ORIGINAL: CBourgeois
OK Like someone said......man this stuff is getting to be a real science! OK I just went to the local gun shop and they were pushing the Barnes 285 grain MZ Expanders. I also purchased a box of the T7 30 grain pellets. I was thinking about trying these bullets with 80 grains of the triple seven pellets. What are the thoughts? What I am understanding from F Gander that the 100 grains was just too hot of a load for the closer shots within 150 yards?? Is this correct? Man you talk about going back to school! well class is in session and I am here to learn, I love a challange I just don't care for a deer to be wasted at the expense of my ingorance. Of course I would like to see EVERYONE drop in their tracks as they do when my 7 MM MAG reaches out and knocks on their door, but don't take me wrong, I do NOT mind trailing a blood trail at all, as long as the deer is running dead and just don't know it.
Nevertheless again I would like to THANK EVERYONE for their support and very useful knowledge!
Chris
One thing I forgot to mention! MAN these new bullets and sabots are 100% harder to shove down the pipe of the Encore than the PB's were! But that is a no brainer as long as they do the deed on the Split Hoofed Critters that I am in search of, I will just have to use a little more GRUNT to get them down!!
Chris, The MZ Expanders are great bullets, see this write up:
http://www.chuckhawks.com/barnes_expander_bullets.htm
Frontier Ganders comments pertain to the PowerBelt ONLY. MZ Expanders can be shot fast and hard, they will hold together, go thru bone, even both shoulders and expand to 2x and retain 100% of it's weight. Bryce Towsley, who wrote the chapter on Muzzleloader Bullets, in Rifle Bullets for the Hunter A Definitve Approach (excellent Christmas gift for a hunter, including yourself) calls the Barnes Expander MZ "the nearly perfect Muzzleloader bullet" and his logic was:
retains 100% of weight
exands to 2x the diamer, so about an inch
expands on contact about 1 or two inches into the animal, since the huge Hollow point on the front of it
does NOT fragment 1 bit,
go thru large bones
exits for huge blood trails
usually produces boom flops on boiler room hits
So if you do some careful reading of what people use and WHY, then you will get their LOGIC. Why does Craig Boddington say:
"a thing of beauty is a long shank bullet, perfectly expanded on it's head to about 2x of the diameter"? Current Issue of Am Rifleman in his evaluation of a new bullet.
Most people choose bullets based on the following factors:
accuracy
penetration
expansion
shoot thru
Accuracy is #1, cause if you don't hit what your shooting at nothing else matters.
Penetation is #2, cause you gotta get into the vitals to get a kill or boom flop
Expansion is #3, because once you penetrate the vitals you want a large wound channel, so that massive tissue disruption is caused. That is why they measure volume of ballistic gel displaced by a bullet because it is a surragate factor closely related to tissue disruption
shoot thru is #4, because you want a good blood trail. Some folks want "all the energy" to be in the deer, so no shoot thru, under the theory that all the energy in the deer produces "boom flop". But it is tissue disruption/wound channel that produces boom/flops on boiler room hits (not neck or head shot),not all the enery from the rifle in the deer. Physics says that every action produces and equal and opposite reaction, do does recoil knock you down, no, so the bullet expanded in a deer is not going to knock it down, the tissue disruption is going to do that. Read this article:
http://randywakeman.com/EnergyTransferandBulletBullistics.htm andthis:
http://www.rkba.org/research/fackler/wrong.html
Here is a Nosler Partition shotwith 100g of 777 in the brisketof a buck and it wentlengthwise thru the buck and I found it on the offside under the skin near the hind quarter of the deer. As you can see it is perfectly expanded, no flat as a pancake mushroom, and it went to about 30 inches ofdeer, now that is penetration! Which means "gets into the vitals" causes massive damage and exits the vitals for good blood trail. The Expander will do this also, and more.
Chap
