Gel, gel, ballistics gel!!
I was a gun-obsessed teenager in 1986 when the Miami shootout happened, and watched with fascination as the FBI Ballistics Gel Test Protocol was rolled out in 1988.
In the years that followed I dove headfirst to consume anything I could find written by Dr. Martin Fackler and others of his ilk at the International Wound Ballistics Association and the Journal of Trauma, and as the civilian internet was born in the 90’s the availability of information on the subject, both good and bad, exploded.
Then in the early 2000’s, I finally bought my first gun (a remington 870 marine magnum), and it coincided with Duncan MacPherson publishing his unrivaled work Bullet Penetration: Modeling the Dynamics and the Incapacitation Resulting from Wound Trauma, which I bought and read over and over as I constructed MSExcel models to enable me to do correction calculations based on .177 bb calibration data and predictive penetration based on bullet geometry, material, and velocity charracteristics.
I called up bloom gelatin company and learned all about different bloom grades of gelatin, then on multiple occasions ordered up large quantities I could use to make 9”x9”x18” 10% ordnance gelatin as specified by the FBI protocol. I even went so far as to hack an air conditioning unit to serve duty as an insulated utility trailer refrigeration system I could use to keep the gelatin at its required 5°C to ensure proper calibration and proper terminal media viscosity required to certify penetration data as valid under the protocol, allowing me to play unfettered in the summer months feeding my terminal ballistics junky-like habit.
This was right around the time I started deer and bear hunting, primarily using my 12 gauge shotgun with either buck shot or rifled slugs. In the years that have passed between then and now I’ve killed a mountain of critters with some form of 12 gauge; most dying very quickly but the odd one dying horribly, sometimes because of unusual and counter-intuitive properties + mis-matched application of certain rifled slugs.
In parallel I did a zillion different gelatin tests on a zillion different shotgun rounds and made the odd YouTube video in the early days of my channel to share results on stuff I thought others might find interesting. In more than a decade of being available on YouTube, the most popular of these videos has about 85,000 views, and they average about 50,000…not great performance.
Fast-forward to today, where the YouTube firearm infotainment market is saturated with people consuming ballistic gel dummies and non-gelatin based synthetic alternatives (with no calibration standard or data provided, hence no correction possible to a known standard), often re-using their gel over and over (which I know from experience effects its calibration characteristics), yet no one seems to care and folks somehow think the data derived stands up to the standard of Dr. Fackler.
In the meantime since starting around 2001, I’ve now successfully hunted more than 75 deer and bear using buckshot or slugs - amassing a pretty good body of real-life experience to contrast against all the $$ I insanely lit on fire (or should I say mixed, poured, refrigerated, shot, and photographed), and I can safely say that for me, at this stage of my life, swamp water in Rubbermaid totes is a sufficient terminal media analog for what I’m now interested in.
My interest is less and less properly calibrated penetration data, and more and more plastic deformation + fragmentation characteristics relative to impact velocity. Re penetration data, I am satisfied to simply know which tote I pulled what type of recovered bullet fragment from.
Suspect this is the approach I will take this coming spring/fall, but am pretty pumped as I’ve not yet seen anyone explore the concept of impact velocity in rifled slugs. To use properly calibrated ballistics gel to do this would both be cost prohibitive in today’s world, as well as add an insane layer of complication to what I’m hoping to do. Hope this does not disappoint too badly, but suspect the work will be more interesting than anything I’ve uploaded in the shotgun world thus far!
Cheers,
Brobee
