tylerjwitty
CGN frequent flyer
- Location
- Northern Ontario
It would be a pretty terrible bullet that wouldn't kill a white tail
Berger, Ballistic tip, meant bone penetration, accubond control test.
- Thread starter kman300
- Start date
It would seem that only the 120gr partition meets the criteria of "premium" bullet (weight retention, penetration, etc) that others in this thread view as so important. Is the partition "tried and true" to you because of the large number of animals under a wide range of conditions you have killed with it or because of what other people have reported about it?
Is a test of 200 big game animals statistically significant?
h ttp://www.riflemagazine.com/magazine/PDF/hl248partial.pdf
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I know I don't want nothing to do with Berger after this years BS. Lost a wt doe hit center of shoulder bullet exploded and never made the lungs.Tracked a km with no blood then gave up .Harold
How did you get the 10gr if you never retrieved the deer!?!
I remember that article when it came out; it had a lot to do with me trying the Bergers in the first place or at least his writeings for 24 hour campfire did. Four of us used them that year and 2 out of the four will never touch them again for big game. So much for paid-for opinions.
I've done a couple bullet/cartridge tests on my own cull hunts. One was on animals considerably larger than goats and involved a popular wonder bullet versus the most ordinary thing you could imagine. I shot almost three times as many animals on that hunt as all seven of the article's New Zealand shooters put together and came to my own conclusions. Another hunt was a direct comparison of two large calibers and involved shooting 16 water buffalo in short order.Conclusions? Opinions? Yep, I've got some of those.
I've got another "test" booked for next August, and will probably "prove" something else I already know but some people have trouble wrapping their brain around. If nothing else there won't be any newspapers and leg bones to clean up.
I know I don't want nothing to do with Berger after this years BS.This recovered bullet from a large mulie doe shot the same morning. Lost a wt doe hit center of shoulder bullet exploded and never made the lungs.Tracked a km with no blood then gave up .Harold
So you shot a high bc fragile bullet made for long range hunting into a mulie's chest at ~3000fps and are mad? I wonder how many other stories on the internet about bergers blowing up are because people shoot them really fast into animals up close where bc means absolutely nothing.
I know a fellow that uses a 308 winchester with 180gr tsx and complains they pencil through on lung shots. People accept that monos work best when driven fast which is why they shoot light for weight at warp speed. What's wrong with going heavy for weight and slow with berger/amax et al?
I remember that article when it came out; it had a lot to do with me trying the Bergers in the first place or at least his writeings for 24 hour campfire did. Four of us used them that year and 2 out of the four will never touch them again for big game. So much for paid-for opinions.
I've done a couple bullet/cartridge tests on my own cull hunts. One was on animals considerably larger than goats and involved a popular wonder bullet versus the most ordinary thing you could imagine. I shot almost three times as many animals on that hunt as all seven of the article's New Zealand shooters put together and came to my own conclusions. Another hunt was a direct comparison of two large calibers and involved shooting 16 water buffalo in short order.Conclusions? Opinions? Yep, I've got some of those.
I've got another "test" booked for next August, and will probably "prove" something else I already know but some people have trouble wrapping their brain around. If nothing else there won't be any newspapers and leg bones to clean up.
I see you mentioned earlier you had a 190 vld fail on a wt. Anymore details?
There are annual threads on 24h about bergers and amax killing stuff and people argue back and forth. Lots of pictures are always posted but people still always argue. Most, if not all, the people posting pictures are normal hunters, not "paid" for opinions. Again, everyone may use whatever they like. The thing I have trouble "wrapping my brain around" is how people will blindly accept the fact that a box of crappy tire powerpoint, corelockt 130gr 270 or 150gr 30/06 is hunting ammo and kills everything they shoot at each year but people using "match" ammo, which is usually heavy for weight for high bc, is wrong. I recall people jumping all over a guy last year when he shot a nice black bear with a 250gr scenar. Of course the bear was dead but the bullet "failed" and shoudn't have been used because he only found the jacket or it had low weight retention.
I was useing the 190 VLD in a custom .300 Win with a 27inch fluted 1-11" fluted Sendero contour Lilja barrel. I've shot a bit of F-Class with that particular rifle and have my own 1/2 mile shooting range to play arond and wreck barrels on. The load was 79 grains of H1000; a load suggested to me by Walt Berger. It put out 3050 fps in that long smooth barrel.I've got a 6.5-20 Mark 4 on that one. We were actually shooting it earlier that day.
In those years we had a stupid amount of tags, my son and I had 9 deer tags apiece if I remember correctly. Anyway at the last few minutes of light I had 440 yard group of deer standing around begging to get shot. Shooting prone with a rear bag made folding up a couple of them dead easy, made even easier by a zero wind condition. Probably could have shot them all if I'd wanted to.
It was supposed to be just a matter of driveing out to pick them up. The first sign of trouble was when a doe took off when all the live deer were supposed to be gone. It started doing that weird pronging thing were a hurt prey animal puts on an elaborate display of health to discourage predators from following then disappeared from sight. OH, oh. Still unsure what was going on, we went the last little way and saw my little buck standing behind a little bush with his head hanging down to the ground. I told my son to shoot it with his little .257 Weatherby, which did what it always does, flatten deer. 100 Ballistic tip at 3500 fps if you're interested. At impact it would have had nearly all of that left since it was no more than 30 yards. That left us to sort out the doe problem, since it was supposed to be laying dead right in that empty hole in the snow with a few specks of blood. We took up what trail we could find, to no avail. Back at the skinning shop we found that the 190 had blown up on the ribs, and nothing had penetrateing through. The little .257 made it to the hide on the far side, despite the NBT being known for being soft. The doe was never found despite some tracking snow, I can't prove what happened there.
Shortly after that I disected both Berger Target and Hunting bullets and found that they were exactly the same thing except for the colour of the box. I posted the pictures on a thread a few years ago.
I've used more than a few match bullets of different types, most notibly the 300 grain SMK in .338 so I wont pretend to be an saint. I don't like the Scenars at all, (Too hard) and have for the most part been able to find hunting bullets that handle long range hunting chores just fine. The newest Accubonds promise some of my hunting rifles a bit of a BC upgrade too.
Bergers are about the softest of the softs and TSXs are about the hardest. Both have avid fans, and seem to work as designed most of the time though two more opposite bullets would be hard to find. Everything in the middle must by default be good for something, and those Corelocts at crappy tire are solidly in the middle. Being in the middle isn't such a bad deal, if you want to get in trouble take anything to the limit.
In those years we had a stupid amount of tags, my son and I had 9 deer tags apiece if I remember correctly. Anyway at the last few minutes of light I had 440 yard group of deer standing around begging to get shot. Shooting prone with a rear bag made folding up a couple of them dead easy, made even easier by a zero wind condition. Probably could have shot them all if I'd wanted to.
It was supposed to be just a matter of driveing out to pick them up. The first sign of trouble was when a doe took off when all the live deer were supposed to be gone. It started doing that weird pronging thing were a hurt prey animal puts on an elaborate display of health to discourage predators from following then disappeared from sight. OH, oh. Still unsure what was going on, we went the last little way and saw my little buck standing behind a little bush with his head hanging down to the ground. I told my son to shoot it with his little .257 Weatherby, which did what it always does, flatten deer. 100 Ballistic tip at 3500 fps if you're interested. At impact it would have had nearly all of that left since it was no more than 30 yards. That left us to sort out the doe problem, since it was supposed to be laying dead right in that empty hole in the snow with a few specks of blood. We took up what trail we could find, to no avail. Back at the skinning shop we found that the 190 had blown up on the ribs, and nothing had penetrateing through. The little .257 made it to the hide on the far side, despite the NBT being known for being soft. The doe was never found despite some tracking snow, I can't prove what happened there.
Shortly after that I disected both Berger Target and Hunting bullets and found that they were exactly the same thing except for the colour of the box. I posted the pictures on a thread a few years ago.
I've used more than a few match bullets of different types, most notibly the 300 grain SMK in .338 so I wont pretend to be an saint. I don't like the Scenars at all, (Too hard) and have for the most part been able to find hunting bullets that handle long range hunting chores just fine. The newest Accubonds promise some of my hunting rifles a bit of a BC upgrade too.
Bergers are about the softest of the softs and TSXs are about the hardest. Both have avid fans, and seem to work as designed most of the time though two more opposite bullets would be hard to find. Everything in the middle must by default be good for something, and those Corelocts at crappy tire are solidly in the middle. Being in the middle isn't such a bad deal, if you want to get in trouble take anything to the limit.
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Should I load a .270 win down to 2500fps? Like owning a Viper and pulling two spark plug wires.It's just too fast!!!!!Don't believe all the crap on Wild TV, they edit out where it took 11 shots to put down an animal to one long range perfect hit .Nowhere on the box did they say velocity limits or do not use at under a 1/4 mile.I been doing this for over 40 years.Will go back to Partitions,Sciroccos and the like.Worse than a 80's vintage Nosler ballistic tip...........Harold
Many thanks for the detailed account. It would seem you did your part right and the bullet didn't. I would most respectfully suggest however that Just as people point out my 1 test means nothing, 1 failure shouldn't either. There are reports of tipped bullets losing the tips and jamming actions, accubombs exploding and recovered Barnes that didn't expand. People still use them and speak highly of them. However having confidence in your chosen bullet is also very important and if there is a nagging doubt can't blame a guy for not wanting to use that brand anymore. A friend refuses to use Barnes anything because he had bad experiences with the X bullet. I've tried to tell him about the new ones but he's old and I ain't going to chance his mind!
From what Brian L has posted iirc the difference between hunting and target vld is that the target vld has a 0.005" thicker jacket in the shank only. This leads to slightly more taper to the nose and ends up the same as the hunting bullet at the mouth. Not much of a difference.
I too am excited about the new accubonds. I am however very curious how they are going to make it expand down to 1300fps and of course survive the high impact speeds people will subject them to.
From what Brian L has posted iirc the difference between hunting and target vld is that the target vld has a 0.005" thicker jacket in the shank only. This leads to slightly more taper to the nose and ends up the same as the hunting bullet at the mouth. Not much of a difference.
I too am excited about the new accubonds. I am however very curious how they are going to make it expand down to 1300fps and of course survive the high impact speeds people will subject them to.
bearkilr
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Nowhere, ......just past the middle
One failure on a game animal does indeed matter, whereas a failure in test media does not. I shouldn't have to explain why.
Bottom line: save the target bullets for targets. Berger has called a line of their bullets "hunting" and there's little difference between them and their target HP's. However, the ballistics masturbators have discovered they drop 5" less at 1000 yards than a premium hunting bullet of the same weight, and they can tell all their buddies they shoot Berger's like the guys on TV.
You mean they just relabeled the box?!?! Why would they do such a thing?!?!!? All that's going to do is result in additional sales to another market segment, the hunting community. What were they thinking? Why doesn't Hornady try that with their Amax? Oh right, they make more than one bullet............
This reminds me of the lady that dumped hot coffee on her lap and then sued mcdonalds because it didn't say on the cup that the coffee was hot. If you've been doing this for 40 years you ought to know a thing or two. Nosler says 1900-3200 max for their btips and they are a much stouter bullet than the bergers.
One failure on a game animal does indeed matter, whereas a failure in test media does not. I shouldn't have to explain why.
Bottom line: save the target bullets for targets. Berger has called a line of their bullets "hunting" and there's little difference between them and their target HP's. However, the ballistics masturbators have discovered they drop 5" less at 1000 yards than a premium hunting bullet of the same weight, and they can tell all their buddies they shoot Berger's like the guys on TV.
Either a sample size of one is significant or it is not. It doesn't matter if it's one success on game or one failure. Is one example enough to draw a conclusion from? My statistics Prof in university always said no.
So the Columbia space shuttle disaster should be ignored? Sometimes there really is a significant difference between one success, and one disaster.
bearkilr
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Nowhere, ......just past the middle
There have been many examples of match bullets like the Berger failing to perform on game, typically at closer range when the velocity is high. I have not heard of disintegration of a Barnes TSX, Nosler Partition and the like. There have been instances of these losing their petals or failing to fully expand, but a result of that would certainly not be a lack of penetration. Assuming shot placement is where it should be, a bullet behaving like a solid will kill much better than one which disintegrates and fails to reach the vitals.
Don't apply Statistics 101 to real world evidence in hunting, it's as useful a tool as basing your choice of a hunting bullet on ballistics.
There were 7 more shuttle missions after that happened so obviously they didn't stop putting shuttles in space after this happened. They also didn't stop putting boats on water after the titanic sank or airplanes in the sky after one crashes. Frankly I'm not sure what these examples have to do with bullet performance but since you brought them up, they illustrate that one "failure" doesn't spell the end of the activity in question all together.
We are not talking about match bullets in general but the berger hunting vld. SMK's are not designated hunting bullets, Bergers are. Is the nosler partition the only one worth using then? Accubombs got their name for a reason. I pancaked a 165gr partition out of a 300 rum and I tore all the petals off a 100gr tsx out of a 257 wby. I recovered both bullets from deer. Did they fail? They didn't exit and weight retention was rather lacking. Are they not premium bullets based on those two examples? Bergers are not designed for close range, high speed. Not surprising they fail. A barnes tsx is not designed to open at 1000 yards either. Doesn't mean its not a good bullet.
I didn't start the statistics 101 talk. Another fellow mentioned 10 tests in order to draw a valid conclusion.
BC does play a roll in selecting my hunting bullets. 100 yard tree stand of course doesn't require high bc bullets but a big old hydro line strip cut through the woods does, for me anyways.
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- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
The test results pretty closely parallels the performance I would expect from these bullets in the field; I would have predicted 12" of penetration for the Bergers and BTs and 18" for the ABs. It proves to me that the Bergers are unsuitable as game bullets with the impact velocities observed in the tests, as 18" of penetration is the minimum I want. Berger designed his bullets for effectiveness at 600 yards rather than 100, which is probably where they demonstrate a balance of suitable penetration and upset due to their fragility.
