First year using VLD's........When I grew up my father was not a handloader & during the process of him teaching me how to hunt he said "boy, for a hunting bullet you have to get winchester power points or remington core-lokt, these are the only bullet to use" Well needles to say that philosophy stuck with me for a good 25 years of my life in which time I killed several elk & an awful lot of mule deer. Though I can never really remember ever loosing an animal I can remember many times spending endless hours tracking animals since many of them ran for hundreds of yards before expiring or bedding down waiting for us to shoot them again. They've been around forever, are good stout bullets & they work.
Now on the other hand my recent experiences with the Berger is a different story entirely. After becoming a handloader & being overwhelmed with so many bullets to choose from it became a tough decision on what a guy should use thats for sure!
This year I hunted with a 6.5 x 284 with the 140 VLD running at 2930. I shot a black bear at 180 yards and her belly hit the ground in a nano second. The bullet entered high behind the shoulder & severed its spine in half. The fragmentation blasted down into her chest cavity turning everything into gooo.
I just shot a decent mule deer at 320 yards at a steep uphill angle & once again he dropped instantly but of course I severed his spine in half just like my earlier bear. (just discovered that my zero was 1.5 inch high at 100 & my scope objective has a rather good dent, note to self, don't drink so much while at hunt camp)
The impressive thing was that the entry hole was just a tiny little red bee sting seen just high & back behind the shoulder.
From looking at the inside of the chest cavity It appeared that it hit a rib square on, split into two main pieces. 1 piece went thru the far side of the spine & the other piece went thru the near side of it's spine leaving 2 quarter sized holes. One went up into it's neck & the other went down into the near side of the opposite shoulder. The top of it's lungs were pretty much non existent. As I peeled both shoulders, rib meat & back straps off I was utterly dumbfounded by the massive damage that this poor deer encountered! About 3 inches of 3 ribs on the entrance side was completely gone, the spine was cut in half & 3 of the large vertical ribs were blown off the top of the spine entirely. Good thing it was right were the back straps end & the neck meat begins as I only had to throw out some hamburger meat.
I recovered 3 pieces of that bullet, the big piece looked exactly like the one photo earlier in another post. The other two pieces were just tiny fragments. All combined it weighed 40 grains, including little bits of meat. I was truly impressed with the amount of bone damage for such a small frangible bullet! I know that elk bones are much larger but I do not believe that any elk rib bones could stop this bullet. A square on shoulder would be a different story but we shouldn't be shooting them there anyway!
Last year I took a nice WA state whitetail with a 180 nosler ballistic tip coming out of a 308 at just under 2600. I shot him square on the shoulder at 20 yards in heavy timber & it completely ripped his main upper shoulder bone in half sending some serious lead, brass & bone fragments thru his rib cage breaking several of them & then continued on into his vitals. It actually hit him so hard that it knocked him over backwards!!! And I've never seen that or so much energy transferred into animal ever before.
Obviously I don't have much experience with the explosive bullets over the years as I do the old stand by bonded bullets but as it stands now I will never use a lead tip bullet ever again! The frangible's just seem to be able to produce such a quick, clean & fast kill that puts critters out of their misery faster than you can jack another round in your chamber! We do owe them that. The only thing that sucks is I miss the thrill of following a blood trail!
Now on the other hand, no matter how I look at it or think about it any (key word here) proper placed bullet of almost any size, shape, or design will kill. Just don't be that guy that takes marginal shots, makes poor hits & then claims the bullet or caliber was at fault. I personally know someone that lost 2 medium sized whitetail deer to a 308 with 165 grain Remington bullets so the next year he was touting around a 300RUM & now he's thinking about getting a 338 for deer hunting cause he didn't have much luck with the 300 either.......... I know there is no such thing as "overkill" but we have to be realistic at some point.