Funny when a Nosler partition sheds its front half everybody says no problem turns into a solid..when a monometal sheers its petals people seem to want to say failure.

Every single Swift A Frame I have used - in a 7mm Lazzeroni Firehawk - shed all the lead from the rear partition.

All animals died, of course, but I won't be using Swift, or any other bullet with lead behind the partition if I have a choice.

Mono metal are my first choice, second is the solid shank bullets like the Jensens and Trophy Bonded Bear Claws.

quote:

Originally posted by Mike_Dettorre:
Funny when a Nosler partition sheds its front half everybody says no problem turns into a solid..when a monometal sheers its petals people seem to want to say failure.

Just to be clear, in my example with the stag, I did not consider the loss of the petals a bullet failure. If it hadn’t expanded, it wouldn’t have lost the petals! I have no issue with how the bullet performed. More of the same batch went along to Namibia, and were used to take everything from Springbok to Eland. No complaints on any of them.

I agree with the previous poster about the shedding of petals not being bullet failure. Case in point. I am on Thornburg mountain in Northwest Colorado Elk hunting. Late on a snowy afternoon a nice 5x5 Bull stands broadside 300 yards up the mountain with his right shoulder to me. My .340 Wby is loaded with 225 grain Barnes XLC the blue coated bullet. I fire away and and after the snow settles from the muzzle brake I see the Bull standing broadside with his left shoulder to me, I fire away holding on the shoulder again. The Bull collapses in his tracks. When I get up too him I find my shots entry and exit holes within two inchs of each other on opposite sides. Upon skinning My son and I find two blue petals at each exit hole and blood and gore strewn many feet beyond the dead Bull. I was impressed with the penetration plus the work done by the petals before being shed with massive internal trauma. I never criticize the shedding of petals because of this happening to me. Good Shooting.

quote:

Originally posted by JeffreyPhD:

quote:

Originally posted by Mike_Dettorre:
Funny when a Nosler partition sheds its front half everybody says no problem turns into a solid..when a monometal sheers its petals people seem to want to say failure.

Just to be clear, in my example with the stag, I did not consider the loss of the petals a bullet failure. If it hadn’t expanded, it wouldn’t have lost the petals! I have no issue with how the bullet performed. More of the same batch went along to Namibia, and were used to take everything from Springbok to Eland. No complaints on any of them.

Jeffery I don't think he meant you. There has been plenty of previous discussion on this topic and haters of mono metals will use that example as a failure.

Years ago I had a nice buck in sight. He was pushing a doe toward me with his nose half way up her rear end.

They zigged and zagged but slipped through without offering a shot.

Since I had a TTSX in the chamber of my rifle and it FAILED to EXIT the bore of my rifle......I'm going to scrap my initial thoughts of
(wrong place-wrong time) and now declare the no shot opportunity as another "BARNES BULLET FAILURE"

quote:

Originally posted by Snellstrom
Jeffery I don't think he meant you. There has been plenty of previous discussion on this topic and haters of mono metals will use that example as a failure.

Thanks for the background for this. Guess I missed the mono metal hater discussions.

I've only use a tipped monometal once on game. A 185 TTSX on a hog. Shot him quartering to me and it penciled through and the hog ran off!

Just kidding. Killed him dead and kept going. Plenty of damage. I mostly hunt with Nosler Ballistic Tips.

quote:

Originally posted by scottfromdallas:
A 185 TTSX on a hog. Shot him quartering to me and it penciled through and the hog ran off!

Just kidding.

Well played!


That forces me to mention a "bullet failure" story: a former coworker mentioned that he had decided to try Nosler Balistic Tips. He shot a California blacktail "perfectly" through the lungs but the deer ran off and was never recovered. IIRC, he was shooting a 30-06 with 150gr factory loads. Blacktails in this area(costal Nor Cal) rarely top 150lbs...

His conclusion: "Ballistic Tips are beautiful bullets but they aren't worth a darn."

quote:

Originally posted by Mike_Dettorre:
Justin,

The reason I asked the question the way I did is in my original post.

Stated another way, when somebody says

"I shot this animal and I know I hit it good and it ran off...damn bullet must not have expanded"

They are making a huge assumption about what actually happened. They don't know where they actually hit the animal or completely missed the animal. What they do know is that the animal ran off an was not recovered. They are also "violating" the principle of Occam's Razor which is the simple answer is the likely answer. Given, that there are likely a 50+ times more "perfect" expansions than non-expansions, the simple answer is it was likely a poorly placed shot or a complete miss.

There are many (although a very small % of the animals taken with) recovered unexpanded non tipped mono-metals that forum members have pictures of.

So far we have 2 unexpanded actual accounts of tipped monometals shot into media and likely 3 more.

Mike,

I understand that, but isn’t it a bit unfair to ask for recovered bullets that “failed” by not expanding from dead animals? The mono bullets, tipped or not, are supposed to expand like any other soft point. If they don’t expand and rather they act like a FMJ or solid, wouldn’t they be more likely to penetrate an animal completely? If an animal is shot well it shouldn’t matter, it will die, but again isn’t it true that a bullet that doesn’t expand is more likely to pass through, making it unfair to ask for recovered bullets like you’re asking?

I have zero experience with mono bullets and hope to change that this year, because they’re different and interesting to me, I have no doubt they kill game very well. I just don’t understand asking for examples of bullet failures from dead animals, when in fact if it is really a failure, there will be no dead animal to recover it from? Even if say, someone makes a shot on an animal and it goes further than expected, if placement was OK, one might surmise the bullet didn’t expand, but again, if there was no expansion, I think that bullet would be more likely to be a pass through, again leaving no example for your question. Also, I think we can all pretty much agree that bullets that expand kill quicker, otherwise we would all be using solids when we hunt. It’s just a matter of getting some expansion and enough penetration to get to the vitals.

Justin,

Not unfair at all because my definition of failure in this instance is solely a failure to expand and I am looking for proof.

I have seen pictures of at least a couple of dozen unexpanded barnes Xs or TSXs recovered from animals. Those were all called "failures".

So if it makes any "easier", we don't even have to use the word failure. I am simply looking for unexpanded tipped monometals recovered from game.

To re-iterate my other point, when a hunter claims a lack of expansion occurred in a monometal because "I hit it good and it ran off", he or she is only making an educated guess and therefore it's really not worth serious consideration, IMHO.

If the animal is not recovered, then one cannot make any judgement on its performance.

quote:

Originally posted by Saeed:
If the animal is not recovered, then one cannot make any judgement on its performance.

Exactly!
Or where or if it was hit.
I hear stories from people about perfectly hit animals that run off never to be found
(bullet failure)
and stories of animals perfectly hit and the animal ran further than they expected, when animal was found they thought the exit wound looked too small so obviously the bullet "penciled through".
(also bullet failure).
My thoughts are in the first instance they made bad shot or even missed.
In the second scenario I think if they opened up the animal they would see that the bullets performance was fine. Monometals very often won't leave as big of an exit wound as cup and core bullets yet still have done their damage.

Two of my favorite my favorite video clips that I have posted before:

what if there had only been 15 yards of open pasture and no dog? and the animal lost in thick brush?

would this hunter have claimed a failure to expand?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgMjqguHnW4

or this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4gZnNGHG1o

And it's not just deer.

My hunting partner was shooting 165 GMX's out of his 308. He pops a pig at about 80 yards. The pig squeals takes off running and goes over a little rise and disappears out of site.

Kyler Hamann the guide who posts here and has seen over 1000 pigs killed is a little worried because the squeal, what looked like an "uninjured" run, and no blood trail are consistent with a bad hit or just a graze.

Pig was found about 75 yards away dead in the open. During cleaning extensive damage to both lungs.

What if that pig had run into a brush pile 10 yards away and made it 65 yards into the brush and never recovered?

Would we have an experienced guide with seeing over a 1000 pigs hit claiming unexpanded monometal or claiming a graze?

To slam the point home if you don't recover the animal, you are making a whole lot of assumptions or flat out guessess

Mayhaps, if "Hunters" would simply accept the FACT that just because they have the perfect rifle/optics/caliber/bullet/primer and powder combination, the intended victim did not read the script and will not always fall dead in its tracks at the "BANG"!!!!

I have killed a lot of deer with the monos. I have carefully examined about 100 deer killed with them. I have put a thousands down range and have come to some conclusions about them. Some of those conclusions I like, some, not so much.

They can go through an ungodly amount of bone and deer without stopping in Bambi.

They can make caliber size holes into and out of the hide all the while doing horrific damage in between. You cannot know what happened unless you open the deer up and examine the wound channel. Nor can you guess. Any attempt at equating wound channel and caliber is going to be as unsuccessful as a coin flip. Like cup and core bullets, monos sometimes produce a lot of blood and sometimes none, and you cannot predict that either.

Stopping even a fully expanded mono in a deer is very unlikely. Bone does not seem to me to be any more impediment to passage through deer than any other soft tissue.

I believe that both tipped versions and the TSX or untipped versions can and do expand slightly when striking very small normally inconsequential objects. I have seen convincing evidence that especially if they only expand only slightly after striking something on the way to the target that they tumble and can restabilize somewhat travelling base first. I suspect that this propensity is also the basis of some failure to expand claims. It defies my comprehension that a bullet which so consistently penetrates all the way through when it expands is going to stop in a deer when it does not expand. Logic dictates it has to shed a lot of energy either before impact or while in the deer if it is going to stop in the deer. Even 53 grain .224 monos will penetrate large deer completely almost all the time. A mono takes a lot of energy to expand and an expanded bullet uses up a lot of energy moving tissue. When those bullets fully penetrate >95% off the time how can we explain an unexpanded bullet stopping in a deer when I retains that energy?

When I was a kid there were no internet forums just pot belly wood stoves at the local good ol' boy hangouts. I remember my Dad sitting amongst these men all drinking coffee and smoking pipes, cigarettes, chewing, spitting ect.

Bullet failure?

It was never mentioned

Bad shooting and poor tracking was dicused every year in and around deer season.

Miles,

Not really sure of your last point.

However, I assume that of the two dozen or so unexpanded non tipped monometals that I have seen, that they tumbled inside the game and that is why they were recovered. If a non-tipped monometal can fail to expand and tumble and be recovered then so can a tipped monometal.

The whole point of this thread is that the tipped monometals seem to have greatly reduced the unexpansion frequency.

I'll see if I can get a copy of the pic of all the unexpanded non tipped monometals.

quote:

Bad shooting and poor tracking was dicused every year in and around deer season.

As a kid growing up this is the same discussions I heard about. I was lucky and got to hear plenty of hunting stories involving Deer elk black bears and moose and quite a few involving mountain goats and grizzly bear.
Never once was bullet failure or needed a bigger gun EVER a part of the discussion.
Since blessing my life with the internet I've become enlightened in the excuses of bullet failure and "needed a bigger gun"....

quote:

Originally posted by Mike_Dettorre:
Justin,

Not unfair at all because my definition of failure in this instance is solely a failure to expand and I am looking for proof.

I have seen pictures of at least a couple of dozen unexpanded barnes Xs or TSXs recovered from animals. Those were all called "failures".

So if it makes any "easier", we don't even have to use the word failure. I am simply looking for unexpanded tipped monometals recovered from game.

To re-iterate my other point, when a hunter claims a lack of expansion occurred in a monometal because "I hit it good and it ran off", he or she is only making an educated guess and therefore it's really not worth serious consideration, IMHO.

Mike,

You are asking for bullets that didn’t expand AND ones that stayed in the animal. If monos tumble in game when they don’t expand, I could see game catching them rather than passing through. Is the SD the same for tipped and non tipped mono’s? I am not trying to be argumentative, but am honestly trying to get a better grasp for monometal bullets, because I am going to load some up for next season.

I agree with Saeed in that when an animal is not recovered, you can’t make assumptions about bullet performance. In the same vain- can you say whether a bullet expands or not when it passss through the animal, comprehensively, at least? If someone shoots an animal and it is not recovered, they cannot say where they hit the animal, but no one can say whether the bullet behaved as it should have, either. As I said before, if an animal is hit correctly with anything, including a solid, it will die. However, if a bullet does “pencil” through and does not expand, and the animal runs, it will be harder to track and find that animal than one that was shot with a bullet that expanded and left a better blood trail.

Justin,

You asked a few questions.

1 SD is actually a relationship between diameter and weight. It is often used as a proxy for penetration meaning given two similarly shaped and constructed bullets at the same velocity the one with the higher SD would have a tendency to penetrate better.


Regarding your other point, your correct when you have a complete pass thru and you recover the animal, you actually don't know if it did expand. However, if you have a complete pass thru and you do a necropsy on the dead animal and there is massive tissue damage you have a pretty good idea the bullet expanded. Conversely, if you have an animal react and run off you have no idea what happened.

None of my posts are either for or agianst monometals, I am just looking for real data and if there is information that one could conclude that the tipped monometals represent an improvement.

Justin,

These are TSXs:



2 with essentially zero expansion

1 with minimal expansion

1 with minimal expansion and lost petals

1 with perfect expansion.

The top four are what I call proof.

Everything else absent high speed video over the entire flight path and bullet flight, regarding un-recovered "penciled thru" monometals; I call a guess and subject to shooter ego.

quote:

Originally posted by Mike_Dettorre:
Funny when a Nosler partition sheds its front half everybody says no problem turns into a solid..when a monometal sheers its petals people seem to want to say failure.

The difference is the patition is designed to shed its front. An X is designed to expand and not come apart. If something different happens then that is a failure.

I shoot partitions because my rifles love them and they just work. I have seen too many x failures to want to change. But one day I'm sure regs will force me to use monometals. And the tech has come a long way to make the monos better.

The Nolser Partition is not designed to shed its front.

It is designed to mushroom and the partition is designed to stop the mushrooming at the point of the partition and maintain a core and yes the exposed led does sometimes come off and the longer it stays in animal and the further it penetrates the more led is likely to come off. But to say it is designed to shed is not accurate.

The Nosler engineers did not say, "hey let's make it so this led comes off and we shed this weight" and that is based on discussions with Nosler.

Kinda like my other favorite mischaracterization that an extractor on a CRF rifle grabs the cartridge from the magazine. A CRF bolt pushes the cartridge forward and when the cartridge (caused by the upward pressure form the follower) releases from the rails it pops under the extractor. The extractor doesn't "grab it"

quote:

Originally posted by MC:

The difference is the patition is designed to shed its front. An X is designed to expand and not come apart. If something different happens then that is a failure.

So by your parameters if a Nosler partition mushrooms perfectly and retains its front core it has failed? I'm not sure that I agree with that.

The closest that I could get to an non-expanded TSX. This is a 300 grain TSX from 375 H&H (it weighed 299.9 grains after it was cleaned). I shot a bushbuck in the neck at about 50 yards and the bullet traveled down the spine smashing vertebrae all the way back. It was found under the skin of the left ham.

No. Not saying that the Partition is failure if it happens to shed its nose. I am also not calling a TSX a failure if it sheds its petals.

Mike, I was directing that post at MC, not at you. I have edited my post to reflect that.

BTW, I agree with you 100% on this:

quote:

Originally posted by Mike_Dettorre:
No. Not saying that the Partition is failure if it happens to shed its core. I am also not calling a TSX a failure if it sheds its petals.

Well it must be off season where we nit-pick every detail. The Partition always sheds lead. Always. The amount it sheds depends on more factors than I care to list. Shedding lead is part of the design. Argue how much or how little, but the arguement will still include shedding lead. I like that it sheds! It causes more internal damage. But that is just me.

The X bullets are designed to petal, holding the petals. I really don't care if one breaks off or not. Nor do I take it personally if some guy on the net doesn't like the bullet I shoot. I have a couple X bullets sitting here in front of me which did not expand. Yet they were recovered from animals that hit the dirt. The dude who makes X bullets lived across the street from me. Good guy. The tech has come a long way since the days of pin-holing critters with copper.

Good luck to you guys. I hope you draw tags and kill critters. (Just don't use garbage Bergers. haha)

Frank,

Thanks for the pic.

Mike,

Thank-you, I understand now. Like I said, I was planning on trying some kind of mono bullet this year, now I have more information going into my personal experiment! I’ve been Nick Nosler in my bullet preference up to now, and I’m not ready to give up on them, but variety is the spice of life!

Mike,
Bullets 3 and 4 (L-R) are classic examples of what I have found to be bullets that hit small things and partially stabilized traveling butt first. I have more than a few samples of that look just like that.

My range is in the woods and has a lot of very dense aspen for a backstop. I have found a lot of monos butt first into the trees. At first I wondered about it. It did not make sense at first blush. If the bullets were tumbling, then why should they not be more or less equally distributed rotation wise like unstable bullets striking a target are? Far and away these were either butt first into the tree or point first. Very few sideways. The answer is that they are not tumbling. Hitting the plastic target backer is enough to begin expansion (like bullets 3 and 4 in your photo. because they are spinning at very high RPMs they have a propensity to restabilize, and with the bullet partially expanded, the partial expansion functions like a drag or fletching on an arrow if you prefer. That drag caused something like 2/3 to hit butt first. More than random chance would dictate. Since I found a substantial number quite off course they obviously must have tumbled some and deflected, just like unstabilized bullets tend to do. Bullets that are too long and do not stabilize will tumble and the further from the target the more their path diverges from point of aim.

I am willing to bet that even juicy grass stems are capable of initiating expansion slightly and that the slightly expanded bullets are the ones most likely to restabilize butt first. We know that small twigs can expand a bullet and deflect it radically. A juicy twig may well be a much more formidable object for a bullet to strike on it's way to a target.

I have seen monos not expand at all into very dry loose sand when using a sand bank as a backstop. That can and does occur with cup and core bullets as well but not so often. The theory that moisture initiates expansion has been stated previously by Barnes if I remember right. Our experience that the plastic tip provides a more consistent expansion start that results in more complete expansion would seem to agree with my experience.

Virtually all of the deer I have killed with Xs or TSXs have been from fairly high stands with virtually no chance of striking anything before Bambi. That doesn't prove my theory, but it does comport with it.

left to right

55 grain TTSX Whitetail doe 360 yards 223 WSSM M.V. 3790 fps

165 Barnes XBT 308 win, Moose 100 yards, M.V. 2660 fps

180 CoreLokt Black Bear, 250 yards.Factory load.

165 Sierra BT, 300 Win mag, Sitka Blacktail deer 100 yards

last is a 210 Nosler partition, 338 win mag, 100 yards moose.