6.5 Creedmoor Ballistic Gel Tests - 143gr ELD-X, 140 SST, 130 SGK, 129 ABLR

alright folks welcome back it is time for another exciting ballistic-gel test video for 6.5 Creedmoor now the last ballistic gel tests we did with 6.5 Creedmoor was with 135 grain Berger classic hunter now at the time I was a little bit surprised by the results because with 6.5 Creedmoor we found these Berger bullets to just fragment like crazy now the reason I found that surprising was because I'm an idiot I didn't realize that's what Berger bullets are supposed to do so you guys quickly straightened me out and a kind gentleman even sent me a burger manual so that I could read and lower my level of stupidity so I wonder if I want to read a very choice excerpt from the honey bullet line paragraphs here the vld design incorporates a sharp nose that allows the bullet to penetrate two to three inches before it starts to expand after the bullet starts to expand it will shed 40 to 85 percent of its weight as it fragments into the surrounding tissue later they go on to say our bullets don't poke through like a narrow high weight retention deep penetration bullets but instead dump their energy where it is most effective inside the animal now the bullets were going to be testing today work on a completely different philosophy right this is a hotly debated and argued topic and I guess the good news is there are bullets available on both side you can buy burgers and they grenade and they get all explodey and they go nuclear as soon as they enter the animal or you can use a big copper solid and here's a maker rex bullet that I had shot in 300 blackout that just peels open keeps all of its weight and is all about weight retention the bullets were gel testing today are more like weight retention bullets not like burgers exploding bullets from the last video I got to tell you I'm on the weight retention side of the fence I think maybe it comes down to my experience as a bow hunter perhaps I've killed five times more deer with a bow that I have with a gun so poking a hole right through the correct spot is what I'm all about but that's the thing it doesn't just poke a hole through you take a bullet like we're testing today where hopefully that bullets gonna mushroom and it's going to expend some energy inside of that animal you end up with a freaking exit wound like this so I don't want to dwell on this for an hour here but I just wanted to give my thoughts I like bullets that hold together I like being able to get through a shoulder I like being able to hit both lungs so hopefully we'll find a little bit of that sort of performance today the bullets we've been testing here for a little while trying to get some loads together to test here the first bullet and the one I'm probably most excited about here today is the 143 grain Hornady eld X this has been a good shooting bullet here for us so far on the channel got a load worked up 43.1 grains of H 4350 had a 2.8 inch overall length gives us twenty seven hundred and sixty two feet per second not too bad the second bullet is the hundred and forty grain Hornady SST kind of similar to the eld X we've got a load worked up with it using Hodgdon superformance 44-point let's see what actually 44.7 grains of Hostin superformance overall length of two point six nine zero now this one I cheated a little bit back in the video where we shot 140 grain SST and Hoschton superformance we only went up to 40 4.0 grain I think at the time it was the first time I had shot superformance but we ended up we didn't even hit 2600 feet per second with this bullet in this powder so for today's video I you know I cheated up I went up to forty four point seven grains which is what Hornady shows in their manuals being the max which brought the velocity here for this test up to about twenty-six hundred and fifty feet per second still not as fast as it could be you know the hundred and forty-three ldx weren't twenty seven fifty so I gave up some velocity here with the SST just because we don't have a super fast load worked up with this guy yet so it just kind of is what it is it's taking a little bit of a velocity hit today the next bullet is the hundred and thirty grain Sierra game King this has been a very good shooting bullet for us we've got a load worked up with it using forty four point eight grain of Winchester 760 add a 2.7 inch overall length gives us right around 20 850 feet per second so respectable velocity here with 130 green cierra and the last bullet is the Nosler active bond long range 129 grain a cube on long range we're also using winchester 760 with it 44.0 grains at a 2.86 0 inch overall length and a velocity of right up to 2,800 feet per second so a little bit slower than the Sierra but still pretty respectable velocities except for the SST we could be pushing it a little faster but you know we're not so we'll just have to see how it performs now just like in the last video I want to put the ballistic gel down downrange I want to put it out at 200 yards it is super annoying every single shot I gotta walk 200 yards down there reset the gel 200 yards back fire a shot and then repeat that over and over so what I did was I tried to get two of these into the gel and recover the bullets luckily when I was shooting the only one that exited the gel that I wasn't able to capture wasn't one of the eld X bullets and then I went back and shot another one later so all I was running was it was a target camera all this running back I like I don't even know how far so I shot 9 shots into the gel a shot practice target retrieving the I made about 12 trips downrange so that's 400 yards roundtrip so 400 yards times 12 and let's see there's three feet in a yard that's fourteen thousand four hundred feet I walked how many feet are in a mile there are 5,280 feet in a mile I walked 247 miles today so you'll have to forgive me if the freaking camera work kind of sucks so let's just let's run out to the range get all the shooting over with then we'll come back and have a look at the recovered bullets okay going down to shoot the 143 eld x so I could tell from the target that the first shot had winning high and exited the top of the gel it's funny the two red tips of our bullets you can see one of them right there and the other guys up here here's where the the first shot exited the top of the gel right here you can see it lost a little petal there but it looks like it lost its tip it lost a petal and then it exited the gel the second shot lost its tip tore up Jack started shedding a few little pieces of copper here right at the end of the first block lost a piece of copper between the first and the second block and the bullet stopped here about three inches into the second block of gel looking like a perfect little mushroom so here are the pieces I pulled out from our first couple hundred and forty-three grain eld X's that bullet is looking pretty beautiful mushroom there are still a few small pieces of copper left in the gel but I'm not going to dig them out because I'm afraid I'll do more damage to the gel then it's worth just to get out some tiny fragments of copper okay let's leave the gel oriented in the same way that it was and next up will be the hundred and forty Green Hornet ESS T [Music] all right so this bullet held together pretty well we're about three-and-a-half to four inches away from exiting the block on the back it did lose us a few small little pieces of copper on its way through right here about the point it started to mushroom it did lose its plastic tip so it looks like it may have been delayed a little bit when compared to the eld X it's probably pretty much impossible for you to see here but the bullet path that has a bunch of black crap in it is the eld X and then the SST is in front of it so yeah let me go back down I'll shoot another one of these guys so our second Hornady SST penetrated to here little past halfway through the second block and it is just barely inside the edge of the gel boy these guys look to have held together really nicely just what you want to see okay so I flipped the blocks around and it's time to move on to the hundred and thirty grain Sierra game King okay this is pretty wild it doesn't look like we got any penetration into the second block we've got two really large petals here right at the end of the first block it looks like something some large part may have exited at the top we've got a pretty big piece of copper jacket back here so this bullet seems to have just disintegrated into a couple pieces now these panels are very large but let me dig them out and we'll go ahead and shoot another one okay so our biggest chunks of bullet here with the second game king are right here about four inches into the second block we've got another nice chunk down here about an inch into the block and a few very small fragments back here it's actually one decent-sized fragment about halfway but this bullet def only came apart big time okay time for the hundred and twenty nine green a cue bond [Music] Arceus nasser a cuban seems to have held together it's right there so about a block and a half of penetration and i don't see anything at all that it shed of course the blocks a little bit messy at this point i'm having a hard time tell them what's what but we'll get a weight on this guy and that'll probably give us a better indication of what it said oh yeah that is looking pretty so i'm gonna reset we'll go back and shoot one more these guys alright that guy looks like it made it to right here about the same penetration that we got from the last bullet it looks like it did lose one reasonably large sized pellet right about here or looks like a chunk of lead all right so our gels looking pretty rough but the only bullet we didn't recover two really good examples of is the first one that eld x 143 granny LDX it exited the block and we lost one of them so i think we're done with the other bullets i've actually got two of the eld x left i'm gonna shoot them both into the block and see if we can recover them before we quit alright so the gel got a little bit crooked for that second shot and i think i lost that that bullet but the first one at least i think it's the first one went right into about right here four or five inches into the second block and looks like it mainly held together so i'm gonna dig this guy out and we're done let's get back to bench all right let's start with 143 grain eld X that's what it looks like before and these are what it looks like after very impressed with what we see here got my scale here let's see this chunk weighs a hundred and eleven grains and this chunk weighs a hundred and twelve grains so they shed around 30 grains including the little tips that ended up getting recovered out of the gel and a few stray pieces of copper here in there so I couldn't be happier here with what I'm seeing from 143 grainy ldx this is what I like to see so let's move on to the hundred and forty grain SST all right so there's your before picture and here's one of them after there's another one after the plastic tip and a couple another tip and a couple scraps so this is pretty similar performance to the hundred and forty-three grainy ldx kind of looks pretty good to me now if you remember these were lagging behind in velocity you know we can push them another hundred or two feet per second but for doing this at 200 yards even at a lower velocity that's pretty impressive let's see what their weight is that guy is a hundred and sixteen grains that guy is a hundred and seven grains so the the eld X was right around one hundred and ten grains as well one hundred ten hundred twelve so these are all kind of in that same area and reasonably consistent performance if you ask me so let's move on to the Sierra game King all right so the game king definitely came apart on us no doubt about it but the chunks were pretty large like this was one of the chunks from that first that first shot I think it was like this guy and then there was another one that was kind of banana shaped like that yeah it might have been this guy but like that first one there were two big chunks of copper or two big chunks of lead and then a big chunk of copper so it didn't quite disintegrate like we saw in the last video with with the burger but these guys definitely came apart here was the second one looks like the bullet base held together and tore open more big chunks now I think there's also a hundred and forty grain Sierra game King that's a more traditional looking bullet like that this is a you know hollow-point boattail it almost it reminds me of the hundred and thirty-five grain Sierra varmint er that we shoot in 30 caliber they're not really alike that that's a flat base bullet and it like I say it's a varmint bullet but it's got a similarly large hollow point with that cross shape and that guy really comes apart so I wasn't really sure what to expect here but if we looked at the hundred and forty grain Sierra game King which is a you know a more standard soft point bullet I have a feeling it would hold together better and perform more like these others but this guy kind of came apart which I've already mentioned isn't exactly my preference however these were some pretty big chunks man so if I'm going to shoot a bullet that comes apart I'll take big chunks going in several directions over you know the whole thing turned into dust it's probably a really great like coyote bullet or something like that okay and last up is our 129 grain Nosler a cube on long-range now by the time I was shooting these the the gel was pretty torn up I wasn't able to recover any of the tips but if they were red or green or yellow or something else like that other than ray I might have been able to I'm sure they're probably in the gel somewhere like the red Hornady tips I was able to recover but I just couldn't spot them these guys held together very well a lot of these scratches are me digging them out with pliers so that's where if you've noticed that marking on some of the earlier bullets it's me trying to get them out so this one seemed to expand a little more dramatically than the Hornady bullets right a little bit more completely these were going pretty quick but we really only lost one piece and it was it was off of this bullet right here like this one side the part that had curled around that side seemed to seem to come off so let's measure the weight on these guys 91.5 is the light one and 109 point zero tell you what let me measure this one again with the piece of copper that brings it up to write out a hundred so at least the one that completely held together it did hold a little bit more weight than the Hornady bullets which you would expect from a bonded bullet all right this is a more expensive bonded bullet and that's what they're all about the whole bonding thing is all about the leadcore not being able to separate from the copper jacket because they are bonded so really happy to see these nozzles perform so well like this is this is good stuff man so our ziplock bags an acceptable way of keeping record of bullets I think that's the way I'm gonna have to go that seems to work I'm a little bit surprised by that by the game King I'm not really sure what to think about it so I went to the Sierra website to see what they had to say about this bullet and when you go to the specific page on this bullet all it really says is that this is a six point five millimeter version of the very popular 30 caliber 165 grain game king hollow-point boattail game king so if we go to the page for the 165 grain hollow-point boattail game king in 30 caliber that is a slightly harder than it's 165 green Spitzer Motel counterpart and will give superior penetration and good expansion on medium game with excellent accuracy bit of a rabbit hole like every bullet you go to it's it's referencing the performance of another bullet like you like that one by God will make you one just like it so yeah I don't know but it does seem to you know it seems like they're saying that it should have superior penetration and good expansion the expansion was a little bit too good and I really don't think you're going to get superior penetration when your bullet breaks into four or five pieces doesn't mean it's bad I bet it's a deer killing machine it's just it's it's it's interesting to see the different ways these different bullets perform and just here in two videos I mean we've covered the whole spectrum the burgers break into a million pieces the Sierras break into five pieces and then our two hornaday's and the NAS are a cue bond held together pretty well so they've got us all covered right I mean no matter what you prefer there's a bullet out there that should fit you so I think that's pretty much it if you don't like the format of these gel test videos I don't blame you I don't either but we're not gonna be doing a whole bunch of these this is a bit of a novelty we'll do them every once in a while whenever we you know get a batch of bullets we want to test but I don't think they're ever going to be any good I don't have slow-mo cameras I don't have any bright ideas of how to turn this into interesting video format so hopefully the results were worth it though I feel like we learned some good information we didn't really set out to crown a winner or a loser we just want to characterize them but I'm really leaning toward that 143 grain yield DX as being my preferred hunting bullet right now it's shooting well in our gun it's a nice heavy bullet I prefer hunting with heavy bullets it's got a very high ballistic coefficient there's no real downside and then they're reasonably affordable so the honing of de l DX has got a whole lot going for it in my opinion so I think that's where we'll wrap it up if you'd like to help support my channel come to patreon come slash reloading and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 242,714

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Id: d88AEkWNXdk

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018