I musta admit I don' t know alot about bullet grain. All I know is when I go into a shop to buy bullets, I just go into buy bullets for a specific gun. So can some of you educate me.Does a higher grain give more power or give the bullet a flatter trajectory? Just looking for some overall facts.
Grain is a measurement of a bullets weight. So the more grains the bullet is the heavier it is and the slower it must be fired in order to keep pressures inside the barrel from becoming too high and damaging the firearm or you.
There are 437.5 grains per ounce which comes out to 7000 grains pound.
When you purchase bullets it is a very good idea to purchase the EXACT brand, bullet type and bullet weight that was used to sight in the rifle.
Suppose you sight in a 30-06 with Remington 150 grain corelokts and then purchase Hornady 180 grain SST's for hunting it is very likely that they will not impact the same place and you could end up wounding and loosing an animal because of this.
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Thanks for the info. Big. but you said shoot slower, the bigger the grains, the slower the gun has to be fired. What do you mean by that? I hope I don't sound to dumbish...
I "heavier" grain bullet weighs more. How fast can you push a shopping cart? Now how fast can you push a Honda Civic? The civic weighs alot more and you only have so much strength...so the civic is going to get pushed slower. The heavier bullets are slower.
Now there's a flip side to this:
Say you let me push a shopping cart as fast as I can and a Civic as fast as I can. You get to stand up against a wall. Would you rather me launch the shopping cart as fast as I can...or the Civic? The Civic will be slower but its gonna hit you alot harder.
The heavier bullets "hit harder"
So why would anyone shoot lighter bullets? Well it gets complicated. Everything is a trade off. Lighter bullets are faster and so they don't "sink" as much and make it easier to aim at longer distances. (that's the main reason)
Hope that helped
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I don't mean the slower the gun has to be fired, but rather the slower the bullet must travel to keep internal barrel pressures safe. A gun can handle a certain ammount of pressure inside the barrel before things start to break. So the heavier the bullet being fired the more pressure that must be exerted behind it to reach the same velocity as a lighter bullet.
Take a .270 Winchester for example. Its maximum safe working pressure is 65,000 psi. It can safely fire a 130 grain bullet at 3150 fps and pressures remain under the 65,000 psi limit. In order to get it to fire a 150 grain bullet at the same speed you would have to increase the pressure behind the bullet substantially past the safe limit.
Another way to look at it is throwing a baseball and then a bowling ball. You can throw a baseball much faster than you can a bowling ball. Same thing with guns. A cartridge can fire the lighter bullets faster than the heavier bullets with equal energy being applied to the bullet.
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"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency........... Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president."
One of the important things in bullet selection is not so much the grain of the bullet as it is the sectional density. The higher the sectional density, the greater the range and penetration of the bullet. The calculate this, you divide the bullet weight by the bullet (in pounds*) by the diameter of the bullet (in inches) squared. This is because longer, narrower bullets will penetrate better than a bullet the same weight with a larger diameter.
Say you have two rifles, a 25-06 and a 30-06. Both are shooting 120 grain bullets. Which one penetrates further if they both leave the muzzle at the same velocity?
The .25 caliber, because the forces of friction are acting upon a smaller surface.
*a grain is 1/7000 of a pound.
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I would suggest that you buy a good reloading manual such as the two volume set from Hornady. If you are interested in guns and ballistics, there just is not a better source around. Also the Lyman manual and the book (Cartridges of The World) are very good reading as well.
One of the important things in bullet selection is not so much the grain of the bullet as it is the sectional density. The higher the sectional density, the greater the range and penetration of the bullet.
Actually bullet construction is far more of a factor than sectional density where penetration is concerned.As far as the effective range of a bullet is concerned,the ballistic co-efficientwould be thegreatest factor because it determines the velocity and therefore energy retained at a given range.
bullet grain
