15 BHN vs 22 BHN

[dtknowles]

Hard pointy bullets for targets, soft blunt bullets for hunting. Do you really need to worry about leading if you are hunting big game, not taking very many shots and do you worry about a couple tenths of a MOA on accuracy. I don't think you have to go all WFN but should be a flat point for hunting.
Tim

[Bigbore5]

Buy an hp mold of 270-300grs. Use the largest pin.Cast a 10bhn alloy. Keep it between 1200 &1300fps.

[pls1911]

AMEN.
Praise the message: DAYLIGHT TRANSFER!
SHouder/spine junction area doesn't tear up meat (beside the hole), and always provided a drop in their own shadow.

[magnumuser]

For the OP,, the original 45 colt load used 40 grains of black powder and a 255 grain flatpoint bullet propelled at a nominal 1,000 fps. That cartridge was proven to shoot through the rib cage of a horse at i think, 50 yards.

A horse or mule or burro, has much, much more bone structure then a deer. SO the issue is not actually penetration, but how you want the bullet to behave. In that the bullet stays in one piece, or explodes on impact.

[Bigslug]

Catching up on this thread.

All my four deer kills have been with .30 caliber Barnes TTSX rifle bullets, and I was able to witness a fifth take a rapid double tap from a hard alloy RCBS 405 grain FNGC out of a HOT .45-70 load. The .30's were significantly above the OP's 1300 fps and the .45-70 was probably striking something to the tune of 500-600 fps faster.

Granted, all of those deer were down pretty quick, but from what I saw in the post-mortems, blood trail is not something I'd expect much of from pistol bullets - expanding or not.



Attached pic is the exit wound from a 130 grain Barnes out of my .308 after entering between the front legs on a quartering towards me shot. Impact speed would have been about 2600 fps. The heart was well-disintegrated, but you wouldn't know it from the external evidence.

Given the elasticity of skin and it's ability to slide over external muscle tissue, there will tend to be a lot of self-sealing - even though the animal may be bleeding out in torrents internally. All of the aforementioned five deer, plus a couple more of my Pop's .280 Rem TTSX kills, had exits very similar. Lots of blood in the chest cavity - very little on the ground. . . and that's with tissue being displaced by velocity your handgun doesn't have.

If you make a decent cardiovascular drain internally, they should get woozy and fall within about ten seconds. The .31 to .34 caliber meplats have a pretty good reputation for this on solid, non-expanding .45's. If you opt for a hollowpoint and softer alloy, I'd try to stick with a finished bullet weight above 250 grains to ensure adequate penetration.