I burned through quite a bit of powder and bullets yesterday at my buddies hunting lease. I just wanted to throw several T-EZ's down range to make sure my Endeavor was still good to go since the Loshbough hog hunt is coming up. I'm glad I did because it was a little off. From 50 yards everything looked good but when we went back to 100, things were a little off. It didn't help that it was windy as hell and we were in the middle of a cow pasture. I made a few scope adjustments and got my group back to black. I didn't get any pics from 100 but you can see from the black pasties where some of the before adjustment shots were.

This picture is a 5 shot group at 50 yards. The target is a 6" B/C Shoot-N-See...



All shots yesterday were with 250g Barnes T-EZ's with the supplied sabots replaced by MMP HPH12's and 120 volumetric grains of BH209. I'm pretty happy with the results.

My dad and I decided to conduct a test on expansion of the T-EZ's. I have seen plenty of pictures before but I wanted to get some hands-on experience. So we packed a 5 gallon bucket with as many magazines as we could and then soaked them with water. The magazines expanded and everything was ready. I know the only accurate test is when you shoot animals but this was still pretty fun!

I initially started with my pet load of 120g BH209 and 250g T-EZ from 50 yards. There were a lot of magazines in there but it blew right though. So I backed it off to 60g and let it go. It went all the way through to the last couple magazines and bulged and cracked the bucket. We recovered the bullet and set it aside. The next test shot was from 100 yards and I used 70g. Again, it almost blew through but we were able to recover the slug.
Here's some pics of the test bucket...







And here's some pics of the bullets we recovered. The one on the left was the 100 yard shot and the one on the right was the 50 yard shot...







When we were back at 50 yards and before we called it a day, I decided to shoot one of the 290g T-EZ's with 50g BH209 just to see what happened. Here's the result...



I was pretty impressed at how perfectly these bullets expanded and so was my father. I could tell the 290g T-EZ with the 50g charge didn't fully expand. And it had only gone half way through the magazines.

My dad went to digging in the impact area and was able to recover 2 of the 250g bullets. Here's what they looked like...





And here's some pics of all the bullets together...









I'm pretty confident and excited about the hog hunt this coming weekend. I'll be using the 250g bullet and 120g of BH209. I keep hearing that taking a stock Encore apart and putting it back together can affect the point of impact so I'm not taking any chances. I just cleaned the bore and breech plug. It was shooting dead center from 100 yards last time I fired it and the only thing I did since then was take it apart to clean it. So I can see now that my Endeavor needs a little tweaking. After the hunt I'm going to install one of the Mike Bellm tune-up kits just for good measure.