Brass projectiles??

In the conversation I had with "the guy", he was showing a design in his bullets that would have similar petal shedding and base continuing for pass-through. His video showed an antelope being harvested. When the bullet hit, it looked like someone was airing it up, then deflating it. Had one large and several small exit holes with massive internal damage. .260 Rem at like 4 or 6 ish hundred yds, I don't recall exactly.

This thread is similar to what happened with a certain DG bullet design that changed ownership and was changed due to cost and ease of manufacture.
It was changed from pure copper jackets/pure lead cores to guilding metal jackets to antimony added cores.
The difference on game was tremendous, went from a 100% reliable text book mushroom with minimal weight loss, to a bullet that either would break up or fail to expand and tumble through the animal.
I have never seen such a change before or since and do not know if it has changed back as I am sure there would have been many many complaints.

Pure copper is far more malleable than any of it's alloys and is harder to draw/swage/form without distortion on any thinner side, as we know nature likes to follow the least resistant path. Only careful heat treating at various stages helps control this.

Cheers.

Edd said:

I believe the Hammer bullet retains 70% of it's weight because 30% of it turns into fragments.

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I won't dispute that. I'm sure I'll try the Hammers eventually. Part of my decision was based on the information that Lehigh provides on their site about how exactly they expect their bullet to perform. The information on the Hammer site (I felt) was a bit lacking and I was left with the impression that they perform much in the same manner that the Barnes do terminally.

at one time Steve had a dead blow bullet that retained 40-50% of original weight. the way I understood it it is a different process in the hollow point that could be used on the hammer hunter. call him I might have misunderstood

Hammers certainly seem to have a devout following by those who've used them. It's my belief that they have made terminal performance on game their number one priority as a bullet design goes. My intention in asking the initial and follow-up questions was to begin more discussion based around brass and it's various alloys. I really don't know much about the potential metallurgical advantages and disadvantages of brass as a projectile medium. It's all exciting.

JJMoody said:

I really don't know much about the potential metallurgical advantages and disadvantages of brass as a projectile medium. It's all exciting.

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There's a great wealth of information on Nathan Foster's website about effective game killing and bullet performance. One of the methods that seems to work quite well is the fragmenting of softer bullets like the SST, A-max, and VLDs. It would seem that a brass projectile would have a better chance of replicating this type of expansion by producing a smaller and denser particle cluster versus the larger pieces of the copper bullet.

The problem is velocity. I would have preferred to try the brass Lehighs, but with a 7mm-08 I'm not convinced I can keep it over the velocity threshold at any distance I might shoot at here. If I were still shooting the 7RM, I would love to try them.

My experience with mono metal bullets (Like jacketed bullets) has been all over the performance scale. and some ran from near perfect performance, to abysmal failure (Just like some jacketed bullets) if used in the wrong application.

Some like the Hammers, are at the top of the performance chart because of the design criteria/needs for hunting. other mono metal bullets were/are designed with one thing in mind, COST. They are cheaper to make than jacketed or True CNC machined bullets and the alloy used is very soft to facilitate opening up on impact, but they were very unpredictable and dependent on a few shot locations to perform.

Just saying, no matter how good a bullet is for some applications they may not perform as well in other applications, so bullet choice for different uses is still very important in my opinion.

J E CUSTOM