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Yes, for obvious reasons, turned copper bullets will be way more consistent than seated cup and core bullets. For targets, they're a no brainer. Berger has made a solid now too made for ELR target shooting.
There are a couple of things that you are ignoring. The most obvious is the effect of the tip, whose material is substantially less dense than copper, making the copper portion of the bullet the predominant determining factor in stability. The second is that AB has not extensively tested our Bulldozer hunting bullets for terminal performance or even accuracy. We now have several customers who have shot 30 or more animals with our bullets and have noted over 90+% clean one shot kills, way above what they were achieving with other bullets. The SG of 2 applies to ELR situations where the bullet transitions to subsonic speeds usually at 2400-2600 yards down range. Additionally very high impact velocities can cause very weird effects not seen with lower impact speeds. Lastly, with petaling the bullet length immediately becomes much shorter which helps with stability in denser flesh. In addition, any asymmetry created after petaling will steer the bullet due to the spin imparted to the bullet by the rifling. I remind people that experts that don't hunt with our bullets but comment indirectly about them by lumping them into the mono category really don't know what they are talking about because they totally lack experience. I'm not trying to be a jerk, just stating a plain fact. One reason we made our bullets to have BCs that are higher than equivalent weight bullets, be they monos or lead core, is so shooters will not need to waste time getting extremely high MVs to shoot at longer ranges or to achieve good impact speeds. It also reduces wind drift and makes the bullets shoot flatter. The value of ductile copper is that expansion is easy to achieve and penetration is superior to even heavier lead core bullets, so heavy for caliber Bulldozers are not needed to achieve very deep penetration. One thing is true. Under stabilization will result in erratic bullet behavior after impact into a flesh target, but it is very clear to us that our hunting bullets do not need SGs of 2 to perform well, 1.4-1.5 appears to be sufficient, but the monolithic construction allows one to spin them as fast as you want without the fear of the bullet coming apart due to high centrifugal stress.
I didn't even mention your bullet specifically, George. And I'm not ignoring tips, it just wasn't relevant in the particular discussion. Yes, tips play their own part in both BC and terminal performance, but I was talking more about stability and centrifugal forces. You act like I was bashing your bullet here. I was not. Nothing I said taken into consideration would decrease performance of your bullet. I also didn't say your bullet had any issues with the things I mentioned.
Nope not at all if they are mono. They would be crazy fast. I shoot a lot of deer with the 70-80gr pills
i'm glad you have the good judgment to admit that, it's just that many others have lumped our bullets with "monos" when in fact they are different in many ways by design. They clearly try to impugn our bullets by implication without any real data or experience with them.
You make some good points. If you use the Lab Radar to test BCs I strongly recommend that you use the G7 model since it is less sensitive to velocity and not put much credence to data from very high MVs say speeds over 3000 fps. Probably the best velocity range is between 2000-2600 fps. Also each rifle also may give slightly different BC readings for the same bullet. The value of a Lab Radar BC is that that BC more closely approximates the actual BC the shooter sees than that on the box of bullets which in all cases should be used as a starting point to be refined if need be by truing of your data with actual shots taken with that rifle with cool barrel temperatures.
I'm aware. I have your bullets and have done some testing and examination of them so far myself. Still more to come before I make any sort of conclusions.
The tip length is about 0.200" but because it is aluminum which is denser than plastic, I use the tip length as 0.100". I think the stability at 4500 ft of the 135 gr SBD2 will be adequate at that altitude and higher.
I am about to try these in my PRC. Same length barrel and and twist, but I am at 1500ft and hunt around 3 -3500 usually. I have had great results with these out of my 6.5-284N (7.5 twist /26"). Avg 3126fps and
More twist. I have had to go 0.010", 0.020", 0.030", etc. on seating depth and some have had to go even more precise than that to get them to shoot.
As @idcwby said most run them with pretty short jumps. I had to back mine out to about a .1" jump to get them to work though, and I have a friend who never got the badlands to work (he has a pretty picky barrel in general though)
