Tim Sundles from Buffalo Bore says retained weight of a projectile is a useless metric.
This is from one of his videos. His comment is that if you get a good mushroom and sufficient penetration , who cares about weight retention .

My understanding is that high weight retention is necessary to hold a good mushroom shape and get good penetration.
Let me thank you in advance for your comments .

Regards,
brair

You cannot get deep penetration without good weight retention.

All bullets that fail to penetrate will also not retain weight well.

I think he is getting more than he deserves, attention.

Weight retention alone is not enough to make a judgment without looking at bullet construction/material, impact velocity and the game shot. Barnes TSX retain most of their weight, Nosler partitions do not. Bot are good bullets under the right situation

Tim is right in a way in that he qualifies his statement using "if" you get a good mushroom and sufficient penetration.
An expanding bullet stopping under the skin on the far side of an animal has done all it can to destroy tissues and vital organs and if it has lost all the lead core on the way through the animal, that lead core has played it's part in destroying tissue and organs of the animal and is still inside the animal. What is recovered to weigh is only a portion of the bullet and not the full story of how a bullet has performed.

A bullet blowing up and not 'penetrating' enough to get to the vital organs is not what Tim is talking about.

If bullet performance is measured by weight retention then how much is good weight retention meant to be, 30%, 50%, 70%, 90%? At what level does weight retention affect the bullets performance?

What eny said. Nosler Partitions typically retain about 60% of their weight and lose most of the mushroom. As the mushroom comes unglued the particles of the mushroom act as a grenade. Nothing will turn an animal's chest cavity into red jelly like a Nosler Partition. I love the TTSX and they work great but they work in a different way.

Mark

quote:

Originally posted by brair:
Tim Sundles from Buffalo Bore says retained weight of a projectile is a useless metric.
This is from one of his videos. His comment is that if you get a good mushroom and sufficient penetration , who cares about weight retention .

My understanding is that high weight retention is necessary to hold a good mushroom shape and get good penetration.
Let me thank you in advance for your comments .

Regards,
brair

Retained weight is mass. Mass is necessary for momentum which is necessary for penetration.
When you lose weight, you lose mass reducing momentum.

I overall like him, but these videos are not helping his business.

For me, and I can speak for, I never want to recover a bullet. A bullet that retains 40 percent on a broadside shot is no good to me. I want to reach the vitals on gated angles.

I want blood on the ground. I want two holes.

Bullet weight, knockout value and so on.

Totally immaterial as long as the animal is dead.

With modern bullets, one only has to be logical in his choice.

The soft points of today are far superior to the soft points of the past.

In the old days they did not have our choice of today.

We have bonded bullets, which are great as long as you do not use them in very fast cartridges.

You have partitions, in different varieties.

Nosler and Swift A Frames are one.

They do work, and again, as long as you do not use them in very fast cartridges.

They tend to lose the rear end.

But they do work.

Then we have the solid shank bullets.

Like the Trophy Bonded and Jensen.

Which are a better choice than any of the above.

Then we have the all copper bullets.

Which are far superior to any of the above.

Simple logic.

One piece construction avoids all the pitfalls of failure.

I have a bit of a different view. I've shot buffalo with Noslers, TBBC, and Swift A Frames. Noslers are great on side shots, but my favorite shot is a frontal or quartering to and I don't like Noslers for that shot. TBBC's worked great, but when they got hard to get, I switched to A Frames and they've worked great. Most shots are at an animal quartering either away or to and the Swift's have been great, although I pushed the limit one time shooting a bull quartering hard away from the left side and the bullet barely made it through the rumen, but lodged in the heart. Result was a dead buffalo, but watch those left side quartering away shots.

The goal is a bullet mushroomed under the off side skin, and that's usually the case, but in 2023, I had a Swift blow through a broadside buffalo. Fortunately, he was with one other bull and not with a herd, but that surprised me.

I ended up shooting the other bull as well, but pass throughs are a concern.

I've never shot a buffalo with a Barnes and never will if anything else is available for this reason.

I tested Barnes bullets by hunting whitetails in South Texas with my .416. The worked great on does, but I shot a large cull buck (he field dressed 170 pounds) broadside at 100 yards or less and while he dropped to the shot, the first hint that something wasn't right was hearing the ricochet. I shot him behind the shoulder to avoid meat damage, but the Barnes bullet deviated significantly, did not pass through on a straight line and exited between the shoulder blades at the top of the back. That would have been a disaster on a buffalo.

The only Swift A Frame that I've recovered that "failed" didn't fail. All we recovered was the rear portion of the bullet, the whole front was missing, but it was a frontal brain shot on a hippo at about 25 yards and he dropped to the shot. So the bullet worked. The bullet went through the skull front to back and was recovered in the neck.

You cannot guarantee no pass through.

You shoot 10 animals in just about the dame place and position, 8 bullets stay in 2 go out.

Penetration at the same distance at similar animals and you get different rates of penetration.

You want a bullet that will reach teh vitals from any position.

mono bullets do that.

Precisely why Bell hated the softs of his day and preferred solids for all medium to heavy big game.

Monolithic bullets and in particular the TSX are no-brainers these days, although the TBBC and ABC will likewise get the job done without fail.

As a meat eater, I use no lead bullets

quote:

Originally posted by M.Shy:
As a meat eater, I use no lead bullets

Funny this.

We spent most of our lives eating birds, shot every day, with lead pellets.

So many times we had to pick a pellet out of our mouths!

And worse, we spent all our younger days with mouthful of air gun pellets!

Crazy bit is I am 75.

And never been ill!!

quote:

Originally posted by Michael Robinson:
Precisely why Bell hated the softs of his day and preferred solids for all medium to heavy big game.

Monolithic bullets and in particular the TSX are no-brainers these days, although the TBBC and ABC will likewise get the job done without fail.

Harry Selby was another one who gave up using Kynoch soft points which he found came apart too easily so went to solids for everything, saying they rolled lions over pretty well anyway.

I think the reason for the light construction of the bullet sidewalls, both soft and solids, was to do with the variability of rifle barrel bores back in those days. The thin sidewalls allowed bullets to swage to fit tight bores and prevent pressure rises. I knew a guy with a rifle for the 404 Jeffery cartridge who said his barrel was .418" across the grooves and turned down my offer of .423" RWS FMJ and .424" sized cast bullets. He was worried that the normal .423" 404 bullets were too big in diameter so I don't know what, if anything, he shot in his rifle.

quote:

Originally posted by MARK H. YOUNG:
What eny said. Nosler Partitions typically retain about 60% of their weight and lose most of the mushroom. As the mushroom comes unglued the particles of the mushroom act as a grenade. Nothing will turn an animal's chest cavity into red jelly like a Nosler Partition. I love the TTSX and they work great but they work in a different way.

Mark

^^This^^