Tough call, and I am not belittling your experience, but if the deer had run off and suffered for 2-3 days from a bullet that didn't expand enough to make a large wound path and didn't hit good vitals have made you feel any different?

Underexpansion from too little resistance and too tough of a bullet is worse (IMHO) that overexpansion...hence the oft repeated advice to match your bullet and cartridge to the game...

Over the years I have collected hundreds of bullets from Alaskan game. I have seen two Nosler partitions that "failed" ie. did not open as desired. One was fired from my .375 and another from a client's .270. In both cases the nose was pinched shut and did not open at all. The animal still died as I recovered the bullets. Strange things can happen to any bullet. I also have examples of "failed" (meaning did not open at all) Trophy Bonded and Barnes X bullets but again they resulted in dead animals because they were placed correctly.
To put this all in perspective I have dozens of bullets by many other makers that blew up and failed to penetrate.
There are no absolutes in hunting and anyone telling you so is trying to sell you something.

I used partitions exclusivly at one time but now use ballistic tips.For some reason the newer partitions don't seem to group nearly as well in my rifles as ballistic tips.What is really odd is that my old batch of 140gr -7mm partitions grouped very well in my 7mmstw's yet the three different lot numbers that I tried since performed poorly.
As far as performance on game is concerned ,partitions have always done well other than the fact that animals seem to run a bit before expiring while ballistic tips have resulted in many more on the spot kills.

No failures on whitetails (5 or 6 of them) from 15 - 125 yards with 180 gr BT's in 300 Win Mag @chrono'ed 2960 fps. All bullets exited (surpised me); all deer died except the one I missed. -WSJ

I have shot deer from right under my tree to quite aways down a right-of-way w/ Ballistic tips from Magnum rifles. Alot of those went through both shoulders and exited. Some even went throught the back bones. I also know of several hunters that use them as well w/ the same results. NOT ONE has ever blown up on the surface of a deer or a hog. I guess we are just some real lucky folks down here .

I guess I will just keep on getting lucky year after year .

To each his own.

God Bless!

Reloader

I have to agree with fredj338 and disagree with huntingcat. Just because an animal dies does not make the bullet a success. I won't hunt deer with NBT's because of the mess I made of a small deer a couple of years ago. That poor thing suffered more than it had to because I hit it in the shoulder with a 150 grain NBT from a .308 that blew up on the bone. It hobbled about 60 yards and fell over out of my sight line. By the time I got out of my stand and got to a place where I could finish it off, it had crawled another 30 yards bawling and bleeding the whole way. I always feel the initial guilt pangs after watching an animal die, but this one was so pathetic and I felt so bad about its suffering that I vowed never to use a NBT on another deer. There are so many better choices. All my deer calibers are loaded with Partitions, TSX's or Scirrocos now. The deer I shoot deserve more respect than I was giving them shooting NBT's.

Fast Ed