Copper Versus Lead Core Bullets — How They Work

hi there ron spomer here i'd like to talk today about all copper monolithic bullets they're becoming much more common in the marketplace and in some jurisdictions they're mandatory now i've had the good fortune as an outdoor writer for 40 years to hunt around the world and take a lot of different animals with a lot of different rifles cartridges and bullets and i think some of my experiences might shed some light onto the performance of these all copper bullets let's go down into my shop and check them out [Music] now before we go any deeper into this we should probably call for a definition of terms what's a bullet seems obvious but a lot of people call this a bullet but it really isn't this is a cartridge it consists of a primer that's stuck in the back of a brass case filled with powder and then that is capped with the bullet of course the primer ignites the powder the gases expand and drive the bullet out of the barrel the bullet is what does all the work this is why we need to pay a lot of attention to our bullets we get all wrapped up in our fancy rifles and which cartridge is better than the other all those are just launch pads for the bullet it's the bullet that kills the animal that does all the work it's the most important component that we're working with so it's important to understand it now bullets come in all sorts of sizes obviously caliber that's the diameter it has to fit your bore properly then you've got different lengths short bullet a long bullet well the shorter ones are obviously going to weigh a little bit less the longer ones are going to weigh a little bit more but that also depends on the materials within the specific gravity copper is a little bit lighter than lid so you're going to have a longer bullet of the same weight if it's in copper versus lead core so you've got round nose bullets and some exposed points on a spire point that has some lid sticking out of the tip you've got flat nosed bullets then you've got the new modern sleek very low drag bullets have an extremely sharp nose and long boat tail for efficiency that's aerodynamic efficiency but it could be made out of any number of materials hollow point bullets the plastic tip bullets that a lot of people call ballistic tips that's actually a brand name from nosler you can have a polymer tip like this on any brand of bullet doesn't make it a ballistic tip and that is to improve its efficiency get rid of the exposed lead nose so you don't get battering within the magazine denting of that lead nose so a lot of options to pick from now here's a what looks like a ballistic kit bullet but it's really just a polymer tip on a barnes ttsx bullet triple shock that is an all copper bullet except for the plastic tip round noses and again you get into your slugs for shotgunning and again you can have a lead filled bullet with a polymer tip or you can have an all copper bullet with a hollow nose in the front there's your hollow so that's an all copper non-leaded bullet and then here's nothing but a lead bullet a good old-fashioned foster slug so you've got a lot of options to choose from now the second thing we want to consider is how this bullet actually kills an animal it seems like an obvious question but i think most of us assume that a bullet just smacks that animal so hard that it kills it so we are always thinking about a faster bigger heavier bullet that really knocks them down well that's not necessarily the way bullets terminate the life force of an animal strike an animal in the central nervous system say from the top of the withers through the spine forward to the brain and it's lights out immediately shoot him through the heart though and don't expect him to die immediately for several seconds without his heart functioning until the blood pressure drops he gets dizzy and falls over that's what you often see with a heart shot animal sometimes though those chest shots do end up in an animal falling right there what's going on shock effect it's like dropping a boulder into a lake and you see the energy waves moving out they can move through an animal's body clear to the brain and disrupt it that way but you can't depend on it so what do you want in a bullet you want reliable expansion because that increases tissue destruction but you need a good size chain behind that to continue moving it forward keep your momentum going this is what we're looking for in our bullets we can get those in lead-based bullets but also in copper-based bullets during 50 years of hunting i've made it a habit to autopsy my animals to see what sort of damage the bullets did i also try to recover those bullets because the result i've got bags and bags of recovered bullets and notes on what happened this has given me some insights into our bullet types today and how they perform so let's examine our different types of common bullets and just see what makes them kick a basic cup and core bullet is nothing but a jacket of gilding metal or copper in various thicknesses into which lead is inserted it can be poured in or it can be stuck in as a cable and then the bullet is squeezed into the shape of the bullet you could have a plastic tip on it you could have exposed lead tip or the lead could be flush with the top hollow nose a lot of options but they all have one thing in common the lead is not attached to the jacket other than a mechanical squeeze so what do these cupping core bullets look like after impact let's check this is what you can expect from cupping core bullets sometimes you get a perfect mushroom like this with a good shank behind it but notice the smooth surface these things tend to ball up and act about like a lead ball would have in the old days with the muzzleloader sometimes you just get a bunch of crumbled up mess various stages of rip and tear but what you don't want usually is this breaking up the cup comes apart and the lead in the middle separated from it that reduces your penetration in many cases the lead core can fragment into tiny pieces that are distributed surprisingly far from the main wound channel these are rarely recovered but when a lead bullet loses half or more of its original mass and it doesn't exit the animal well that lead has to have gone somewhere now externally the partition style bullets don't look a lot different than common cores it's the inside that matters and they have a transverse wall of jacket material through the center that separates some lead in the shank so even if your lead in the nose is lost it continues driving forward for deeper penetration that's the value of the partition style bullets nozzle partition swift a-frame are a couple of examples now here are what our partition bullets look like after impact terminal performance is usually pretty good the nozzle partition without the bonding of the lead nose you end up with losing all the nose lead but you keep a shank and that drives forward a-frames and various impact speeds classic performance this one obviously hits a major bone and got quite mangled but the important thing to remember with all of those partition bullets is you're going to retain some weight in the shank because it's locked in and that helps with your penetration never judge a book by its cover these are bonded bullets they can have a polymer tip they don't have to they could be hollow flat the critical part about a bonded bullet is that internally the lead is molecularly bonded to the jacket material essentially it's welded so the two can't come apart you still lose some lead to friction but generally these will retain a lot of their weight and they will stay in one piece which helps of course with deeper penetration okay how do bonded bullets perform after impacting an animal well let's look at some of those bonded bullets generally keep much of their weight because of course the two parts are bonded you can have some pretty violent strikes like this one in major bones and they'll stay together now the lead can erode away from the surface but it's going to stick in one piece and that gives you deep penetration even with a little 22 caliber bullet like this 2 2 4 and that's just a classic mushrooming that you'll see with your bonded bullets monolithic bullets can come in many shapes and sizes they can have a polymer tip or just a hollow plain tip but they've all got that hollow in the nose and that's what allows them to expand tissue gets in there it opens under hydraulic pressure because there's no lead in the bullet there are no pieces to come apart they maintain almost all of their weight and that gives them deep deep penetration and you end up with a bullet that generally looks like that good expansion ragged edges on the pedals a long shank to continue driving forward that's your monolithic bullet at work we have several brands here they all work about the same classic expansion across the front ragged edges on some of the pedals sometimes the pedals break off other times they don't depending on the velocity get deeper or shallower expansion of the nose sometimes you end up with just a slug with most of the petals broken off but still you're penetrating deep through the animal and doing damage as you go even if you lose a lot of those petals bullets that expand excessively or break up create wide but shallow wound channels as shown in this wax tube we shot into those that expand less but retain more mass create longer but narrower wound channels and that's generally what these monolithic bullets do so have you heard that these monolithic bullets can be inaccurate raise pressures and follow barrels well i certainly have and i've experienced all of it but these days they've got it pretty well solved here's what's going on an old copper bullet or a gilding metal bullet that's solid is harder than a lead core bullet it can't squeeze down or object to fit the barrel precisely so it's going to be a little less accurate if it's not perfectly matched up to your barrel and because that bullet is longer for a given weight than a lead core bullet it's going to have more surface area to touch the barrel that increases following that increases pressures now they've solved most of that with these relief grooves on their bullets it reduces the surface area reduces the friction reduces the fouling bingo and the accuracy actually increases i've got great accuracy with these there's at least one bullet on the market that has a raised ring around its center that's its driving band the rest of the bullet is just at bore size so it's going to touch the lands the top of the rifling but not get down into the groups solves the problem just in a slightly different way so there are a few bullets on the market that are still unbanded but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not going to be accurate in your rifle you just have to try them out because some rifles love them the other issue is that they've got some of those bullets that are not pure copper they've got five to ten percent zinc in them so that makes them gilding metal the same material that's used on the jacket of leadcore bullets try them i think you're going to find some that are accurate and don't necessarily follow your barrel or razor pressures what about this idea that the bullet should stay in the animal and dump all of its energy rather than passing through and wasting energy on the hillside beyond i don't really subscribe to that because i've seen it happen every which way and animals that i've taken when the bullets stayed inside didn't necessarily fall down any faster than the ones when it shot through so you are definitely going to get these copper bullets to pass through the animal now we once did a little bit of a study with some ballistic gelatin about 24 inches of it shot 180 grain bars tsx bullet through it clocked the speed on the back side and factored in the remaining energy when those bullets hit the front they were carrying about 3 000 foot pounds of energy when they exited they were carrying 258 so i think that's more than enough energy dumped in the animal to do the damage but do expect those bullets to move all the way through i like the fact that they leave a pretty good side hole for blood training because as i've said even the times i've shot animals in which the bullets stayed inside they didn't necessarily die right there heart shots lung shots even broke some shoulders and hit the lungs in the heart and that animal still ran a significant distance and it was difficult to locate so i always appreciate good blood trail that's what i get with these copper bullets now to address twist rates and stability every rifle barrel has a certain rate of twist one complete turn in 8 inches 10 inches 14 inches those are standardized for each cartridge so that the manufacturers of the ammunition know how long to make the bullet it's the length of the bullet not the weight that determines stability and this is why you can't usually find all copper bullets that weigh as much as the top end heaviest lead-based bullets in a given caliber 270 winchester 150 grain bullet in lead you go to a copper bullet and probably the heaviest you're going to find is 130 grains make it 150 it gets too long it won't stabilize in 270 barrels if you're a hand loader just look on the box it'll say there for a one in nine inch twist only you know what to do factory ammunition they're loading it to fit the standard twist strings no need to worry about that accuracy with copper bullets is just fine hey if you have to hunt with the slug shotgun you're in luck there's nothing to touch the bore the copper is inside of the plastic sabot so you don't have any of the falling problems and the raised pressure issues you could really put a punch on a deer with one of these big bullets now if you thought the old lead slug the foster type mushroomed really well and hit hard well you try these all copper jobs they can either have a hollow in the nose or they can cap it with a little plastic tip but it's still going to drive in there and peel that open into a big star that's got rough ragged edges and it's really wide punch is a really big hole there's a lot of energy in that 12 gauge slot and they work really well in 20 gauges too so you've got a lot of options without the problems you get with a rifle slug gun hunters haven't made when it comes to monolithic bullets now let's talk trajectory can a copper-based bullet keep up with a lead-based bullet for downrange performance and we're talking flat trajectory and wind deflection well they can as long as your muscle velocity is the same and the ballistics coefficient rating of the bullet are the same you're going to have the exact same trajectories now it's easier to get a higher ballistics coefficient in a lead-based bullet because part of bc is the weight or the mass the density of the bullet but if you keep the form factor really good on those copper bullets you can come pretty close to matching and you can often drive the lighter weight copper bullets fast enough to even things out not a big problem unless you're an extreme range shooter just remember go for the highest ballistics coefficient in your bullet and you will get the least amount of wind drift and the flattest trajectory whether it's lead-based or copper based well i have tested worked with and hunted with these monolithic copper bullets now ever since they came out in the late 80s early 90s and i find them to be pretty reliable early on i had a few oopses with them but they seem to have corrected all those problems and they really work well in reliably now i find that they're about like the performance of a good controlled expansion lead-based building i expect about one and a half to two times original diameter expansion at the nose a good long shank behind it to continue driving forward they're going to retain 90 weight in to 100 so i expect them to shoot broadside through most animals leave a good sized hole in the blood trail on the outside if i need to shoot from a weird angle they're going to reach the vitals they will handle big bone and massive muscles really well and keep penetrating you can shoot them in handguns slug guns muzzle loaders rifles hey there they're the same bullet ballistics are the same physics or physics this is the way this stuff works there's nothing magical about it it's just a glorified rock we're throwing at these animals and these copper bullets make for a pretty darn effective rock hey if you have more questions you want to search more about ballistics and shooting visit me at ronzbomer outdoors.com and always hunt honest and shoot straight [Music] you

Channel: Ron Spomer Outdoors

Views: 36,966

Rating: 4.930686 out of 5

Keywords: outdoors, ron spomer outdoors, ron spomer, hunting, firearms, guns, shooting sports, rifles, big game hunting, hunting gear, hunting gear review, rifle review, copper ammo, copper bullets vs lead, copper bullets for hunting, copper bullets, ballistics, barnes bullets, barnes ttsx, barnes tsx, Swift A-Frame, Nosler Partition, Ballistic tip, Federal ammo, bonded bullets, bullet comparison, lead bullets, cup and core bullets, shotgun slugs, muzzleloader bullets

Id: We6OM03wSEI

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020