If the heat if the impact weakens the steel, how come the lead doesn't melt?
And yes, that's what I think happens.
Otherwise the highly frangible AMax bullet in the aforementioned video would expand on impact.
357 magnum for deer
- Thread starter tbrwlf
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If the heat if the impact weakens the steel, how come the lead doesn't melt?
And yes, that's what I think happens.
Otherwise the highly frangible AMax bullet in the aforementioned video would expand on impact.
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When a bullet hits a piece of steel there is heat. You don't think that soft materials like copper and lead are going to bore a hole through harder material like steel all on their own, do you? The holes you see in mild steel from bullets are caused by heat, not by an intact, unexpanded copper/lead bullet boring a hole through the steel.
If you don't believe that a copper and lead bullet expands when it hits steel because the bullet is "going too fast" I just don't know if continuing the conversation is worthwhile. I see bullets hitting steel all day every day and believe me, they expand.
More likely the 750gr bullet didn't start expanding until it started to yaw a bit.
Have you ever shot a deer at 20 yards with a bullet going 3500fps? I have, and it's clear the bulley expanded!
Anyway, this is pointless. Bullets require velocity to expand. The more velocity the more expansion. The reason hunting bullets may enter gelatin a bit prior to full expansion is because expansion is not immediate regardless of velocity.
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Gatehouse, I'm not just making guesses here.
In engineering, one particular class had a section on percussion mechanics.
That is mechanics of impact that happens faster than the shockwave travels through said material.
Materials behave differently at high speed impacts. Like water that acts like concrete when a plane hits it at speed.
Heat is not why bullets pierce steel at high speed. Momentum and shockwave containment is.
The AMax should have exploded on impact as per hornady but it didn't as per mechanics. The shockwave that triggered the expansion was not fast enough. It did expand though but at those speeds, 1 millisec translates in perhaps 1 ft not expanded in gelatin.
So it comes to reason that a bullet that expands a bit slower, at high speed, passing through a deer (what's that? 2" of dense muscle and 10" of sponge-like lung) doesn't get to expand inside the deer.
Your argument that bullets hitting steel do expand is too generic. High speed bullets like 30-06 pass through 1/2" regular A32 steel at 100m. And the hole is often smaller than 30 cal. Again, percussion theory explains it.
Let's not argue any more. You have your beliefs, I have my educated guesses.
Pfff 357? My great gran-pappy used to hunt deer with a soup spoon, a dried pea, and a sharp rock. He'd use the spoon to launch the pea into the deers ear, where it would lodge dead-centre in the brainpan. He'd then use the rock to bleed out, gut, and skin the thing.
A real hunter wouldn't need no fancy magnum to take deer.
A real hunter wouldn't need no fancy magnum to take deer.
