exploding bullets on impact...is this real or are people guessing?

[LVJ76]

wow that definitely worries me since I will be hunting 50-400 yard shots on whitetails using a 6.5prc which is a bit faster than your bros creed so even more likely to blow up. It is what it is for this season. I will definitely be changing bullets for next season.

Go for a behind the shoulder shot and you should be fine, avoid the shoulder at close range

 

[dfanonymous]

I think all of us understand that the bullets we shoot have no explosive in them. We are talking about disruption of the materials the bullets are made of and why the come complete apart. I've seen deer with 8" on fur displaced from a bullet and they were never dead, just missing fur. This is what we are talk about. You can get explosive incendiary rounds but they would be illegal to use in any state.

For what cartridge and where can I get these HEI/HEIAP rounds you speak of?

 

[DSheetz]

Those rounds are military rounds originally made for use in the 50 cal. machine gun M2 now sometimes being used in Baretts and other 50 cal. rifles

 

[dfanonymous]

Cool story man

 

[Orange Dust]

Thanks everyone for the comments. I am shooting a 6.5prc using Hornady factory loaded 143ELDx bullets. It sounds for shots inside 300 yards I need to be extra diligent to stay off the shoulder and target the lungs (which is typically what I am at regardless). Once the season is done, I will switch to either Nosler accubonds or similar type bonded or monolithic bullets since my hunting is inside 400 yards on deer anyways.

I just shot a little buck my daughter shot earlier. We jumped him and i shot him through the front shoulders at about 50 yds with a 162 eldx and a 28 nosler. Impact about 3300 blew theough with a 2" exit. Not 143 6.5 bud held together fine i guess, it wasnt in the deer and didnt see any jacket fragments, just a lot of finely shattered bone. Deer arent nearly tough as elk, or even mulies unless a really gig one. Bet you will be fine. You all had me scared of these bullets. We will shoot a couple more and see.

 

[Blue Ridge Rifleman]

I have a Ruger No 1 in 7mm that shoots 150 gr. Sierra Match Kings into tiny little groups. A few years ago I jumped a Wyoming whitetail at about 50 yards and put one into the shoulder on the run. The buck jumped and continued on three legs. Even on three legs he was hauling. At the point of impact i found hair, meat, bone fragments, but no real blood trail to speak of. I tracked it for 2 - 300 yards, lost the trail and never recovered the deer. Since I couldn't perform a postmortem I can't say exactly what happened, but I expect the bullet fragmented on the shoulder joint. I'm now shooting Nosler partitions and while they don't group as well, they perform every time.

 

[3warbird]

Had this happen today on a Va whitetail out of my 270 Ackley. Running a 130 nosler at 3308. I have shot deer from 200 out to 768 and it has performed great, most never taking a step. BUT this morning had a big doe step out at 65yards. Only shot I had was dead center shoulder and I took it.
Watched the doe take impact from the bullet and buck up and kick, and watched her run 200 yards to the edge of the pond where she stopped to drink. She walked off after that with a limp but seemed to be fine otherwise.

Walked to the pond and only found 2 drops of blood. So yes I guess they do fragment (blow up) or whatever the case may be sometimes. This is the only time I've experienced this

 

[keithcandler]

If you want to shoot elk shoulders, use a partition or ttsx.

20+ years ago, I had a 300 yard shot on a nice buck. Hit him square on the shoulder with a 150g Sierra match king(3150 fps), bullet blew up on the shoulder, knocked him down, he got up while I was coming down the ladder stand.

 

[UplandFreak]

What cartridge?

270wsm and 6.5 prc

 

[Frank in the Laurels]

145 Speer out of a 7mm mag will ..had a couple that never made it through a rib .. All at close range 30 yards at 3160

 

[idcwby]

The worse bullet issue I've seen, came from a 200gr Speer HotCor out of my 300RUM, mv of 3000ish, don't remember exactly. Shot a muley buck at about 75 yards and he jumped and headed down hill, started tracking with decent blood and got another shot at him at about 200 on the move and he ducked off the ridge. I run down to where he was and run past him to have him standing in the brush at 25, at this point I stick one in the neck and he drops. When quartering him discovered the first shot was back of the ribs and broke a couple, but didn't make it in far enough to do fatal damage. The second shot hit him in the top of the ham and only penetrated a couple of inches with a baseball size entry and the neck shot had a softball hole and broke the neck, but didn't exit. After that I quit shooting those bullets, I would've never expect that from they kind of bullet. Had a 200gr Accubond come apart on an elk shoulder at 75 yards, but it still had enough to get to the vitals, this was with the RUM also with a MV of 3220. My dad had issues with the Long Range Accubond in his 300H&H so he quit using them and some Remington corelokts out of his '06 in the 90s.
The only varmint style bullet I had issues with was the Lead-Free Ballistic Tip from Nosler. 6mm Remington pushing the 55grainer at 3950. Smacked a summer coyote at 250, it dropped like being hit with Thor's hammer, as my buddy and I was hopping the fence to go get it, it jumped up and ran off. Got to the impact spot and all we could find was some hair.

Something I've noticed, not sure if it's even accurate, but it seems some bullets do better in calibers and slime don't. This is just an observation from my experiences of hunting over the years.

idcwby

 

[WYO300RUM]

The amount of resistance the bullet encounters is a big part of the equasion and figures heavily in the result. Continuing with the example of the RUM with the 190ABLR. You can shoot a deer and hit most any bone of substance and it will literally blow a deer nearly in half. Change it to a coyote shot in the ribs and you get a 2" exit. Real examples. Haven't tried it on an elk but experience says it would not penetrate a shoulder on close shots.

I know a smaller caliber Berger hitting bone will premiturelly make it come apart and ruin a lot of meat. Found that out a few times.

 

[quailybirds]

I have seen many ballistic tips "blowup" inside the chest cavity on whitetail, and mortally wounding the deer. I have one instance of the bullet hitting the front shoulder and also blowing up, however the bullet shattered throughout the shoulder. Hit no vitals when it should have. I haven't shot ballistic tips since.

 

[nicholasjohn]

I've witnessed it first hand but it may be irrelevant because the issue has since been fixed. In 1984 I had a Steyr Model M Professional in 30-06 that shot the Nosler Solid base bullet really well, under 1/2 MOA. At that time in Arizona you could take two Coues Whitetail Deer and I regularly did that each year. I had no problem with those bullets at all, Coues are really small deer and even shoulder shots exited the opposite shoulder and killed quickly.

Then Nosler introduced the Ballistic tip and discontinued the solid base bullet. I found the 165 grain Ballistic Tip equivalent shot just as well with the same load, 57 grains of IMR4350 at about 2950 fps. But I soon noticed poor penetration on raking shots, such as quartering away shots. Then one day I shot a small buck I had jumped from his bed as he ran up the opposite side of a canyon, about 200 yards, the deer went down at the shot but just laid there with his head up. I watched him for a few minutes waiting for him to expire but he seemed alert and wasn't fading, so I put another in his neck.

I was curious what had happened so I opened the chest cavity to have a look (I usually use the gutless method and pack only the boned meat) what I found was that the bullet entered the right ham on a trajectory to take out the heart and lungs but had not made it to the diaphragm. I found only small pieces of jacket and lead in the meat of the ham and then into the abdomen which totally absorbed the impact with no hematoma even to the liver.

After that I switched to the Nosler 165 grain Partition and continued to kill them stone dead. A friend of mine that had shot some of my ballistic tip loads found them to be very accurate in his Remington 700 and asked if he could have the rest of the 100 rounds I had loaded. I gave them to him and described the terminal performance concerns I had, but he decided to use them anyway.

Then one day he and I were glassing for Coues when I noticed a slight and very blurry movement in the bottom field of my 15X56 Swarovski binoculars. Looking over them I saw a small Coues buck had fed up the slope we were sitting atop of glassing and was only 30 yards or so from us. I got my friends attention and he was able to slowly raise his rifle and take the shot as the deer turned broadside, unaware we were there. My friend shot him dead center of the shoulder and the deer collapsed with a cloud of hair and debris in the air where he was standing. Because of the angle of the slope we couldn't see the deer any longer so we both stood up from our sitting positions behind our tripod mounted binoculars and were shocked to see the deer laying there with head up and alert, the same as the small buck I had shot the previous year.

My friend quickly dispatched the young buck with a neck shot. As we approached the deer the entry wound to the shoulder was massive, about the size and also the shape of a football. I could see several fragments of jacket glistening in the morning sun in the entry wound. We took the shoulder off and I were surprised to see that not a single fragment had penetrated into the chest cavity. After that he also stopped using those Ballistic Tips.

I called Nosler and discussed the experiences I had with lack of penetration. They acknowledged that they had many similar reports and were changing the jacket design to correct the situation. The changed jacket design is what is now labeled Hunting Ballistic Tip and it is a very good bullet that penetrates deeply while still creating a wide wound channel.

Current bullets such as the Hornady ELDM and Sierra Tipped Match King are jacketed just like the early Ballistic Tips with a thin non tapered jacket and behave much the same. Now that I have much more experience and have seen several hundred big game animals taken with all kinds of bullets I choose to use these thin jacketed bullets on purpose but use them appropriately. They kill much quicker at long range than heavily constructed premium hunting bullets because they create a wider wound channel that provides more margin for error at long range and at the lower impact velocities they penetrate well. If I need to use them up close I simply choose a rear lung shot placement and the deer go down in a flop.

This was an interesting read and one I can relate to. Many years ago, when I first started handloading, I ran out of soft-point deer bullets and all I had left to shoot some whitetail does with was a box of Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow points. This was with a 308, in a doe-only season in western Pennsylvania, when they were in "herd reduction" mode. I shot a couple of does, and my buddy used my rifle to shoot a couple more, and our results were such that we made sure that we never an out of "deer-shooting bullets" again.

The match bullets were leaving the muzzle at around 2600 fps, and all the deer were shot well inside of 100 yards. ( The two I shot were around 30 yards; my buddy's were a bit further out.) I hit one in the shoulder, and it made a horrendous wound. The deer died, but it was from a bone fragment that happened to take out some important plumbing in the animal's chest cavity. The other was a rib cage hit, just behind the shoulder. That deer died right away, too - one lung was jellied-up mess, and I found some fragments of the bullet jacket in the deer's heart. The other lung was intact, with zero damage.

The two deer my buddy shot all died pretty quickly, but they were also a pretty sloppy affair. Just like the ones I had shot, most of the tissue damage was from bone fragments - not bullet action. None of the animals had round, deep wound channels. All were irregular in shape, and we were glad that something managed to get through to kill the deer.

A couple of decades later, I used the same bullet to shoot a coues deer in Mexico. It was a big buck, but its body was about the same size as the yearling does we had shot in PA so long ago. It was a 300 Weatherby this time, and the deer was broadside at 410 years when I shot it right behind the arm. It went down immediately, and the wound channel looked absolutely perfect. The lungs had a whole bored through them about as big around as a toilet-paper tube, and the exit would was about like a nickel. This thin-jacketed hollow point bullet performed perfectly, at a velocity that was several hundred feet per second slower than what we had been getting that day we stacked up all those does years ago.

I think the moral of the story is that when the velocity is right for the bullet construction, it will work OK. If you hit one with a lightly-constructed bullet at very close range, though, you might not like the results. These guys who use match bullets to shoot their animals somewhere in the next zip code are probably going to get favorable results, but I hope they keep a couple of rounds with a Nosler partition sticking out of it for the close-in shots that sometimes present themselves.