Here are some pictures of the Barnes TSX bullets recovered from the three buffalo I shot. Rifle was a .416 Rigby, bullets are 400 grain. With the exception of the first bullet on the first buffalo (bullet shows little expansion and a folded over petal), which was a frontal shot that transversed the whole body and must have hit some bone along the way, the bullets performed perfectly. I would have no hesitation to use again. Two of the shots were one shot kills.

Mike great looking projectiles..That one did expand but the one petal somehow was forced inward and you had a solid driving thru your buf...Good shooting...

Mike

Mike, glad to hear that you got the three you were after. Looking forward to hearing your report.

Hog Killer

Thanks Keith.

FYI, for those that are interested, the retained weights were 3@400 grains, 2@399 grains and 1@385 grains. Pretty damn good.

MJines, would it be possible to take more specific pictures of the third bullet in your first picture on this thread that didn't open up properly and post them here, please?

If you could take four pictures, from the side of that specific bullet with the rifles engraving in the middle each time, after having turned the bullet 90 degrees each time.

Maybe one could learn from those pictures what the reason possibly was for the bullet not to open as the others did.

Would appreciate your trouble to do this. Thanks.

FWIW, Another hunter in camp had the identical failure-to-open on one of his Barnes in .416 Remington I think. It appeared one of the petals went inward and filled the hollow point. In essence, it performed as a solid. Mike's recovered bullet and his were nearly identical.

this is the exact thing i have been saying for so long...every so often one of those barnes bullets does somthing out of character...which does not inspire confidence, and thats why i have chosen noslers for my up comming brown bear hunt
daniel

To be clear, the bullet that "failed" did open, one petal collapsed in and the bullet retained all but 1 grain of its original weight. At worst, it functioned as a solid. At best, it expanded, hit something solid at a angle that bent the petal in.

I have no problems sticking with the TSX.

Thanks for the report. My fiance and I are hunting buff next year. She is going to use barnes in her .375 H&H; I'm going to use Woodleighs in my .500 NE.

I have looked and looked t the TSX that acted like a solid, and I wonder if it hit something before the buf??? Was it dropped and had a dent ,kink in the nose area, however it did its job and there was full penetration..

Mike how was the destruction on the animal from it???

Mike

Jagter,

Here are some angle shots of the bullet. To me it clearly looks like it hit something since the bullet appears to be slightly bent. We did not do an autopsy on the buffalo, so I cannot say how the bullet performed internally on the buffalo. It did pentrate very deeply.

Mike

It is my understanding that hollow point bullets, such as the Barnes TSX, use hydrostatic pressure from body fluids that fill the hollow portion on the bullet, resulting in the bullet opening up.

As was mentioned, and the pictures show the nose of the bullet deformed or bent over. If that bullet hit a twig, piece of dried mud on the outside of the buffalo, etc that deformed the nose of the bullet enough to close the hollow piont opening, fluids could not get inside the point, and the bullet would not expand as designed.

I have used the 180 gr NP in my .30 Gibbs for the last 30 or more years taking at least 20 elk, 2 moose, and an Alaskan caribou. I used the 300 gr TSX in my .375 RUM last year in Zim and RSA on buffalo, zebra, and 3 other antelope, and was so impressed with the performance of those bullets, that I switched to 180 gr TSX bullets for my .30 Gibb.

MJines:

Thanks for the additional bullet pictures.

A bent bullet, even if it is only slightly bent, simply means the bullet tumbled on impact.
Lack of stability is the first thing that comes to mind.

The experts will be able to tell more about that.

I heard the same thing from another ballistics expert that I trust. He indicated that the 400 grain TSX is too long to stabilize reliably in the .416 Rigby and that it would be advisable to go down to the 350 grain version.

Well that makes me feel better as I am off next week to hunt buff in Tanzania with my 416 Rem and 350 TSX's. What velocity were you running the 400's at? These 350 are hitting 2600 out of my gun with good accuracy. I'll let y'all know how they perform, providing I hit a buff with them.

Lewis: That's a fantastic load you are using. Randy Brooks from Barnes bullets used it on lots of buffalo and I think you'll have no problems taking down a big bull. The best of luck to you and we'll be waiting for a great post hunt report. Shoot straight and break bone! jorge

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I have long said that shoulder stabilization is real and it works on the cylinder and trucated cone Flat Nose solid, and the ogive Flat Nose as well, but maybe not as well there.

The truncated cone copper FN is shorter than the Barnes banded brass solid, so it may gain some stability there too. When will Barnes learn? Maybe theirs has a little feeding advantage?

Shoulder stabilization has been pooh-poohed in these forums.

But it is real.

Keep up the good work, Alf.

Alf wrote:

quote:

So now we have one unanswered question, what about projectiles with inbetween shapes, ogived with flat meplats of varying size. ie not full cilinders and not spire points with very small flat meplats?

Thanks Alf, very interesting feedback.

Unfortunately I have only seen the one incident with the 286gr Dzombo and its half round half flat nose construction out of a 9.3 x 62 that definitely tumbled on impact.
Derived from that, it seems as if the shoulder stabilization that flat noses benefit from, is absent in the case of the Dzombo design, apart from the low gyroscopical stability factor it also has.

As far as the bullet that does not open and expand, I can not comment - I know Gerard has specific views on this that make a lot of sense as well as the fact that those views really work in practice as far as I have experienced given that things like bullet length, right velocity and twist rate is properly sinchronised.
But more from the expert on this.

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quote:

You say the Dzombo has a "low stability factor" ?

I dont quite understand this statement? at normal hunting trajectories a projectile is either stable or it is not, The gyro regime dictates that once you exceed the critical spin rate needed for stability the projectile is stable thus once gyro stability is attained it remains stable until the linear velocity drops to the transonic range ie 400 to 300 m/s, therefore we have to assume the Dzombo is unstable from get go? or it is stable and then becomes unstable cause it went transonic? I doubt it cause from the few reports I have seen they have stability at the " Normal" hunting ranges one would use a solid big bore bullet at.

Theoretically there is probably (maybe yes, maybe not!) no way that I can say the Dzombo tumbled from the moment it left the barrel.

So, let's work backwards from the slightly bent, recovered bullet to the barrel.
A bent bullet, even if it is only slightly bent, indicates that the bullet definitely tumbled without any doubt. In this specific case it was combined with very poor penetration depth serving as further proof thereof.

Therefor, if this what you say is right, which I think it is: "The gyro regime dictates that once you exceed the critical spin rate needed for stability the projectile is stable" then the specific Dzombo out of that rifle at that specific unknown velocity must have been unstable from the word go, confirming the low stability factor.

Still this is based on one only field result example and it can not be regarded as a general rule of happenings guaranteed to be so each time this specific exercise would be repeated.

We're still in the dark!
Should rather say: "Theoretically we're still in the dark!"

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Ja, there is no such thing as the 'humane killing of human beings' and "the flaws of modern humane projectile legislation or treaty" are 100% correct as you have pointed it out.

Back to game hunting - mankind may kill an animal to eat - then also in a decent manner, that is to say.

Although this next statement is true -

quote:

The turning, or "tumbling", of a bullet is thus the critical mechanism resulting in severe injury, and the likelihood of causing a severe wound will depend on how far a bullet penetrates the body before turning

I don't know how achievable it is in a real situation.
Read together with this you said "An ammunition designer who is intent on inflicting the greatest possible damage will want to have the bullet turn as soon as possible," - bullet manufacturers can achieve that in their design to have the projectile tumble on impact. BUT, then you don't get good penetration as we have seen in one case with the Dzombo bullet.
So it is either the one or the other, not both, because how would the the bullet maker do the design so that bullet penetrates deep and only then start tumbling?

That simply leaves us with expanding bullets for large tissue damage or controlled damage and flat nose bullets for maximum, stable penetration.

Contrary to this then "So with this in mind it wound appear on face value that a unstable bullet is not necessarlily a bad thing," I don't think we need an unstable bullet in the light of what have already been achieved with the two logical types of bullets mentioned above and as you do agree in your final paragraph of your previous post, for at least as far as hunting goes.

quote:

Originally posted by ALF:
Jagter:

The paramater that changes dramatically between air and target is the density of the medium, if we assume that tissue is 1000 times more dense than air then in order to statisfy the stability regime we need to increase the rotational velocity 30 times greater than what is needed in air. ( the mathematical derivation of a spin stabilized projectile dictates this)

That means for a normally, stability inducing 3000 revs per second (180,000 rpm) we need to go 90,000 revs per second (5.4 million rpm) once the bullet is in target to satisfy the equation.

That off course is impossible to satisfy thus the projectile will be unstable once it impacts the target no matter what.

To help you refine your numbers water is approximatly 680times denser than air.

Fat and skin are slightly lighter than water (they float)
Muscle is slightly heavier than water (but not by much)

So the figuire I'd use would be 700times.

AllanD

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Alf,

What would you think of a bullet that penetrated 38 inches (into the neck) on an elephant frontal brain shot?

Awesome Mike!!
jeffe

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But, Alf, those tumbling RN FMJ "solids" are also veering off course and not staying to the center of the vitals where they were aimed. This has been proven in the Iron Buffalo, where I could not keep a single one going straight, and they stopped or veered out of the Iron Buffalo before going half as deep as the FN solids.

The answer must also include staying on course.

The answer will be either a "tough soft" matched to the thickness of the game, to stop under the offside hide, or a bigger-is-better FN solid that blows a big and straight hole all the way through.

/

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quote:

Originally posted by RIP:
But, Alf, those tumbling RN FMJ "solids" are also veering off course and not staying to the center of the vitals where they were aimed. This has been proven in the Iron Buffalo, where I could not keep a single one going straight, and they stopped or veered out of the Iron Buffalo before going half as deep as the FN solids.

The answer must also include staying on course.

The answer will be either a "tough soft" matched to the thickness of the game, to stop under the offside hide, or a bigger-is-better FN solid that blows a big and straight hole all the way through.

After a couple of dozen buff and more than a dozen elephants all taken with round nosed steel jacketed solids I have never seen a bullet go off course. Not to say that it it didn't happen only that if it did the course change was not noticeable and all animals were killed. That makes me wonder if the Iron Buffalo is much tougher on bullets than real meat and bone. My experience is one reason that I pay very little attention to bullet performance results from paper, wood, water or gelatin. I do pay attention to results reported from real animals though.


465H&H

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As Alf has stated, you don't need much luck to get to the vitals with ideal presentations of even the largest game.

So, with the RNFMJ or RN brass solids, by applying enough skill, you usually get lucky.

On the Portuguese-Texan heart and brain shots on the fleeing big stuff, when skill has failed, and skill must be rapidly called upon again, you need a sure thing, not luck.

A GSC FN (.375 caliber 300-grain at 2700 fps) caught by alternating 7 inches of water with one inch of plywood (note how close to dead center the bullet is at the end of it's path):





Round nose solids uniformly get stopped sideways or exit the contraption before the 5th layer of wood.

The TSX and the North Fork SP's rate a "5" for penetration.

The North Fork Cup Point is an "8" out of 10.

The GSC FN and the North Fork FP solids are "10" and a sure thing.

The RNFMJ and brass RN solids get a "4."

It may not be a live animal, but it sure tells us something.

Andy and 500grains reckon the Iron Buffalo is about equivalent for penetration comparison on elephant and buffalo.

With the FN and FP solids of monometal copper, in the Iron Buffalo, I have verified that between 2100 and 2700 fps the penetration is the same for a given bullet of about 0.3 SD whether .375 caliber 300-grain, or .475 caliber 500 grainer.

The faster bullets just do more damage. They throw water and wood higher into the sky. This should equate to a more lethal wounding ability, and again: A SURE THING.