Killing Phone Books - Bullet Performance by Ian McMurchy

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Ian won't be around right away. Some lame excuse about heading to Africa tomorrow morning.

[old_heli_logger]

Cool, I've heard that those African phone books are really tough...

[tx_shooter]

Originally Posted by old_heli_logger

Cool, I've heard that those African phone books are really tough...

Only tough because they are printed on animal hides... I don't imagine that they would be real thick from lots of numbers. lol...

[CastleRocker]

I thought I was the only one that actually did much bullet testing. I have also saved the bones from our elk and put them in front of the "paper box" to shoot through. (I have a steel box that I use to contain the phonebooks, magazines, or newspapers). It really is a good test for what a bullet actually does if a shot happens to hit a rib or a leg bone. My .02

[Guy M]

Not long-range high velocity bullets, but the only bullets I've got photos of after testing. Thought they'd be an interesting addition to the subject. Both were fired from my .45/70 Marlin 1895 lever action into water-filled milk jugs at 20 yards.

The bullet on the left is the bonded 350 grain Swift A-Frame. MV was 2046 fps. Retained weight was 345 grains and it expanded to .710" dia. It was recovered in the 7th jug.

The bullet on the right is the 350 grain Hornady FNSP. MV was about 2086 fps. Retained weight was 296 grains and it measured .846" dia. It was recovered in the 6th jug.

The water-filled milk jugs worked really well, and it was easy to recover the bullets. Of course the test can't show us a wound track, nor does it simulate bone or hide. I do however believe it's pretty interesting. Will be doing more of these tests as time permits.

Regards, Guy

[Buffalobob]

A few thoughts on why the sun rises in the east but not ever in the north. That is mostly because there is a big funnel shaped chute up in the sky that keeps the sun from getting off track. This is called the Masculinity Certainty Principle which is the opposite of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The Masculinity Certainty Principle is predicated upon the person having absolutely no knowledge of what they are talking about but being able to spin up a collection of facts from a vast suppository of information. The wimpy guy Heisenberg would actually admit he didn’t know very much very often.


Back in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and seventy eight, having a full load of knowledge about rifles and bullets, I set about to determine what would be a good long range 7mm elk bullet. I chose two bullets with high BCs and one bullet with known penetration ability (160 grain Nosler partition). The two high BC bullets were the Hornady 162 gr HPBT and the Sierra 168 gr MK. I tested all three bullets for accuracy and the two match bullets were dead even with no advantage to either. The Nosler partition accuracy was the usual 1+ MOA. So I soaked some bundles of old phone books and newspapers in water with the very poor results of getting them wet around the edge but not in the middle.

On Saturday, I took the newspapers and placed them at 100 yards and fired three bullets from each of the three candidate bullets. I then analyzed the wound channels and measured penetration depth and weighed the retained mass.

The Hornady 162s had very little mass in any one piece but quite a collection of pieces. The Sierras were confusing as some times there was a big piece of jacket and sometimes there was not. The Noslers always had the rear partition intact. In terms of penetration the Hornady would penetrate about 11-12 inches and the Sierra about 12 inches and the Nosler about 13 inches. The peculiar observation that I did not at that time understand was that the Hornady bullet fragments were always encased in a Fifty cent sized wad of paper and it was this wad of paper that was penetrating through the rest of the paper. In other words the bullet would explode upon impact and punch out a big wad of paper right at the surface of the stack and the “wad encasing the bullet fragments” would then penetrate. In real life, animal skin and muscle will not create a wad to encase the fragments and the fragments will quickly lose momentum and come to a stop. The importance of this obscure information became apparent to me once I used the 162 gr HPBT on animals.

While I might not always be right, I am certainly never wrong. I conclude that it is probably important to actually know something about some things some of the time but not absolutely necessary.