around with my Arc-Angel Bullet design I've actually made up various drawing that I thought might be worth giving more attention to latter on. If I interpreted your "Serious Hollow-Base with a Boat-Tail Chamfer" design correctly, I actually made up a drawing a couple of months back that might fit that description. (Great Minds?)

It's almost an exact copy of the bullet in the image I provided above except that it has no "Skirt" or traditional hollow base. It just has a hollowed out boat tail protruding from the tail end of the bullet. The widest part of the boat tail is the diameter of the grease groove so that the rear-most driving band acts as the gas-seal.

I'll have to give that design some more consideration.

Thanks again.

HollowPoint.

[Dannix]

[ArcAngle bullet design 4]
Old thread, but I kind of doubt they would have that non-negligible advantage over rebated boat tail. iirc, at supersonic speeds the basic isn't all that important. However, if you really want a proper trailing edge, rather than coming up with a difficult to implement, probably unreliable collapsible skirt, I think it could be more profitable coming up with a "launch sled" i.e. a sabot with a metal base.

You could just make a rail gun. Then you won't be hindered in base design. :mrgreen:

[45-70 Chevroner]

HammerMTB! Yes they will draw blood. I was hit in the forehead while shooting at a cowboy shoot. The piece of lead came from the shooting positions about 20 yards away. We have two shooting groups using two different sets fo targets. The piece of lead hit me about 1 1/2" above my right eye, thank goodness for eye protection. It could have hit me in the eye. It blead quit a bit, typical for head wounds.

[Southron Sanders]

The trouble is that you don't want a bullet that will change shape in flight. How can you be certain that they all will change EXACTLY the same way when fired at different times in different atomspheric conditions. Unless the bullet changed exactly the same way each time one was fired, accuracy would suffer.

IF you want a "football shaped" bullet, have a mould made up and shoot those bullets. You could load them in a cartridge OR use a SABOT. The sabot would fall away once the bullet left the barrel.

I really don't think that a football shaped bullet would do any better than a modern Spitzer point, BT bullet. I am sure that government labs and ammo companies have done a lot of experiemtning over the years and IF football shaped bullets shot better-what is what we would be using rather that spitzer point BT bullets!

[MT Gianni]

For those who have had boolits hit steel and come back was the steel mounted on a chain or solid?

[waksupi]

For those who have had boolits hit steel and come back was the steel mounted on a chain or solid?


All that I have seen, have been from chain mounted.

[mpmarty]

I had a 230gr hardball 45acp come back and hit me in the left hand little finger off a plate rack. broke the finger. I was using a two handed grip on a Glock 21 and at first thought the gun had Kaboomed. Riding home on my MC that afternoon was a painful experience when I needed to use the clutch.

[Dannix]

All that I have seen, have been from chain mounted.
Were they AR400/AR500? I'm considering picking up some steel this winter.

[45-70 Chevroner]

For those who have had boolits hit steel and come back was the steel mounted on a chain or solid?

Mounted on a cantalever. They swing back and up so the boolit goes to the ground ( at least they are supposed to ). They are only 21 feet from the shooting line, SASS rules.