Exit hole question?

[BoomFlop]

I have noticed smaller exit holes in the past 5-10 years shooting Hornady Interlock bullets. Do you think this is because they have changed them to tougher bullets and I'm not getting the expansion(100-150 yards) in our 7mm-08's or is it they are coming apart? I really have to look for the exit holes and not much if any blood shot meat.

Thoughts?

Steve

 

[Andrew Massi]

Interesting
The only interlock experience I have in that time frame is a 154 out of a 7mm wby. Never any trouble with finding exit holes haha

 

[Wolf76]

Not really answer to your question. The sst bullet seems to always exit and provides much better terminal ballistics.

 

[RT2506]

It has been a loooooog time since I shot any deer with a Hornady bullet in anything. Out of the 7mm Rem mag I guess I shot a half dozen of so deer with the 139 gr. None of them ever exited and the deer always ran off a ways and left very little to no blood trail. I lost the meat from one pretty good buck because there was NO blood trail. I found it a few days latter when the buzzards were one it. It looked like it had died in full stride and slid into a patch of kudzu that I had walked all around it. I switched to the 154 interlock and I had better results and it always exited with maybe a quarter size hole. If you want BIG exit holes get you some Berger VLDs. Thy blow baseball size exits. I also tried some of the Hornady 117 Inter locks in a 25-06. Exits were not really large, about index finger size. I had a few runners with this bullet also. Found the 117 Sierra that dropped deer in their tracks 99.9 % of the time and never looked back. By the way the 7mm Rem mag was the worst caliber I ever used on white tail deer no matter which bullet make or weight I tried back in the late 1980s early 1990s for deer running a good distance after taking a perfect behind the shoulder shot. I can't explain it but they would run 100 or so yards and would slosh on the inside when I found them but they still ran. I was hunting and doing crop damage control in east NC and if a deer ran out of the fields the surrounding area was THICK jungle or swamp and it would have been hard to trail a chalk line in that stuff.

 

[snox801]

No experience with those either

 

[MagnumManiac]

In my experience, smaller exit holes are attributed to bullets that expand with the petals held close to the shank of the bullet.
Good examples of this are Partitions, Vulcans, Hot Cor or Accubonds and Interloks.
I thought this would ring true with Remington Core-Locks, but they seem to give somewhat larger exit holes for me.

The largest exit holes I have witnessed are with Berger bullets.

Cheers.

 

[BoomFlop]

How do Berger's compare to ELD m's in the 308 Win would you say? 168 gr Hybrid or Classic hunter (factory)?

 

[MagnumManiac]

I have only ever shot a buddies 308, we were using 125gr Ballistic Tips, they really did some fine damage to a few hogs. No exits on everything we shot.

I've also never used ELD-M/Ex's in any cal.
The last Hornady bullet I used was 30 cal 220gr RN Interloks. Worked flawlessly on deer over here.

Cheers.

 

[just country]

morning, no Barnes TSX or TTSX? justme gbot tum

 

[javman]

I've had plenty DRTs with lowly 7x57 with different bullets and plenty of exits! 7mag is going a bit faster!

 

[Bdubose]

For 40 years I never shot anything but the Remington Core-lokt 150s out of my 7 mag until I started shooting long range. Killed well over 100 deer and only had one deer run off with no noticeable exit hole. Found him by tracking foot prints 75 yards away.

Now I'm shooting Nosler 168 Accubond LR. Last year it killed 6 doe and 1 hog from 70 yards to 230 yards with 1"-2" exit holes. Nothing ran more than 10 yards.

I'm pretty happy with the both the paper performance and its ability to get 1 shot kills.

 

[gvjm]

Wow! I'd have to say I've had the opposite results with my 7 mag! I actually don't hunt Whitetail with it anymore because of the tremendous damage it has done! The best results I ever got was with the 154 SST. Small exit, the lungs where completely liquified and there was a cloud of dust from the deer dropping so hard on the spot! The worst results was completely blowing the front quarter off with a 140!

 

[Bdubose]

Hard to argue with results

 

[Bdubose]

About 30 years ago I tried slowing the round down for smaller whitetail thinking that would do less damage - I learned the hard way that it had the opposite effect.

Maybe speed it up if its doing too much damage?