I liken the 350 grain .416 X bullet to the 270 grain .375 X bullet in that it is so superior to the lighter versions one is better off making it his light bullet in this caliber. The 350 X works real well on plainsgame of all sizes and is also pretty effective on buffalo.
The 300 lacks penitration on Buffalo but the 350 works pretty good and compares to a 400 gr. traditional bullet...I don't use them but I have seen them used.
I think the biggest mistake made with the 350 BArnes X is most folks that like the light bullets like the extra velocity and that causes failures and blown off petals...
I believe that loading the 350 at 2350 would make an excellent bullet and in fact I have seen this in effect and it worked real fine...It was a favorite of Ross Seyfrieds and he is well versed in shooting buffalo.
I tried them once on a one gun hunt as a plains game only bullet. For this purpose they worked fine, but I used 400 grain softs and solids for the dangerous stuff. The load that worked well was 88.0 grains of Reloader 15 with CCI 250 primers, seating the 300's as far out as possible for functioning in a Mod 70 magazine. As I did not recover any of the bullets I can't comment on possible petal loss. Accuracy was around 1 inch at one hundred yards. They hit about 2 inches higher at one hundred yards than the 400 grain loads that I worked up, so no change in sighting was necessary. I certainly would not recommend them for dangerous game, but they work for what they were designed for.
Good hunting, Jim
Posts: 1206 | Location: Georgia | Registered: 21 July 2000
On NA game either bullet would work fine. If you do the down range ballistics though, the 325 holds up better and shoots flatter than the 300, even though the 300 starts slightly faster. I move the 325 out of my Rigby at almost 3000 fps (2924.5 fps to be exact), and while too fast and too light for dangerous game IMO, for any NA game it should do nicely. I doubt you can approach that kind of velocity with the Remington, but you might want to check what the bullets are doing at 300 and 400 yards when each is loaded to the max to see how they are holding up at longer range.
Couple of my clients Bob Inman and Sonny Layton just got back from RSA where they shot a lot of plainsgame and they used the Barnes X in their 300 Magnums...They were not happy about the results obtained with the 180 BX on the game, seems they failed to open up...Just passing this on, and adding it to my list of Barnes failures.
I have used the 300gr X bullet in a 416 Taylor. While it is very accurate the only thing I have shot with it is a whitetail deer. The bullet entered the deers chest and exited the rear hindquarter. Meat damage was minimal and the exit hole wasn't much bigger than the entrance hole. The deer needless to say never moved.
I question how one knows the bullet did not open up if the bullet passed through, obviously not being recovered. I have killed a lot of deer with the 300 gr. X bullet out of the .45-70 and the exit hole is always only slightly, if any, larger than the entrance hole, but the deer drop on the spot and their insides look like mush. To look at my exit holes one could assume, and wrongly so, that the X bullet is not expanding, but the insides of the game tell a different story. If the bullet killed the animal, where's the failure, if it didn't kill the animal, then how does one know if it was the bullet's fault or lousy shooting to blame?
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