Holy sh*t. They have obviously changed some internal skiving geometries. Possibly even the alloy itself. Date of purchase? And, if your don’t mind, where you got it from? I’m getting ready to grab some more. Feel free to PM if you want. Please and thank you.
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Good stuff Buford. Thanks for adding some data points for everyone to consider.
Not sure if you remember but I did a similar test with a few different types of rounds about 5-6 years ago. If you want me to, I can link it for everyone’s benefit. Your call.
Vicious, I’m tracking.
WS6, THAT is what I experienced with the 70gr GMX even from my SBR. Granted, I bought almost all my 70gr GMX at one time, early in their initial release. But, I see explosive wound tracks with the occasional punctuate entrance, always a silver dollar or bigger exit, and always guts and blood and organs blown out of the backside of the animal. Blood trail is always strong, even when I tagged a 285lb boar through both cartilage plates and both scapulas at about 40m. Frankly, that didn’t look much different from my Tikka T3 shot at 70m on a 240lb sow with 308 Winny 165gr Federal Trophy Bonded Tip (a TBBC with a boat tail and ballistic tip). Effects on the animal were the same; a quick dirt nap and some squiggling in place… which quickly ended.
Granted I’m not equating the two calibers. Not hardly (I just spent serious coin building my own AR10). But the effects I’m seeing from the 70gr GMX are slightly better than with the 55gr Superformance GMX and the 62gr TBBC (neither of which would I hesitate to use for hunting or SD/HD). The farm I used to hunt at mistook my hogs for hogs my buddy shot with his Romanian AKM clone using 7.62x39 Wolf soft point and Hornady soft point on more than one occasion while they got started dressing the carcasses from the truck beds.
The guides who occasionally came out to hunt/spot with me commented that, when fired from my 11.5" suppressed SBR, the 70gr GMX created an audible “thump”/thwack that made them think it was a 7.62 AK round or a 6.8. Purely anecdotal. But they are all seasoned guides and not prone to praise. More like merciless mockery on a constant basis.
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I vaguely remember. Please link. [emoji106]
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Definitely yes to bullet shape but no to velocity.Thats one thing I see written over and over in these papers about velocity and energy not being a wounding factor in and of themselves. I believe Fackler et al did tests where they shot steel BBs at ~4000 fps into pigs and gel and it did not significantly increase wound severity. My understanding is that velocity and kinetic energy only matter in the sense that they provide the bullet with the ability to do work ie. fragment, expand, penetrate. How that bullet uses that energy depends on the design, construction and shape of the bullet. A good bullet design will harness that energy to properly expand while still penetrate deeply enough. Poor bullet designs waste that energy by simply passing through the target. The 1800+fps, I believe has to do with the threshold to produce a significant temporary cavity ie handgun bullets move too slow to produce a TC and as I mention before, I have become increasingly underwhelmed by TC as a wounding mechanism.
One thing I hear from hunters often enough is that copper solids like TSX seem to “hit harder” on meat than other hunting rounds. I suspect that has to do more with how that bullet violently changes its shape as it traverses through tissue early in its upset.
Shoot an animal with a federal DP 1oz 12ga hardened flat nose slug. Shoot it with a 5.56 bonded or monometal. Look at the lungs from both. You’ll change your mind.
Im open to the idea if theres sufficient evidence. If you’re telling me a 70gr GMX is blowing out lungs vs a 12g slug then Id like to understand the mechanism behind that.
The lung lobes hit by a 5.56 expanding round turn out looking more or less like the aftermath of a nosebleed blown into the toilet. Several inches around the bullet path. The lungs i hit with a 12g DP federal flat nose slug looked healthy right up to the cookie cutter 3/4" hole in them. I prefer to damage stuff more. I feel, looking at tissues hit with both low and high velocity bullets with flattish meplats, that velocities in the 2000s are far superior.
But seriously…go do it yourself! Nothing beats doing. Internet forums and he said she said pale in comparison to holding that tissue yourself…and the venison YOU get to eat 
My experiences mirror yours.
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Gold Dot 64gn has been discontinued and is no longer being produced. 62gn replaced it. For everyone’s info.
This is probably a dumb question so please excuse it, but are you saying an expanding 5.56 round does more damage then a 12ga?
When compared to the 1oz Federal LE DP slug, absolutely. It turns lungs to soup and ruptures ventricles. The 12ga slug cookie-cuttered through, damaging only an area 3/4" across. Had I used an expanding or fragmenting type slug, my opinion may well differ. When I field dress a deer I’ve shot with 5.56, I fish a soupy mess out of the chest. When I field dress one I’ve shot with the slug mentioned above, I remove in-tact organs with a hole through them.
Im not sure what useful information this type of test can provide other than demonstrating these bullets can penetrate thin plastic and expand in water. Certainly Ballistic gelatin, ClearBallistics Gel simulant, and properly prepared wetpack in that order serve as a more appropriate and accurate test medium.
I’ve ‘been present’ with that exact slug was used on an adult male. Your description comparing the two (5.56/12g) is accurate.
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See the 2nd and 3rd sentences in the first post. And save your typing.
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I have and your test isn’t accurate for comparative purposes because it has no measurable correlation with body tissue. From your tests can you tell us which bullets meet or exceed FBI penetration requirements? If so by how much. Is it possible that the bullets that you feel excelled in your tests actually exhibited over penetration? Really I am surprised a water jug test is even permitted here.
You’ve created a straw man.
The data I have provided is valid for internal comparison between other water tests and amongst the six rounds I have used.
I have seen fully half of these rounds used on real people. I have seen all of them tested into calibrated ballistic gelatin. I have also used all of them (except for the 55gr GDSP) to take game that I have field dressed.
Next, we ALREADY KNOW how the rounds perform in the FBI battery of tests. And it happens to correlate more strongly to these simple field activities (in terms of expansion and percentage of medium traversed) than your condescending comments would lead a casual reader to believe. All of that data has been public domain for years, and I embrace ALL OF IT. Also consider that building a correlated body of data can assist other shooters in making preliminary field evaluations of ammo selections prior to their participating in structured, formal terminal ballistics testing (which should not be forgone, nor have I tendered this argument to any degree).
You’re clearly untroubled by what you haven’t read in my posts, and that’s fine. However, don’t expect to set up a straw man in this thread and then attempt to sully me over it. That’s not going to happen.
I’ll end with a few reposts of quotes from this forum from 2011:
"When a bullet is penetrating any material (tissue, water, air, wood, etc.), the total force the bullet exerts on the material is the same as the total force the material exerts on the bullet (this is Newton’s Third Law of Motion). These forces may be represented as a combination of shear forces and inertial forces (don’t be concerned if these words sound too technical – the concepts are easy). Shear force may be thought of as the force that resists deformation; if you push on a wall you are creating shear forces in the wall material that resist your push. If you push your hand down very slowly on a water surface, you feel no resisting force; this is true because a liquid cannot support a shear force….
"You can fan your hand back and forth in air quite rapidly because there seems to be no resistance, but a similar fanning motion cannot be done nearly as rapidly underwater because moving the water can take all the strength you can muster. The forces that resist the movement of your hand in water are inertial forces….
"A bullet penetrating a soft solid (tissue or a tissue simulant like gelatin) meets resistance that is a combination of shear forces and inertial forces….
"…Anyone who has worked with gelatin knows that a finger can be pushed into gelatin with a force of only a few pounds; this force is similar to the resistance to a finger poked into the stomach, but the tissue does not fracture as easily as gelatin does. A finger poked into water does not meet this kind of resistance, which is due to shear forces. Penetration of a 9mm bullet at 1000 ft/sec is resisted by an inertial force of about 800 pounds; it is obvious that the presence or absence of a 3 to 5 pound shear force makes no practical difference in the penetration at this velocity. This also explains why the fact that gelatin fractures more easily than tissue does is not important.
"The extension of these dynamics to soft tissue variation is obvious. Different types of tissue present different resistance to finger probing by a surgeon, but the surgeon is not probing at 1000 ft/sec. Different tissue types do have differences in the amount of shear force they will support, but all of these forces are so small relative to inertial forces that THERE IS NO PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE. The tissue types are closer to one another than they are to water, and bullet expansion in water and tissue are nearly identical at velocities over 600 ft/sec where all bullet expansion takes place (See Bullet Penetration for a detailed explanation of bullet expansion dynamics).
"Since inertial forces depend on accelerating mass, it makes sense that these forces should be lower at lower velocities (because the penetrated material cannot be accelerated to a velocity higher than the bullet). Shear forces have little velocity dependence, and as a result, shear forces are a much larger fraction of the total when bullet velocity is below the cavitation threshold. This low velocity effect is the reason that total bullet penetration depth is much different in water and in tissue or a valid tissue simulant.
“As a result of the penetration dynamics, most soft solids with a density very near soft tissues (i.e., near the density of water) are satisfactory tissue simulants when shear forces are not important. However, total penetration depth depends significantly on dynamics at velocities below 400 ft/sec, so most materials do not properly simulate penetration depth. The total bullet penetration depth in tissue and a valid tissue simulant should be the same; standard practice is to use calibrated gelatin to insure this. In effect, gelatin calibration is done to ensure that the shear forces in the gelatin are the same as in typical soft tissue (as described in Bullet Penetration, the technical parameter used in the dynamic is viscosity).”
–“Wound Ballistics Misconceptions.” (Duncan MacPherson, Wound Ballistics Review, 2(3): 1996; 42-43)
From user “DrJSW” in November 2011:
"…If you review the history of the use of ballistic gelatin, go back to Dr. Fackler’s papers from his days at the Presidio, you’ll see that the purpose of ballistic gelatin testing was not to try to mimic human or animal tissues–which are incredibly variable in homogeneity depending on individual specimen, angle of penetration, and organs/tissues penetrated/perforated–but to furnish a standardized test medium so that any and all ammunition could be compared on the same level playing field. Apples to apples, if you will.
No professional has EVER implied that ballistic gelatin mimics human or animal bodies. Attempting to draw any sorts of valid conclusions from a heterogeneous test medium is a nightmare, because you introduce an uncountable number of uncontrolled variables to your test protocol.
As soon as you add other substances to the test protocol, you change from apples-to-apples comparisons to what might be appropriately considered apples-to-fruitcake. Did your bullet hit a piece of apple, or a piece of candied maraschino cherry? Or did a fragment of brazil nut plug the hollowpoint of your bullet, limiting expansion?
Try not to take these sorts of tests too seriously."
So, NightVisionary, you should know better; you posted in that same thread.
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The bullshit needs to stop- PERIOD. People are providing solid information and data and others want to show up and take a San Francisco styled dump on it.
super interesting. thanks for posting
Yes, thanks for posting.