“Read it on the Internet, so what could go wrong”-- was message buddy sent with a link to vid. At first I thought I was going to see YouTube at its finest. http://youtu.be/AZAyhv0xqUI
Surprisingly showed some interesting results. Thought I’d let the experts (or the far more experienced than me) weigh in.
Useful in a pinch as improvised SP/hollow point round? SHTF/zombies/Hillary winning in '16, circumstances where more suitable bullets are not available of course. Thought about putting in disaster & prep forum, but thought I’d get better results in here. Mods feel free to move.
This is often done in pistol rounds with Hollow Base Wadcutters
Yep. Makes 38 spl, for example, less useless due to internal case volume that was originally geared to black powder charges. Other than that, I’ve not heard of any other productive examples.
i wanted to see a 25 yd group 
On a worn milsurp rifles with throat erosion many shooters seat a bullet backwards and jam the cartridge into the throat/rifling to hold the case against the bolt face to fire form the case without stretching. (rifles with excess headspace)
On my British .303 Enfield rifles I use fat pistol bullets to fire form my cases.
The only down side that can happen by shooting bullets backwards is the bullet will not seal the pore properly and high pressure/high temp gasses will flow around the bullet and cause more bore wear.
Loading bullets backwards has been done for many years by some fairly knowledgeable shooters and handloaders. One of them being none other than the late great Elmer Keith. It has also been done with some very large caliber rifles and used with great success on very large African game animals (elephant, water buffalo, rhinos).
IIRC the theory behind the technique is that the base of the bullet, being the bore diameter, once turned around becomes a bullet with an enormous meplat. Testing (not by me) has indicated that at short to very moderate range, these bullets penetrate much further than when loaded in the direction for which they were designed. Tests have also demonstrated that at least out to 100 yards there is no loss of accuracy.
What gets me about things like this is,who did it first and wtf was he thinking?
Hmm lets put it in backward and see what happens…lol
IIRC, Keith’s reason was he was using pulled .45 ball and loaded it backwards to find out if it would perform like a SWC in .45 Colt. I don’t believe he was, nor would I ever try, loading ball ammo backwards in a semi-auto. He found that it performed fairly well and did expand whereas .45 ball ammo normally does not expand at all.
As to WTF was he thinking? I’d hazard a guess that he was just curious and wanted to test the theory. Remember that Keith was the man who pushed the development of magnum handgun cartridges (.357, .41 and .44).
Kinda like olives, on the tree they are hard as rocks,but somebody soaked them for a month in brine water then ate one, bam you now have a tasty treat. But who would have thought that before then.
I guess if no one tryed new things there wouldnt be much of anything.
Greetings,
In his book "Sniping in the Great War" Martin Pegler brings up the German practice of loading the bullets backwards, supposedly as a better way to penetrate the steel loopholes of the British. He even has an original cartridge with the reversed bullet he found on the Somme battlefield (p-63, 2008 edition).
I recall reading another book called "Sniping in France" by an English officer (Major Hesketh-Prichard) who set up some of the British sniping schools in WW-1. He also mentioned reversed bullets used by the Germans.
Whether it had the desired effect or not I am not sure.
best wishes- oldandslow