45 Y/O S&W Police Slugs - Anti-materiel Sabot Rounds - Tested

today on taofledermaus we're going to take a look at these very rare 1970s era smith and wesson police lugs these rounds were an attempt to convert a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun into an anti-materiel rifle at least that's how they were marketed the smith and wesson police lugs were introduced in 1973. that same year the actual inventors of this projectile ward kelly and william mcalvin received a patent for their design that they came up with nearly 10 years earlier unfortunately it appears it was too late to prevent smith and wesson from ripping off their design basically and producing their own exact copy warden mcgalvin did go on to sell their product and had a company called ballistic research industries a small ammo company in california and they did have a law enforcement only version of their slugs these used something called police alloy which was just a harder tougher version of their projectile they sold their product already loaded in shelves but they also sold them as a loading component eventually ballistic research industries was bought out by winchester and the legacy of ballistic research industries lives on in the bri sabo slug now let's take a closer look at the smith and wesson police slugs i originally guesstimated this box came from the 1980s but based on the coloring of the box the artwork and all that some folks over on the buck and slugs reloader group on facebook convinced me that this box may very well come from the mid-1970s the 80s version had a completely different color scheme now if that's all true this box of ammo is nearly 45 years old but it's in remarkably good condition we know that bpi received their patent in 1973 and it appears that smith and wesson filed for a patent themselves when our box of ammo was produced the patent was still pending in other words their patent hadn't been approved yet unfortunately the box gives us no idea what velocities these were loaded at but it does give us some expectations of what we might see such as rifle accuracy the ability to penetrate automobile engine blocks bodies and heavy barricades and yes you're probably thinking that can all be done just with a rifle right but at this time rifles were pretty much relegated to swat teams and the regular cop would carry a 38 special and a 12 gauge pump action riot gun in their car now it may seem completely logical to just simply introduce a different type of shell with a completely different purpose to those existing shotguns but in a real world situation where seconds matter that would require the officer to change out ammo switching from one type of ammo to the other and having the possibility of mixing it up the shelves will be tested today are in very good condition and have a distinctive blue color and a nickel plated base now let's pop the hood and see what 45 years of sitting on a shelf looks like the first thing we see is the sabo halves and the slug inside one thing i thought was odd was the two halves of the sabo art held together with clear tape the tape itself seemed to be as fresh as it was when it was applied wasn't yellowed it wasn't gooey or anything like that and inside the sabos we finally see the projectile we don't see any oxidation it looks like it was made last year in fact so far these look like they were properly stored for all these decades this lug weighs in at 28.9 grams or just over one ounce the shape is a wasp wasted diablo shape only elongated this means the slug will fly with stability without spin now these are supposed to be made out of an extra hard alloy and i was able to scratch away it a little bit with a knife so it wasn't as hard as i expected it to be the slugs are hollow base but are filled with some kind of a resin and the purpose of that is to prevent the wad from being shoved into the cavity under the slug and sabo unit we do have this hard fiber wad and under that we have an alkane air wedge gas seal that's some old school stuff there and then finally we have the powder charge containing 32 grains of an unknown powder now this is one component we really can't judge by its looks will 45 years make it more potent less potent or just perform the same as it was when it was fresh all these components were loaded back into a new hole with a new primer i was able to show you the internal components but we'll also be able to see how primers hold up after 45 years too since we're dealing with a lot of unknowns here safety is very important the critical breach area of the shotgun will be covered with a kevlar body armor panel to act as an explosive blanket all right well first round we're going to use our 30 pound lead plate that's kind of our standard for comparison um aimpoint's going to be here about how thick is that thing ancient well we can get an exact here oh look at that he's very much my edc tape measure let's see inch and a half inch and a half thick of lead but it weighs about 30 pounds right yeah right at 30 pounds okay it takes a lot to penetrate that with a 12 gauge slug and this is definitely the right test medium based on all our other tests and everything to see what these things will do i'm pretty all right here we go nice sharp recoil knock the plate over what happened to the plate oh well wow that's interesting very very close not bad for just a bead site trying to peer over some kevlar and all that too i don't know how you were able to aim that thing with the kevlar over the top oh look at look at the slug it it it is a hardened metal you know some kind of hard police alloy but it it appeared kind of soft in there so did it bulge the back or anything or very very slight bulge nothing to write home about it looks like it went in about an inch and a quarter inch both danny and i expected this slug to easily penetrate the lead plate so what went wrong well we recorded a velocity of only 1017 feet per second we were expecting velocities at least 1300 or more feet per second we got a lot of junk flying through the air we got a gas seal wad and the sabo's besides this slug but as you can see the slug is flying straight as an arrow the accuracy was pretty decent we just lacked that velocity to punch to that plate it would appear based off this first test that 45 year old powder may lose potency over time it was starting to get a little windy out so unfortunately i've got a talk over danny here from what i read in old magazine articles like on field and stream from when this slug was first introduced it was supposed to be able to pierce one quarter inch of mild steel at 100 yards and that's what we have here one quarter inch thick mild seal rectangular tubing did not pass through if that chronograph reading is right these things are only going like a thousand feet per second there's no data on the box telling us what it's supposed to be uh point aim was here this one hit a little high left yeah we know your aim is a lot better than that yeah i think it was this galvanized coating the galvanized coating is what but yeah this flew back here and remnants of the slug look at that right here on the table that's right where they landed get that out of there it's like a big washer that's very interesting in test number two we have an even lower velocity now even at this velocity our extra hard alloy slug flattens out like a pancake now one thing to think about is over distance a slug like this loses a lot of velocity especially at 100 yards so it's entirely possible if the slug was factory fresh and at full velocity it would have dropped down to this velocity at 100 yards and not be able to penetrate that quarter-inch mild steel all right genuine military not uh chineseium got hit once here in the front just kind of pushed it in a bit we're going to go for the side view here and uh let's just say advanced combat helmet specialty defense system military contract 981 in this test we see something that sometimes happens to rounds like this it gets knocked out of orientation maybe the bad sabo release and the slug ended up just flying sideways now it's still traveling at the same velocity so it has the same energy on impact the forces just spread out over a much wider area you're just going to have a lot less penetration and of course the slug didn't even come close to penetrating this helmet it caved it in pretty well though danny was able to find the remains of the projectile and can verify that it hit sideways i think people are going to want to see us redo that one so instead of shooting the other cool target maybe re-shoot it again with a brand new helmet by atomic defense yeah rotate that around so people can see it he's quite the trooper there yeah so we're gonna shoot at the back of the helmet nice big area back there it doesn't have a bunch of plastic stuff all around it try to hit that x and i think it'll stop it but hopefully this one will function correctly now this one we could immediately see that the projectile was flying straight and true when it impacted this helmet and just like the military issue helmet this one caved in also whether or not you'd be able to survive an impact like that well we'll leave that up to your imagination in this never seen before high-speed footage we could see how brutal that impact is just the inertia from the impact was enough to rip the velcro patch off and send it flying and it also whipped that little piece of black plastic out of its slot now even though we weren't able to achieve those factory fresh velocities you can probably imagine how effective these things were when they were traveling at the right velocity everybody wants us to shoot an engine but can't get anybody to drive the car out here volunteers next best thing we got an old kohler cast iron block and uh other than that i don't know anything about it i don't know what the horsepower is it's kind of irrelevant but nice thick cast iron just like a lot of engines some engines are aluminum i realize that but oh look at that but nobody has a problem yep it's gonna have a bigger problem now well maybe we can see what's going on inside when we get done here okay we have drained the oil out so we don't spill oil all over the place and maybe that's a concern about shooting an engine is that car is going to keep driving potentially for miles leaving a trail of you know hazmat behind it you know that they don't want to be accountable for you know no i drained the oil out of this personally so okay got a little residual in it but that's it okay let's we got rags put a mark on there where where you want to hit it we're going to try for right here there you go make a bigger circle because you have a better chance of hitting it yeah might might make it huh yeah [Applause] i remind you that this is the slug that i showed at the very beginning of the video the one i scratched on and reloaded into a new shell and this one performed about the same velocity as all the others in fact it was the second fastest slug in the test it certainly appears that this particular powder degraded over the years and became less potent that doesn't rule out the possibility that other types of powder may become more potent over time though that was our last one and we'll go through an engine block i guess depending on what part of the engine block or engine component that's about almost quarter inch there maybe 3 16. okay it's a little thicker than i thought it'd be a little bit to the left i touched this thing and something went clunk inside so i'm assuming that was a slug but locked up oh yeah it it actually it moved a little bit before and now it hardly moves so yeah i would go about a half a rotation before okay but wow definitely disable a a caller maybe a motorcycle engine or something somebody's attacking you with their lawnmower you'd be able to stop them oh my gosh well we got consistent chronograph readings of around a thousand feet per second it was like 980 to 000 something not the very i thought i was expecting higher velocity and at higher velocities things would have punched through everything that's what i was expecting yeah whether i don't know what the factory velocity is supposed to be the fresh you know velocity but that is much lower than i really expected and i think most people agree if if that thing was traveling at 1200 feet per second or it would have gone through the quarter inch plate it would have gone through the lead plate anyway it's still an interesting test i mean these things are pretty darn rare there's not a lot of example of these out there and we wanted to share it with you guys instead of just taking the box put on a shelf and you know gathered dust and we never learn anything from them yeah it's more fun this way yeah we and whoever had ballistic products threw that in the box i thank you you know i'm glad we were able to share that with everybody no pass-through just for those who are gonna ask yeah yeah well there you go squirt a little oil out of this gasket there huh i would too if somebody shot me with that yeah all right well that concludes the test i hope you guys enjoyed it get well scott at ballistic mission or kentucky there's too many ballistic things going on here yeah we're praying for you scott yep get well

Channel: TAOFLEDERMAUS

Views: 330,311

Keywords: exotic 12ga rounds, anti material, weird inventions, kentucky ballistics, slow motion camera, taufledermause, smarter everyday

Id: IC6lfiqhW3Y

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021