Bad Luck With Bergers

[Moe02]

The lungs looked way to good with good color. It seems like they where just pensiling through and not causing interal shock.

 

[Ridgerunner665]

Are you sure of the muzzle velocity? Do you have a chrono?

What was the load comprised of? (powder charge)

 

[Moe02]

No crono just guessing with what others say and I have verified my drop chart out to past 1000 yards and it seems to match very close with the listed velocity. My load consists of 99 grains of h-1000 with fed match primers.

 

[c_bass16]

I shoot 190 Bergers in my 300 SAUM and have taken antelope beyond 900 yds and the bullets completely dump their load after about 12-15" of penetration at that distance. On a broad side shot, it would have been a violent pass through.
Goat was facing me, bullet entered the throat, about 3" off center, destroyed the left lung and I found nothing but shrapnel inside the chest cavity.

Velocity at impact was roughly 1800 fps

I don't know what happened in your situation, but I love them and wont shoot big game with anything else. Everything I've shot showed explosive expansion and unless I split the ribs...I rarely get a pass through on deer or larger...which is what I want.

 

[Moe02]

Yea several reports of the same results on game was what made me chose this bullet. I thought my bull may have been a bad lot of bullets and tried them agian on my deer this year with the same dissapointing results. Im not sure what the problem is. I will try to find the jackets that i recovered on my bull and post a picture maybe it will tell somebody more knowledge a better story.

 

[Franklin]

Interesting first thread...I've had the exact opposite results shooting bergers. What die did you use to seat the bullets?

 

[Moe02]

RCBS they are not the high dollar ones. Seems hard to believe that this would be the issue but maybe.

 

[Ridgerunner665]

I would hope that the force required to seat them wouldn't be enough to deform the meplat...even if the dies seated them off the meplat, which they shouldn't do...I mean heck, neck tension should only be .002" or so...

But I don't know...

 

[Korhil78]

My guess is that people who may be having poor performance are damaging the tip of the bullet when they are seating it. its kind of deforming or closing the hollow point tip. The reason that this happens is because Berger bullets are longer than other bullets and so when you go to seat the bullet you may be hitting the top of your die a bit. That is why they have started making VLD type micrometers for redding so it does not do this.

I am not saying that that is what happened to you but it could be. I am pretty certain that with all the hard work that they put in to making the bullet, they have pretty tight tolerances in the making of the bullet.

I have killed only one animal with the bergers so far and it did exactly as advertised. It's very strange that 3 out of 3 bullets did that. Something weird has to be going on.

 

[Joe King]

you might want to pull your seater plug out and stick a bullet in it by had just to make sure that the seater plug is contacting on the Ojive and not the meplat, another thing you could do is smoke the Ojive of a bullet all the way to the meplat and see just where the seater plug makes contact.

 

[Joe King]

My guess is that people who may be having poor performance are damaging the tip of the bullet when they are seating it. its kind of deforming or closing the hollow point tip. The reason that this happens is because Berger bullets are longer than other bullets and so when you go to seat the bullet you may be hitting the top of your die a bit. That is why they have started making VLD type micrometers for redding so it does not do this.

I am not saying that that is what happened to you but it could be. I am pretty certain that with all the hard work that they put in to making the bullet, they have pretty tight tolerances in the making of the bullet.

I have killed only one animal with the bergers so far and it did exactly as advertised. It's very strange that 3 out of 3 bullets did that. Something weird has to be going on.

+1 exactly what I was thinking

 

[Korhil78]

But in the end..you gotta shoot with whatever you are comfortable with. If accubonds are your go to bullet the use those. You def. don't want your confidence in your shot to wane because you worried about the performance of your bullet after you shoot. Accubonds are a good bullet.

 

[Ridgerunner665]

Some of you may laugh at this...but I'm seating VLD's with a Lee seater die (30-06)...I don't like most of Lee's stuff but some of their stuff works and works quite well.

The Lee die does not damage the meplat, it contacts the bullet about 1/4" below the meplat, and does not scar the jacket like most RCBS dies. And the floating plug seems to produce good ammo...

 

[ICANHITHIMMAN]

I have been having the penciling issue to, stupid Bergers! Worst thing is they shoot so good and are so easy to do load work on.gun)