Berger VLD performance on bone question...

I used to be Barnes biggest fan boy till we started shooting elk on pivots where you can see everything and they can't just disappear into miles of timber, after the first season where we saw just shy of 300 elk shot it was abundantly clear that we saw more issues with "hunting" bullets than anything else, we consistently had to shoot more rounds per elk with Barnes than any other bullet. I had two bullets turn 90 degrees on elk shoulders shooting with a 300 WBY and 168's, I hit that cow 5 times before breaking enough bone I could walk up to her and kill her with a 22. The next year I dumped a cow only to find her still alive because the bullet again deflected out her shoulder forward but fortunately hit her neck and she bleed out enough she could get back to the herd, with in 10 min of that another guy had a Barnes stop dead on an elk shoulder but since they are on pivots you know it failed and another shooter can put a second round in quick. By year three if you showed up with something loaded with Barnes you would have to shoot someone else's gun, I'll never shoot one at an elk again, wonderful small game bullets for deer and such.
 
Barnes is one of the few that is always improving on there product. I had a coworker kill his first bull with my 06 and 168 Barnes. Hit it quartering away in front of last rib. Went thru one lung and broke off shoulder while exiting. Still went 200 before dropping. Elk are tough but have had more success with Barnes then anything else. Had a client shoot a cow buffalo on a cull hunt right between the eyes at 200. Bullet went clean throu and lodged a 1 into the neck dropped right there obviously. Recovered bullet weight 178 went in at 180. Textbook expansion. Yes I shoot the l r x along with the tt ax it's like ford Chevy. Every buddy has there preference. For me the Barnes work.
 
I have been a 7mm mag fan for about 10 years. This summer I purchased a Savage BA 10 in 6.5 Creedmoor to use as a practice rifle and ended up falling in love with this cartridge. I'm using the Berger 140 VLD, 41 grains H414 @ 2680 fps, and maintaining .5 MOA out to 750 yards. I used this rifle in Colorado's second rifle season and was very pleased with it and the 140 VLD's performance. I shot a bull elk at 200 yards placing the round just behind the shoulder. Bull ran about 100 yards down hill. I was surprised to see complete penetration, small pencil hole going in and about 1.5" exit. Hit rib going in and between two on the exit. Might just have to pick up a 6.5x284 next.
 
Barnes recommends a 1.83 twist as optimum. A long range outfit tested them for them and found that twist works best. Talk to ty at Barnes he can clue you in on the spfics. That's why I ran the 145. It will shoot in a standard 1.9 twist which factory guns come in.
 
My limited on-game experience with the Berger VLDs? Straight from the factory, most inconsistent terminal performance of any bullet I've used.
My experience with the factory VLDs is limited by personal choice. They can, and have, exploded with limited penetrations, and penciled thru with zero expansion. I never aim at heavy bone on edible game animals. So my experiences were all broadside thru the rib shot placement.
For a year or so I considered myself the most unlucky guy on the planet when it came to poor terminal performance from the factory VLDs. Eventually other members mustered up the courage to post of their disappointing experiences on this Forum. Some contacted me by Private Messages to avoid the brow beating that came with anything posted with a negative connotation - Berger related.
Their performance seems to vary somewhat from caliber to caliber, from what I've read. My own disappointing experiences were with the .308 210 VLDs.
But I've been contacted and told of similar disappointments by others shooting 168gr VLDs in 7mms.
There's so much information posted on VLD performance within historical Threads on this Forum that a guy could put himself to sleep reading them all. It's a love them or hate them relationship, which I attribute to a greater rate of unreliable terminal performance. Which is what I experienced.
To each his own...
 
Well said
My limited on-game experience with the Berger VLDs? Straight from the factory, most inconsistent terminal performance of any bullet I've used.
My experience with the factory VLDs is limited by personal choice. They can, and have, exploded with limited penetrations, and penciled thru with zero expansion. I never aim at heavy bone on edible game animals. So my experiences were all broadside thru the rib shot placement.
For a year or so I considered myself the most unlucky guy on the planet when it came to poor terminal performance from the factory VLDs. Eventually other members mustered up the courage to post of their disappointing experiences on this Forum. Some contacted me by Private Messages to avoid the brow beating that came with anything posted with a negative connotation - Berger related.
Their performance seems to vary somewhat from caliber to caliber, from what I've read. My own disappointing experiences were with the .308 210 VLDs.
But I've been contacted and told of similar disappointments by others shooting 168gr VLDs in 7mms.
There's so much information posted on VLD performance within historical Threads on this Forum that a guy could put himself to sleep reading them all. It's a love them or hate them relationship, which I attribute to a greater rate of unreliable terminal performance. Which is what I experienced.
To each his own...
!! Spot on about being bashed. I made that mistake!
 
The only fail I've seen of a Berger was a 210 and it penciled on a poor shot on a deer, still she was recovered. I've seen hundreds of animals now killed with Bergers and I can only think of a couple that were shot twice only to find out it was not needed. I have helped a couple guys who had legit issues and really wanted to figure them out and it came down to jacket stress so we changed to a Target version and then performance was normal to what we see with the hunting jacket. Bashing is just retarded and 99% of it is just bashing and trying to put blame on something else other than shot placement or running a bullet that will have mechanical issue with how your operating it, there is no way on earth that some guys can kill animal after animal with perfect performance then another guy has issues every time they pull the trigger and it be a bullet problem, if we put any bullet in a position to fail ultimately it's not the bullets issue, that's why I quite using Barnes, the way I hunt and the game I take I found out they will not work and changing to a Berger way like flipping a light switch on awesomeness, in one season it went from doing mag dumps on elk trying to kill them to not even putting a round in a mag and just single feeding cause it only took one bullet per elk, that's not a bullet issue that's honestly an operator issue and I was not willing to change my rifles or hunting method so I use a bullet that fit and the Bergers fit. That's why we all find success with different bullets is we are matching them to our set up and our style.
 
I never considered myself inept, yet the Berger failed at an unacceptable rate and I stopped using it in factory form. Expressing my experiences added to the pool of knowledge. For example, on this Forum it led to the now common practice of checking the tips of the VLDs to ensure they haven't been sealed shut during manufacture prior to hunting with them. In that manner I believe my critique improved Berger VLD user performance and satisfaction. Just the opposite of bashing for the sake of bashing. Critique for sake of improving user experiences. If the negative is never shared, how can other users ever reach the stage of knowledgeable enough to actively choose to reduce their risk of disappointing bullet performance?

I find it a real stretch to conclude that the majority of members set out on a mission to bash any specific bullet. Most simply don't have the interest. If they have an active interest, the majority still won't invest their time, and many won't risk the wrath of counterattack from dedicated Berger VLD users. Are some members upset over a bad experience. No doubt. Would I expect them to sound off on the Threads in this and other Forums, still ticked off and simmering down from "upset"? Yes I do expect that.

One perspective that's been repeatedly expressed is that poor bullet performance is never the fault of the bullet. Therefore it must be the bullet user's fault.

I use my best personal judgement in selecting my choice of bullet, without exception, and agree that the user can improve their odds of satisfaction thru education and being proactive in their bullet selection process, based on their bank of knowledge. But blaming the user diminishes (completely dismisses) the obvious evidence that a lot of very experienced hunters have reported terminal performance disappointments with the factory VLDs under very common hunting experiences. The majority of the less than desired VLD terminal performance experiences aren't a consequence of extreme, exaggerated hunting and shot conditions. Many (most) are the consequence of common day-in day-out shots taken by the average large game hunter on average big game animals.

So if a VLD PhD is required to reduce the potential for disappointments when using VLDs on game animals, then some user education is in order. Which leads to the obvious - who's best positioned to provide that user knowledge? I'll focus for a moment on the best VLD educational issue I'm aware of. I've yet to see an acknowledgement from Berger that sealed VLD tips could compromise terminal performance. Yet every "expert" VLD hunter/user I know checks the tips of their VLD bullets to ensure the jacket tip wasn't pinched shut during the manufacturing process. These expert VLD users don't use VLDs with sealed tips for hunting. They open up the sealed tips prior to use, or they shoot the sealed bullets during load development and for target practice. Additionally, the experiences and intuition of people that have manufactured and tested VLD style bullets on a custom basis for either personal use or commercial sale have also expressed their belief that the smaller the opening in the VLD tip, the less reliable the expansion. They no longer ponder the possibility of a cause and effect. They accept it as fact. Persisting with the position that any effect of sealed VLD tips remains unknown, that sealed VLD tips don't increase the odds that VLDs will fail to expand on game, is akin to holding on to the position that smoking cigarettes doesn't cause cancer.

I could live with some VLD blowups, because I target the ribs, and an exploding VLD will normally still get into and destroy the internals between the rib cage. I couldn't, however, continue using the factory VLDs based on my early initiation to non-expanding VLDs.
 
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My limited on-game experience with the Berger VLDs? Straight from the factory, most inconsistent terminal performance of any bullet I've used.
My experience with the factory VLDs is limited by personal choice. They can, and have, exploded with limited penetrations, and penciled thru with zero expansion. I never aim at heavy bone on edible game animals. So my experiences were all broadside thru the rib shot placement.
For a year or so I considered myself the most unlucky guy on the planet when it came to poor terminal performance from the factory VLDs. Eventually other members mustered up the courage to post of their disappointing experiences on this Forum. Some contacted me by Private Messages to avoid the brow beating that came with anything posted with a negative connotation - Berger related.
Their performance seems to vary somewhat from caliber to caliber, from what I've read. My own disappointing experiences were with the .308 210 VLDs.
But I've been contacted and told of similar disappointments by others shooting 168gr VLDs in 7mms.
There's so much information posted on VLD performance within historical Threads on this Forum that a guy could put himself to sleep reading them all. It's a love them or hate them relationship, which I attribute to a greater rate of unreliable terminal performance. Which is what I experienced.
To each his own...
Whole lot of truth in this. It seems for some it would be less insulting to say something bad about their wife or dog than their choice of bullets.
 
Well put. Your welcome simmer. A lot of people believe in flight ballistics not terminal ballistics. Applied ballistics really done plays the Barnes in this regard. We had to make a 4moa change down from there chart in the 338lapua. But on game great preformence. Never a complaint there. Like I said earlier work for me.
 
I know that our bullets are a different type of bullet but I think a lot of what I have learned from our testing translates to all bullets. There are two things that are essential to bullet terminal performance. The hollow point and the stability factor. The bigger the hollow point the more reliable it will be terminally. The higher the stability factor the better the terminal performance. The size of the hollow point is pretty easy to comprehend. We have determined that we are not able to produce a reliable bullet for hunting with a hollow point smaller than 1.5mm. We thought we had a good 1mm hp that worked well in media tests but when used on elk we were not happy with them and have now scrapped the idea.

Stability factor is not as easy to wrap your head around. Our testing has shown that a marginal stability factor less than 1.5sg will greatly increase the probability of bullet failure. The problem is, you can have stellar accuracy with marginal stability. This is where the bullet manufactures fall short. To my knowledge we are the only ones that talk about it. There are many bullets that are marketed to factory rifle shooters that are marginally stable in the factory twist. Particularly with the push for heavier higher bc bullets. The heavier for caliber a bullet gets the more twist it needs to be fully stable.

So if you think about it, all bullets are a hollow point of some kind and need hydraulics to enter the hp to make it expand outwardly. The small the hole the harder it is to get hydraulics into it. Add a little bit of yaw to the bullet and it makes the hp even smaller. Think of the bullet as a top spinning. Spinning fast it stays point true to flight. For terminal performance we need that point to stay true to flight after it makes contact. The moment that the bullet makes contact the rpm of the bullet drops due to the contact allowing the tip or yaw potentially before it has gathered enough hydraulics into the hp to cause outward expansion. The more marginal the stability of a bullet the sooner on impact it tips. The higher the stability the longer a bullet stays point oriented as it passes through the media.

From our testing, bullets used for hunting should be a minimum of 1.5sg and higher is better. With that said the more vld shaped a bullet gets the more important the stability gets.

Good shooting to all.

Steve
 
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