by wildcatter » Wed Jul 04, 2012 1:31 pm
I'm not criticizing and one, who criticizes, in the face of success, is a fool, and I'm not going to be foolish here.
My Goal is to improve the science and open a dialog, to bigger and better performance.
Ok, Here goes,
I believe that the 250gr XPB was the wrong bullet for this bear. It worked and who am I to disagree with success, but I have other fish to fry.
The 250XPB has a Hugh & Deep Hollow point, the back half is a solid, weighting about 150gr +-. When the bullet hit the Bear, it shed pedals and stopped on the skin of the off-side, killing the animal. The animal did a header (Bang/Flop) got up and ran 35yds (if memory serves). As it was shot at close range, what would have happened if the animal had instead, charged? Well, if Zeek, our Hero, had, had a lever gun or worst a bolt gun, he’d have been mauled, there not being enough time, to work the actions, to get follow-up shots on the animal. The Safety of quick, reliable, and powerful follow-up shots, is a very wonderful insurance policy, don’t you think, one that we have uniquely?
The 250 XPB -vs- a 230gr FMJ-FP, just as an example, you would think that the 250 being only 20gr more weight, they’d move at about the same speed and preform approximately the same, right, N'est-ce pas (tis not so).
The XPB is .950” long and he FMJ is .650” long. You can overcome the deficiencies is lessor weight if you have two things, bullet construction and speed. In other words, what if you had a mythological 45cal solid, flat point that moved at 10,000fps, how would that compare to the xpb or any other bullet, of any caliber, for that matter, and they at normal speeds. The XPB occupies a whole bunch more powder real-estate, than the 230gr. So, the 230 is going to go significantly faster and it has the construction to stay together and the flat-point is going to disrupt much more tissue and exit the animal, in question.
Why exit, when the XPB puts 100% of its energy in the animal, stopping on the far side skin? That 100% is a mere pittance, compared to a properly constructed bullet that dumps allot of energy, out the far side of the animal. To do this, the energy it displaces inside, is ferocious, to say nothing of the over-all internal damage, made from a much larger wound channel.
Statement: Flat-point bullets displace, way more tissue than an expanded bullet (generally with all things being equal) and won’t slow down like expanded bullets have too, comparatively speaking..
We killed a moose once, with one of my 45 cal. creations, using one of the FMJ’s, I believe it was a FP with a TexasSheepDawg Heart shot, the bullet exited the chest of the bull, traveling the full length of the animal, and also killed a cow, that was standing 90 degrees and in front of the Bull, at the right spot. That’s way more tissue depth, than our Hero’s bear has and the bullet had enough left on it, to kill another moose. We've seen this kind of thing time and time again!
I think, from a lifetime of Professional-Hunting and from my Ballistics Studies, he was lucky that the bear ran away from him, but to be sure, it did do a Bang-Flop. I am a proponent of, use enough caliber, use the correctly constructed bullet for the job (I love non-expanding flat-points, FMJ’s, Barnes Busters and the like) and penetrate the animal, for increased internal damage.
I hope, I included enough provisos, because you can pick this apart, but the fact will remain, he kilt the Bar, I’m just saying, with the hundreds of bullets we have to choose from, you can have more insurance.
Zeek, after doing this great feat (and I detract nothing from this truly great feat) and you had to do it again, only this time it charged one of your kids before you could a shot off, would you have chosen a 325gr Barnes Buster, instead or some other bullet??
..t
Safety First..t