I am on the same page as wildrose when it comes to bullet performance. Other than my choice of precision mono metal pure copper bullets. LOL I choose our Hammer Bullets.
In all seriousness rose bullet experience and on game performance expectations are identical to mine. I made the same evolution through bullets in my quest for better performance and less meat loss. Mine almost ended with a bullet design that we got a patent on and the start up of manufacturing and marketing. I say almost because the quest for perfect bullet performance did not end there. We continued to tweak copper alloy and hollow point size to find the perfect bullet performance. My partner Brian and I are no different than anybody else that has a passion for the hunt, the animals, and nature in general. We want quick clean kills with minimal meat damage. When it comes to bullets materials are not all created equal. Cost of materials and manufacturing is of great importance to the large companies. I will leave that at that. For us, we have no investors other than us to answer to and we are of like mind. We will not sacrifice bullet performance to save money. We learned a lot about copper and trust me it was expensive to learn. When we started we just thought we would get some pure copper and make bullets....not! Our first several tries at copper were not failure, or bad, just not what we wanted. There was always a give or take depending on impact vel and we could not control what the bullet would do on impact. We have an alloy now that is simply amazing. Our bullets are fragmenting to exactly the point that we want them to be regardless of impact vel. Bullet deformation is almost identical regardless of impact vel. Higher vel will squish the bullet more. Retained weight is always the same whether or not bone is hit. They do their expanding within an inch or two of impact and pretty much always exit. I am in agreement with what others said in this thread that drt bang flop should not be counted on. With that said, we are seeing more of them now than I have ever seen in my years of hunting.
To the op. I said earlier that I would run a lighter bullet faster in hopes of more dramatic or quicker kills. Speed does kill more quickly if the bullet is up to the task. With your 6.5 I would load one of 2 bullets. Our 110g Hammer Hunter or our 117g Sledge Hammer. The 110g is a better bc design and would extend your range farther. The 117g is designed for normal range hunting like you are doing where bc does not matter. Either of these bullets will take bone or not and increase your impact vel significantly over what you are currently looking at, without worry of destroying your meat or coming apart on a shoulder hit and not reaching the vitals.
Steve
