Armor P bullets

[J E Custom]

I don't know what the core is made of but I've got a couple thousand pulled ap 30-06 bullets. If you take the copper jacket off the penetrator core you will see that the core is lathe turned and if I remember right some where around 780 on the Rockwell hardness scale while my ar500 and ar550 hardens target plates are around 550 on the Rockwell scale. A year or so ago I loaded up a couple bullets with varget in a 308 win. I shot a 3/8 piece of ar500 steel a hardened bag of quickcrete and a tree stump. It Swiss cheesed the ar500 steel split the quickcrete and lodged in the stump. I dug it out of the stump and the point of the penetrator could still have been used as a center punch. The core make crack and break but it will not bend or dent. I would not advise shooting old ap bullets out of a good barrel as if the core ever came into contact with the lands of your rifling for any reason you'd probably ruin the barrel quickly.

Most of the materials used for the penetrator in AP rounds are ether Hardened steel or Tungsten Carbide. larger projectiles (Like tank rounds) may use depleted Uranium.

J E CUSTOM

 

[Chase723]

I'll preface this with the fact that my following opinion is based on my experiences in war, and not hunting animals with AP projectiles...but obviously there are a lot of similarities.

AP rounds are not ideal for hunting, in the sense that they don't provide for quick and humane killing, especially in the calibers/cartridges used for hunting. They penetrate deeply by design but don't really expand on flesh because of that. Certainly if they hit any vital structure they will be effective, and they will punch through bone, but the wound cavity and soft tissue injury is pretty minimal and will result in delayed killing.

If you're going to use them then you absolutely should aim for bone or the CNS. If you don't, expect your quarry to run a long way after being hit and leave a minimal, if any, blood trail. In my opinion this will lead to a lot of lost game because most people simply aren't good enough at tracking. Myself included. Even if you punch through both lungs, or even the heart, it can take several minutes (like 3-20) for tension physiology/heart failure to develop due to the lack of expansion, poor energy transfer and destruction of lung/heart tissue, and subsequent delayed onset of cardiopulmonary failure...and obviously a wounded deer/elk running at 30mph can cover a lot of ground in that time.

That being said, the newer military "brown tip" ammunition (m855a1 and m80a1) is an exception to this due to bullet design. At impact, the penetrator tip not only penetrates light armor but also acts to initiate expansion and fragmentation of the copper jacket/base because they are not chemically bonded together. They're also light for caliber projectiles driven at high velocity which is extremely important for the creation of hydrostatic shock and necessary for reliable expansion of the copper base. It's very effective. They're only real disadvantage is a relatively low BC. I would expect that soon enough we will see variants of this types of projectile introduced into the hunting/long range community.