Does anyone have any experience reloading and/or shooting Buffalo, Elephant, or Hippo with them. Did your pressure or point of impact change form the old style steel jacket solids? Will the new solids hold together? Has anyone seen any info on them?

I have only used the new Hornady's for practice, reserving the Speer AGS's for the real stuff.

The new Hornady's are a thick brass cone with lead core (the 458 500 gr. anyway, which I sectioned to find out). There is no reason they should not perform well, and I would guess better than steel-jacketed bullets, which have a tendency to bend (all of them bend, sometimes, and sometimes more than other times).

They're accurate in my rifles. See no real, "logical" reason not to use them on game.

Will

Will,

Will you do us a favor and shoot something with the new .458 500 grain Hornady solid bullet on your next trip to Big 5 (I think that is where you are headed in August). These things seem to shoot really well in my .458 Win Mag and I'm getting pretty good velocity with them as well using IMR 3031.

Shoot a buffalo or elephant or something with these at 2,100 +/- fps and give us a full report on how they perform. Tell the Zambezi Mad Dog that you are just doing an experiment and that he should not charge you a trophy fee for the animals that you shoot with this new bullet.

Sound like a good idea to me!

Tim

Tim:

I have found that the homogeneous brass solids (i.e., Barnes) have zero deformation when used on game. It appears that solids with relatively thin, steel jackets reliably deform, in my experience. The relatively thick brass shell on the Hornady's look like they should perform well.

The 500 gr. 458 is also relatively blunt and hopefully it will penetrate in a relatively straight line.

Just for you, I will take some with me (2300 fps in the Lott) and shoot all the "free" stuff I can get! (Don't count on any, though!). To be honest, though, a 500 gr. 458 @2300 fps is overkill on most game shots and wouldn't matter what solid bullet is used.

My Lott is just a 505 Gibbs/500 Jeffery wannabe, but about all the hp I can handle. But when things go to poop, there is no such thing as too much hp.

Will

I have seen the monolithics bend and even seen two that snaped in half..Fortunately it happens very rarely...I also saw a Speer Tungston wadded up. I think it was Ron Van Heerden who showed me that one..He had a cigar box full of failed softs from Buffalo and elephant, and quite a number of solids also...It was an amazing collection.

Hi I just a wannabee big game hunter and like to play around. I turn my 416 solids on a lathe and leave a flat nose of about .350 on them and shoting thru a bridge plank in to a 500 gallon steel tank of dirt I have only had 1 show any deforming and that was because it hit the tank at the edge of a previous hole and had only a minor dent on it. I use the solid recipes in reloading manuals and I find that they cronagraph the saene speed and fing no reason any of the solid copper aloy bullets should not work good