.375 all around north america bullet
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Ardent
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
No big secret and might as well chat about it, have neither the time nor inclination to try and commercialize anything. All the petal shedding designs in my mind have petals that are far too light to do serious damage on large animals. I'd like to see a 350gr mono .375 bullet that sheds three roughly 50gr petals and a 200gr core than continues on with roughly a tapered point. Same concept as the bullets Dogleg and 1899 mention, but far heavier and fewer fragments, fragments potentially large enough to kill on their own once inside an animal and a mono core to continue on. Nose profile would be more like a cast bullet, with a sharp edge to help the petals bite on smooth bone to pierce it before shedding. So an up close and personal bullet, not a 400 yard flier. Easy lathe work and should prove a fun project. Figuring how to score the HP evenly and with perfect balance in a manner that doesn't take forever would be the only real hurdle.
Ardent
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
bearkilr
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Nowhere, ......just past the middle
Norma Kalahari
But what you're describing is pretty much what a Nosler Partition does, it's just not mono metal. Incidentally, I like Barnes mono metals, but always wonder when shooting long range at steel gongs. They don't have nearly the smack of lead core bullets in the same weight.
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Ardent
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
Familiar with the Kalahari, but again I suspect those petal fragments might weigh 10grs or so a piece. Would like to see a very heavy for caliber mono that sheds only three .223 Rem sized fragments inside, and a 200gr or so core than continues on. Partitions from my limited knowledge of them still hold together well, not quite what I'm after. Having a method of reliably detaching the large petals evenly will also help the core track straight. Some fun for evenings at work anyhow.
Have a look at this thread (you probably already did if you've done some research on big bore bullet terminal performance). Lots of bullets tested and lots of mono with breaking petal design.
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- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
There's certainly more than one way to skin a cat, and the big case .375s provide more possibilities than most. The problem the manufacturer has is that his reputation as a bullet maker will be ruined if his bullet fails on dangerous game, particularly buffalo, which is the only African dangerous game that is affordable to a hunter, who is a wage earner in his real life, and 2 buffalo can often be taken on a license. This means that more bullets will be flung at buffalo than at elephants, hippos, or big cats combined, and word of the success or failure contributed to his bullet will be more widely reported. If an expanding bullet fails to kill the elephant with a single blow, it could be reasonably dismissed as being an inappropriate application for an expanding bullet. If the bullet fails to dump the impala in it's tracks, no one will care. But if that bullet fails to expand fully at close range, and doesn't produce nearly 3' of penetration on a buffalo, potentially he's got some real problems associated with the future of his bullet. And if the hunter is injured or killed despite good bullet placement, and that failure can be reasonably attributed to poor performance of the bullet, our bullet maker could find himself at the losing end of a lawsuit. Such things have happened as with TBBCs when one failed to impress a grizzly, and Art Alphin's Lion Load bullet when it grenaded on a charging lion's jaw and hunters sustained injures inflicted by the game that was wounded with those bullets.
So the challenge is to design a soft point that will open fully and reliably and penetrate in a straight line through a very dense target, despite the relatively high impact velocity common to the .375s. Since 1912 or so, the .375 has attained the reputation for being adequate on game up to the size of elephants, of being a reliable buffalo killer, of producing lighting fast kills on lions and leopards, and of allowing the hunter to eat right up to the bullet hole on on medium sized and even small game. Impact velocity and target density combine to produce bullet expansion, yet the bullet that expands on a buffalo (inch thick hide, covered in dried mud, overlapping ribs, heavy supporting bones, and very dense muscle) might have trouble producing similar expansion on say an impala, which is not only frail by comparison, but is frequently shot at longer range resulting in lower impact velocities than might be the case on a close range stalk of a buffalo. The miniature species of antelope encountered in Africa, can be killed cleaning with virtually no bullet expansion, with little if any loss of edible meat, or severe damage to the trophy, which would certainly not be the case if a .243 or a .22 centerfire with typical game bullets was used. A bullet that produces excellent results on African buffalo could be expected to perform equally well on a Woods Bison in the Yukon, but as game weight and density diminishes, so does the degree of expansion. A broadside chest shot with a .375 on a white-tail might not impress someone who anticipates the reaction medium sized game has to the bullet impact from a high velocity small bore rifle.
Thus its not a big surprise that the performance of a partition type bullet might exceed that of a TSX, yet the TSX will work with boring regularity under a wide variety of circumstances. When in doubt, a TSX is never a bad choice, provided it shoots in your particular rifle. That said, my slug of choice is the heavy for caliber solid shank, petal nosed, pure lead,bonded core bullet, typified by the 380 gr Rhino. Yet I accept that this bullet might not produce a lightning fast kill on our barren ground caribou compared to say a .243, because there just isn't much there for the bullet to work against, but the caribou will die all the same, and there will be little blood shot meat. But when game weight exceeds a half ton, I doubt there is another bullet within caliber that can produce the wound channel volume that the 380 will.
So the challenge is to design a soft point that will open fully and reliably and penetrate in a straight line through a very dense target, despite the relatively high impact velocity common to the .375s. Since 1912 or so, the .375 has attained the reputation for being adequate on game up to the size of elephants, of being a reliable buffalo killer, of producing lighting fast kills on lions and leopards, and of allowing the hunter to eat right up to the bullet hole on on medium sized and even small game. Impact velocity and target density combine to produce bullet expansion, yet the bullet that expands on a buffalo (inch thick hide, covered in dried mud, overlapping ribs, heavy supporting bones, and very dense muscle) might have trouble producing similar expansion on say an impala, which is not only frail by comparison, but is frequently shot at longer range resulting in lower impact velocities than might be the case on a close range stalk of a buffalo. The miniature species of antelope encountered in Africa, can be killed cleaning with virtually no bullet expansion, with little if any loss of edible meat, or severe damage to the trophy, which would certainly not be the case if a .243 or a .22 centerfire with typical game bullets was used. A bullet that produces excellent results on African buffalo could be expected to perform equally well on a Woods Bison in the Yukon, but as game weight and density diminishes, so does the degree of expansion. A broadside chest shot with a .375 on a white-tail might not impress someone who anticipates the reaction medium sized game has to the bullet impact from a high velocity small bore rifle.
Thus its not a big surprise that the performance of a partition type bullet might exceed that of a TSX, yet the TSX will work with boring regularity under a wide variety of circumstances. When in doubt, a TSX is never a bad choice, provided it shoots in your particular rifle. That said, my slug of choice is the heavy for caliber solid shank, petal nosed, pure lead,bonded core bullet, typified by the 380 gr Rhino. Yet I accept that this bullet might not produce a lightning fast kill on our barren ground caribou compared to say a .243, because there just isn't much there for the bullet to work against, but the caribou will die all the same, and there will be little blood shot meat. But when game weight exceeds a half ton, I doubt there is another bullet within caliber that can produce the wound channel volume that the 380 will.
BigUglyMan
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- New Scotland
The other beauty is that even impala sized animals can be reliably killed with solids. My brother shot his impala with a 300gr solid in the "New King" as I was rationing softs in case we ran into a nice kudu that required shooting. Come to think of it I also shot my baboon and civet with solids. .375" is a pretty decent sized hole to poke through the puddins of most critters.
As for the "no bad bullets" argument, my brother shot a coyote in Saskatchewan with the 375 and Remington Core Lokt factory ammo. The 'yote died but the bullet came apart so badly that it didn't exit. That's disconcerting performance for a bullet chambered in a cartridge used for heavy game. I can't imagine what it would have done on a moose or bear if someone was unfortunate enough to pick up a box of factory ammo when their suitcase was lost on their way to an Alaskan combo hunt!
As for the "no bad bullets" argument, my brother shot a coyote in Saskatchewan with the 375 and Remington Core Lokt factory ammo. The 'yote died but the bullet came apart so badly that it didn't exit. That's disconcerting performance for a bullet chambered in a cartridge used for heavy game. I can't imagine what it would have done on a moose or bear if someone was unfortunate enough to pick up a box of factory ammo when their suitcase was lost on their way to an Alaskan combo hunt!
Ardent
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
I killed an Impala with a 300gr .375 TSX that pencil holed in and out, but one of the most impressive bang flops I've had nonetheless. I think a 300gr bullet, solid, TSX, or soft passing through smaller game will still yield impressive results. The .375 solids are still highly regarded by most PHs even on plains game.
The .375 made its reputation by having three bullet weights to cover the game field. Shooters today seem to quickly dismiss the lightest 235 bullets because they sat down with their ballistic calculators and found that they aren't any flatter shooting than the 270s. Mister (s) Holland and Holland were nobody's fools, and that little tidbit was unlikely to have missed their attention. Its more likely that they knew full well that a high velocity softer bullet killed small animals faster than a 300 grain better suited for elephant and buffalo. Since the big game guy naturally already had solids on his belt, his complementary 300 grain softs could be softer since they didn't have to do "everything". All they had to do was "most" with the solids available for "the rest".
If John Taylor is to be believed the original 270 grain bullets were of sturdier construction than the 300s, penetrated more and killed slower. That would indicate that they were the intended compromise, do everything bullet.
If John Taylor is to be believed the original 270 grain bullets were of sturdier construction than the 300s, penetrated more and killed slower. That would indicate that they were the intended compromise, do everything bullet.
