if a guy was preparing of TEOTWAWKI, what would be the preferred round for urban combat between bonded soft points and the copper solids like 55gr GMX or mk318? not concerned about over penetration.
seems like a horse and a horse between these 2 types of projectiles, right?
thanks in advance.
The potential for Copper fouling prevents me from messing with the Copper solids at all. We shoot ammo across too many barrels to have any of them unhappy with copper.
Can’t you get copper fouling from any copper-jacketed bullet? How does a copper solid make copper fouling worse? I’m just asking in order to learn something.
Regular bullet jackets are made of a gilding metal… Copper with some amount of zinc so the jacket is a little harder than pure copper. So there’s reduced metal fouling.
(Metal heads, forgive me if my explanation wasn’t perfect)
i thought the copper fouling from solids was just mainly the TSX because they use pure copper…?
whereas the GMX was a alloy of mostly copper…?
where does mk318 fall in the copper composition department?
Could be. I thought they were all Pure copper.
i think it was in the GMX thread here that someone talked about the differences with TSX and GMX…it also mentioned that the TSX sheds peddles because the is pure copper is more brittle, where the GMX actually mushrooms.
The TSX line of bullets are 100% copper. The Hornady line of GMX bullets (gilding metal expanding) are 100% gilding metal, which is 95% copper and 5% zinc. I’m no metallurgist, but the 5% zinc adds some hardness to the copper to prevent excessive copper fouling.
Of course. That makes perfect sense, thanks. One wonders why a company wouldn’t use gilding metal in its bullets- cost maybe?
The solid copper would provide a lower threshold for expansion would be my guess.
I’ve been to the Barnes factory in Utah. That was back around 2000 and they were using giant stamping machines that took several steps to pound slugs cut from a roll of copper wire into bullet shaped objects. Barnes was one of if not first to successfully market mono metal bullets and their technique might not work on a harder alloy. I seem to remember that they were lathe turning .50 BMG solids from some brass / gilding metal.
In any event Barnes bullets can be a PITA to get to shoot well unless the barrel is cleaned of gilding metal fouling and then devoted to Barnes bullets. And for me the kiss of death for stocking a large quantity would be cost, they ain’t cheap.
Hornady does with their GMX. They are less expensive than Barnes TSX. As Onyx pointed out I believe the Barnes have a bit lower of a threshold but I don’t know for certain.
I’m almost certain a pure copper bullet would be softer and expand at lower velocities.
Material in only one of many enginering facets that would effect expansion. How the metal is formed/heat treated and bullet design will also play large factors. The same metal can have vastly different heat treats and this vastly different Rockwell hardness measures. (Yeah, I like knives also! 
M193 & THOUSANDS of hours of training.
if all i had was 20" barrels…i would agree.
out of the shorties, i was thinking copper solids.
I have been converted to Mk262 clones. I cannot afford to practice with it a lot, but I keep about 1k of it around. I’ve been forced to practice with m855 and now m193. To me shooting well is more important than the type of ammo you use. Doing both would be optimal of course.
I stock fusion. Good performing bonded sp, and not too expensive.
Bonded sp generally perform better than monometals through barriers with a few exceptions.
There is a very select few amount of individuals in the world that can claim thousands of hours pulling a trigger on anything. For the original question, I have MK318 and Nosler BSB in my mags. The all copper bullets are cost prohibitive for my purposes.