Even old familiar big-game bullets have been tweaked and improved over the years.
Photo above: Many hunters are obsessed with how much weight a bullet retains. All of these bullets were recovered from various big-game animals. They retain varying amounts of their original weight, yet all of them obviously resulted in a dead animal.
While some hunters try every new big-game bullet that comes out, others stick with one or two because they’ve always worked well for them. But even “old” bullets can change, sometimes considerably, partly due to bullet manufacturers tweaking the basic design to improve them, whether for field performance or more efficient manufacturing. I’ve used many different bullets, but in the last thirty years I have probably used more Barnes X-Bullets and Nosler Partitions than anything else. Both have changed markedly over that period.
Partitions appeared in 1948, and were designed to retain around two-thirds of their weight, with a softer front core that fragmented to increase tissue damage. The jackets were lathe-turned, but in the late 1970s Nosler started impact-extruding Partitions to speed production. I can’t say whether this improved accuracy or performance, because I started using the original Partitions only a few years before the extruded version appeared. Both 130-grain bullets in the .270 Winchester and 200-grainers in the .30-06 grouped three rounds into an inch at 100 yards, which back then was considered very good. None of the 130s were recovered from deer or 200s from elk, so I don’t know how much weight they retained.
Retained weight became a major factor many big-game hunters considered after 1986, when the original Barnes X-Bullets appeared, since they often retained all of their original weight. Randy Brooks told me that he originally designed the X-Bullet to lose its petals, because he’d previously used Nosler Partitions and believed the front-end fragmentation helped them kill more quickly, as John Nosler intended.
But quite a few hunters started bragging about how X-Bullets retained 100 percent of their weight, or close to it—apparently equating this with “killing power.” Randy believed the customer is always right, so he started designing X-Bullets to retain their petals, partly by using the purest copper he could purchase, which made them less brittle.
This retained-weight belief also resulted in other bulletmakers modifying their bullets, among them Nosler—though not all of them announced such changes publicly. In January 1998, I killed a bull bison on a Wyoming ranch when the temperature was minus-11 degrees Fahrenheit. The rancher warned me that in subzero temperatures, bison metabolisms slow down, so they often don’t react quickly to correctly placed shots.
I used my first .375 H&H, a British Whitworth made on a commercial 98 Mauser action, with 300-grain Partitions handloaded to around 2,550 fps. The bull stood broadside at 80 yards, and per the rancher’s instructions, I aimed just behind the front leg, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom of the chest. At the shot, the bull grunted and took a couple of steps forward, so I put another bullet in the same area. The bull backed up a couple steps, and fell very slowly.
We found both bullets under the hide on the far side. One retained 87.7 percent of its weight, and the other 88.7 percent–very close to the 90 percent many 1990s hunters considered the acceptable minimum. By then I’d recovered a number of other Partitions from big game in calibers including .25, .270, 7mm, and .30, and their retained weight ranged from 53.7 percent to 80.3 percent, an average of 65.8 percent.
So why did the pair of 300-grain .375s retain so much weight? I asked the folks at Nosler, who explained the recent retained-weight trend persuaded them to redesign heavier Partitions in calibers over .30 by moving the partition further forward. The .300-grain .375 also featured an even harder rear core to resist deformation. (They also said they often tweak their bullets based on testing at the factory and field performance.)
After the bison I recovered other heavier, larger-caliber Partitions from bigger game. The least percentage of retained weight was 80.5 percent, a 225-grain .338 from a big bull muskox, after breaking the near shoulder. The highest percentage was 95.2 percent, a 400-grain .416 from broadside rib shot on a water buffalo.
Barnes X-Bullets have also changed considerably since they were first introduced. The most obvious change occurred in 2004, when the Triple-Shock X-Bullet (TSX) appeared with its multi-grooved shank. This solved the problem of excessive copper-fouling inside rifle bores. In 2007 a plastic tip was added, resulting in the Tipped TSX, which increased ballistic coefficient and resulted in more consistent expansion.
Plastic tips have been used on some big-game bullets going back to the 1950s. Originally they were intended to prevent the tip-flattening common to softnose bullets due to recoil-pounding inside bolt-action magazines, so the tips were often rounded. But in the 1980s they became sharply pointed to increase ballistic coefficient.
Originally, pointed plastic tips were added to already existing lead-core spitzers, including Nosler’s Solid Base, with a typical lead core inside a one-piece jacket with a heavy base, resulting in the Ballistic Tip. Around the same time Hornady also added a tip to its popular Interlock Spire Points, calling the bullet the SST.
But the plastic tip resulted in more violent expansion in both bullets due to the large hollow-point required for inserting the tip’s shank. This often resulted in reduced penetration, so both bullets were tweaked to fix the problem, primarily by using harder lead alloys for the cores. Both bullets still expand easily, but they also penetrate very well.
In some “harder” bullets, however, a plastic tip aids expansion at longer ranges, where velocity drops. The Barnes LRX is a higher-BC version of the TSX, designed for hunting at longer ranges. When LRXs appeared, some hunters guessed the easier expansion resulted from annealing the front end of the bullets, but actually it’s done through changes in the hollow point where the tip is inserted.
Some hunters worried LRXs wouldn’t penetrate as well as TSXs. I’ve been using LRXs in the 6.5 PRC and .30-06 for several years now on game up to elk, and all have expanded and penetrated similarly to TSXs. In fact, none has been recovered, although one stayed inside a big cow elk after a frontal quartering shot just inside the left shoulder. It ended up somewhere in the intestines, where two companions and I searched but never found it.
As far as I know the essential design of Swift’s excellent A-Frame bonded bullet has not changed since it was developed in the 1980s. The A-Frame has a partition jacket made of pure copper, with two cores of pure lead, so doesn’t fragment much, usually retaining around 90 percent of its original weight. But the ballistic coefficient isn’t very high, so eventually Swift introduced a plastic-tipped, boattail bonded bullet called the Scirocco for longer-range hunting. It worked very well, and was eventually tweaked to open less widely and penetrate deeper.
Another trend in bullet design also started 1990s: More manufacturers started field-testing bullets extensively on game before introducing them commercially. Before then, most companies assumed new bullets would work well simply because they’d designed so many previous bullets, so they only tested them in “media,” either wood pulp or ballistic gelatin. But good performance in media didn’t always translate to good performance on game, one good example being Winchester’s Silvertip Supreme, a boattail version of the original Silvertip. On game it came apart frequently, which is why it only lasted a few years before being replaced by the Fail Safe, which acted a lot like the Barnes X-Bullet on game, but cost a lot more to produce. That is why it disappeared soon after the TSX appeared.
I know all this partly because over the years I’ve been invited, along with other gun writers, to field-test a number of new bullets before they were introduced. Such test-hunts have occurred from Canada to Africa, although Texas is a particularly popular destination since it provides a lot of opportunity for culling deer and feral pigs. Sometimes the new bullets are tweaked after such hunts before they’re finally released for sale, and that’s one reason today’s big-game bullets work so well on game from deer to Cape buffalo.
