I was wondering what everyone's take is on the new Hornaday Dangerous Game expanding bullet. Although they are expanding bullets, my understanding is that the jacket is copper clad steel. I am concerned about feeding my rifle a steady diet of steel bullets. Wouldn't that be awfully hard on the barrel?

Dave,
I am feeding them through my 450/400 3 inch. They have a lead core so I'm not overly concerned. They shoot great. I have some for the 404 Jeffery, just haven't loaded them yet.

Rusty, did you get the article yet?

quote:

Originally posted by Dave Bush:
I was wondering what everyone's take is on the new Hornaday Dangerous Game expanding bullet. Although they are expanding bullets, my understanding is that the jacket is copper clad steel. I am concerned about feeding my rifle a steady diet of steel bullets. Wouldn't that be awfully hard on the barrel?

Dave, my thoughts are the same, less steel the better even though Rusty makes a fine point. I've talked with a few balistics experts in the past who use to work with Winchester and Lyman (in fact one authored Lymans reloading manual) and he said steel jacketed bullets will increase barrel wear. It's still quite subjective to me, how many shots, 100's or 1000's. Personally I'm not too worried about it, we are shooting big bores (at 2100-2300fps) not varmit rifles (at 2800-3400fps) and most if not all of us don't shoot our bigbores more than our varmit rifles. Another thing to take into consideration, all barrels are not created equal, IMO it would take 1000's to ruin a good hammer forged barrel. An exception of this was some years ago when Ruger made the M77 in 458wm which had a bad track record of wearing out barrels very quickly (under 500 rounds) at times.

Dave it has not arrived yet, or my wife is hiding it from me?

i loaded some in my 500 AR, for load dev .. solids were SLOWER than softs, 5 increment loads, every time, by about 30 fps ... solids SLOWER... i know, its normally the other way around, with the same load and OAL.

take off .2-.3 grains from the SOFTS. .. yes, that's backwards than normal, and they should have identical balistics

quote:

Originally posted by Dave Bush:
I was wondering what everyone's take is on the new Hornaday Dangerous Game expanding bullet. Although they are expanding bullets, my understanding is that the jacket is copper clad steel. I am concerned about feeding my rifle a steady diet of steel bullets. Wouldn't that be awfully hard on the barrel?

....................NO!

Dave the article arrived. Thank you for your kindness!

Rusty, enjoy! I thought it was a pretty good article. I am going to give try Reloder 15 first but at least in my gun, I wouldn't be concerned about shooting IMR 4831 but I sure understand your concerns using the slower powder in a vintage double.