Hunting with Match Bullets? 6.5 Creedmoor FACEOFF

it is [Music] [Music] should you use match bullets for hunting in this video we're going to shed some light on that subject [Music] gaby here from ultimatereloader.com i'm back with travis fox travis thank you for joining us again hi gavin thanks for having me we are here this is a great milestone to show you for the very first time ballistix gel testing with our edgertronic sc2 plus high speed camera we've had the camera for a couple years and we thought we would use this camera to shed some light on probably one of the most frequently debated topics around hunting that i've seen in this precision rifle class last few years what is that question should you use match bullets for hunting and we're not going to solve that problem in this video but we're going to definitely give you some evidence that's going to help you decide at least for a couple different bullets what you should go with so we thought we would start with an apples to apples comparison as much as we could there's two bullets that are both 6.5 millimeter and they are so similar that it's hard to tell them apart visually in the reloading room that's the 140 grain eldm match bullet and hornady's 143 grain eldx hunting bullet this bullet is awesome i have had several rifles shoot sub half moa with this 143 eldx and i took a black bear down with it a lot of similar stories from other hunters using 65 creedmoor using other cartridges in that class what if we put them head to head with ballistics gel to see how differently they would perform in this context of destroying flesh yeah of taking down an animal we want a shout out to thank you to clear ballistics for supplying this gel for us uh very nice of them to give us these four blocks our results were super fun i was super nervous about this because i wanted i've been wanting to do this test for so long and i wanted it to come out right i didn't want to have any mistakes or anything happen and so we were very very careful on our setup okay so next let's talk about the setup for this testing we wanted to use a rifle cartridge that is near the top of the list in the hunting category that is the 6'5 creedmoor and this rifle back here you've seen on the channel since 2015 i recently did a story basically doing some accurizing on it i got it from about a half moa gun down to about a quarter moa gun this thing shoots really really nice we had a target velocity of about 2 700 feet per second which is kind of a great 140ish green bullet velocity you want to talk a little bit about the loads that you prepared we used 41 grains at h-4350 in both cartridges and both they both were the same and we were within i believe we were within 35 feet per second velocity muzzle velocity on these so it's going to give us very much as you were talking about apples to apples comparison same gun same cartridge same velocity same ballistics gel ballistics gel let's see what they do together and we're able to come with some great results our setup was super important to get everything lined up correctly we discussed the distance that we were going to test at we had a bit of discussion on that i was like oh we need to go further and gavin said no we need to close closer then i realized i want to do this correctly i want to do it right and i want to be successful so we did it at a shorter distance yeah right out in front of here in front of the shop we set up a ballistics testing laboratory you know backwoods style right in the dirt so i wanted to get the bullet to travel straight through the gel we did we did a fair bit of research on youtube ourselves watching other videos kentucky ballistics shout out to him he was shooting through like three or four blocks with his elephant gun some good laughs he was using the same gel wasn't he i believe so yeah clear ballistics a lot of guys are using that we saw some that the the bullets would come out the side yeah i wanted to make sure they traveled straight down so we level everything out we got everything lined up yeah doing line of sight down the block going back to the muzzle area where we're shooting from measuring you know typical ultimate reloader over the top type studies yup yeah we then took a box shot a box make sure that the box travel was to their entry into the box and the exit was level and then there's that offset when you're shooting really close obviously you're going to be low right because if you're bore axis so we got the exact two mils exactly offset so he had to hold up two mils and then you know we set up the edgertronic sc2 plus shooting directly from the side obviously with ballistics gel you're going to want to see the the travel of the bullet then we put another camera behind that to capture the whole event in real time so we had tyler our camera guy was hand holding a camera at the firing line we had the full normal speed view and we had the high speed view now this edgertronic sc2 plus camera is an amazing workhorse it is capable of capturing 720p hd resolution video at [Music] 456 frames per second and through the course of our testing we've tested a lot of different things revolvers rifles ars you know a little bit of everything with it we use an audio trigger so you can actually hit record on there and it'll record for however long it doesn't record it only has a limited buffer but if you use an audio trigger it uses either the hypersonic crack or the muzzle blast or combination thereof to start recording and that recording point is a certain point in time there's a rolling buffer on the camera and you have to figure out how much before that you want to capture and how much after and with different delays and audio effects we've worked it out pretty well and that was proven with the box we saw the splinters of cardboard and it's like here we go here's 600 bucks worth of ballistics gel two bullets to test you know and let's talk a little bit about what we thought was gonna happen well what is it what does everybody say a match bullet's going to do when it impacts a ballistic gel or flesh they think it's going to fragment and come apart and so my thought was oh the hunting bolt's going to do great the match ball is going to hit there and it's going to just slow way down and it's going to lose all of its mass did that happen we're going to have to work our way up to that work our way too so why don't we start with the hunting bullet yes okay those results next so the moment came everything was completely dialed in the ammo was known the rifle was known the gel was perfectly aligned we had our offset because of our close distance my blood pressure was way high [Laughter] a lot of excitement we i armed the audio trigger i came back to the safe zone and travis pulled the trigger boom dude and the results were well we were pretty excited because right away when i kind of ran over and i saw oh the bullet was captured you know we lined up three different bricks because we didn't know how far the bullet was gonna go we had four total to start with hoping to use two per test and so it stopped as you saw in the second block and perfectly centered i mean the shot could not have been placed it was awesome better so let's play back the high speed and we'll kind of just see this is right off the camera playing back 100 percent speed as as it plays at that at that frame rate and you can see man that bullet it just comes to a stop instantly but then the gel is just undulating yeah there's a just so much energy in there it's just thrashing the gel around and you can see the black here in the wound channel yeah and that was fabric from the cheap moving blanket that got ripped yeah it was a brand new moving blanket you put down just laid the block on there and it the violence of the whole thing just yeah it ruptures and breaks apart the blanket sucks it in sucked it into the gel yeah okay so and then when we do the side-by-side comparison of the two we'll show you it at 40 to 50 percent slow down from even what you would what you would see at uh at that playback speed so this is going frame by frame right off the camera you can see right there we have a lot of action in one frame we're already into the second block that's because it's we're going 2700 feet per second you know this is no pistol test here this is some velocity but look at the size of that cavity yeah it is see if it can be shown the flash yeah okay yep there's the flash then the flash we were when we were doing research on this we were looking at these flashes and what this is coming from it's the it's blowing the block up and then when it collapses back down upon itself those gases that are in there it causes them to ignite it's like a diesel engine it's compression compression ignition yeah it's not crazy so so yes the uh the gel continues to flex and just until in the air we were looking at this footage like wow is that block ever going to come back down and the blocks is in this footage the block looks like it's liquid almost but they're they're just these rigid you know fbi blocks that we have yeah but the force is just massive it's just crazy okay so really interesting results for the 143 eldx next let's look at the 140 eldm so we cleaned up the mess from the 143 eldx and got the last two blocks set up now we had a little bit of a debate do we put a third block behind it and potentially spoil what we created during the first test or do we just trust that the bullet will stop in the second gel block and we were like let's go for it let's just create this test it's going to be pristine we don't want to mess up our previous results again i armed the trigger travis was on target boom hold the trigger and wow the violence well we had two we only used two blocks on this yeah so the two blocks take all the energy and the the first test we did had three blocks so that really kind of stabilized it right the two blocks were there you'll see what happened here in the video yeah so all right we go and ka boom you it's a little hard to see in in super slow res but what you see in that full speed the normal speed video is the gel block the first one just goes flying off the table bounces in the dirt you know yeah and yeah and here we are a very similar result uh you'll notice the bullet for the 143 eldx went about halfway through the second block we'll have all the numbers at the end of the video here comparing all of the data here travis's theory was confirmed so look it did not penetrate as far your theory we're in like flynn dude we can see i thought the bullet was gonna i really thought it would fragment more but you didn't think it was penetrated as far so i'm giving you some credit for that i did not think it would penetrate as far i did think it would fragment more which didn't do so i guess i was writing some of it wrong on others but very interesting yeah very interesting result okay so why don't we next look at the results side by side simultaneously so here it is time for the big reveal should we do it let's do it all right the physical side by side right here we've got 143 eodex on this side and 140 eldm on this side let's walk through what do we see here okay blocks are set up exactly as we see them here with shooting this direction aiming points for the center of all of the blocks bullet drives down in the middle stops here on the eldx stops here on the ldm there's a five and a half uh five inch difference of penetration more on the x than the m and again we'll go over all of the data at the end of the video comparing all of the different parameters if you look down in the blocks you can see some of the fry you can see the polymer tip in some places in here some frag bullet fragments the black pieces are from the moving blanket that got blown apart and sucked into the block in the violence of that action the channels look pretty similar i mean just looking side by side and then of course we'll we'll extract the bullets here but they also look very similar in terms of how they mushroomed a little bit different debris you know the fragments and whatnot see a few few more pieces of jacket here it looks like we are going to take these out uh extract the main the main portion out and weigh it and see what kind of mass retention we get before we do that why don't we take a look at the high speed footage side by side okay so we've prepared a split screen view those flashes are so cool now this in post-production is slowed down to approximately 40 percent of the original speed so we're using optical flow here within a program called premiere pro to basically slow things down even further the last shots that we showed you were essentially straight off the camera these have been slowed down just a little bit more and you can see look at that frame by frame very very similar characteristics incredibly incredibly similar yeah and then you can see the eldx on the top going further and and slowing down a little a little slower and then same see you're getting the same cavitation yeah size pretty much though yep it's there they're they're running the same velocity they're running right around foot pounds of energy also they're both right at 2200 foot pounds same frame for that secondary explosion thing that's cool yeah that is just crazy the fact that you can see that so well and then we can see the reaction you know it's going to be kind of similar here totally totally interesting stuff okay so why don't we next take a look at the bullets themselves get them out of the ballistics gel and we'll see how they compare in terms of diameter and other characteristics let's do it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well that was quite the bullet extraction i must say very precision very pro yeah i've done that before here yes tools of the trade huh yeah all right so we've got the bullets and you were just noting it's pretty funny if you look at the eldx box and you look at the bullet that we extracted the picture almost looks exactly like the real bullet yeah i would say the hornady engineers and marketing department work together very well it says on their box 2660 which is i think we were running about the same thing running 2680 somewhere in there yeah uh her picture looks exactly like our bullet so awesome perfect okay and what we've got here is the amd fx120i precision lab balance from cambridge environmental they're the people to get these scales from accurate to two hundredths of a grain let's see what kind of weight we've got left okay the ldx starts out with uh 143 143 grains yeah this is what we extract out of the gel there are fragments left but 104.24 104.24 okay interesting and eldm magic moment in here this was a 140 and we're now at 97.92 okay here's what i say we do let's go measure the diameters we're going to input and calculate weight retention and we're going to be back to share all of the scientific figures with you in just a moment so we're back we've run all the numbers in the spreadsheet program here's my favorite part oh yeah i just can't help myself here's what we want to do we want to give you the numbers and then we'll give you kind of our impressions and we have a couple questions to ask you all okay so muzzle velocity 2638 for the 143 eldx 2645 for the 140 eldm that's 99.74 percent that 143 had over the 140. that's less than a percent difference yeah nice pretty even pretty even we got those running the same speed so then we step down to the penetration density and then we get a little gap going here yep how far it went into the ballistic gel total the 143 eld x 24 and a half inches here the m 19 and a half inches so five and a half inch difference which is a 25 further penetration by the x it's so that surprised me a little bit i was just thinking of it very simplistically a match bullet isn't intended to expand so i thought ah it'll just go further i didn't think about the fact that it's inherently going to fall apart more readily which we'll get to when we talk about the jacket thickness yep expanded diameter 0.541 inches average for the 143 eldx we took a small dimension and a large dimension kind of averaged the two and 0.579 inches for the 143 eldm so the 143 eldm had a larger diameter compared to the 143 eldx but only by six seven six five percent so not not much different almost equivalent possibly because of our next piece the jacket thickness we took the bullets put them in the vise cross-sectioned them gavin took his mitutoyo calipers and his practiced eye measured the jacket thickness the x was .037 the m was .023 which is a 60 difference increase on the x that surprised me a little bit i think maybe that's why the you got the bigger spread on the m is because there's not as much jacket there to hold it together maybe it's an interesting set of trade-offs and definitely for us just a total learning experience this is the first time we've gone through this and we're just totally learning every step of the way yeah the starting weight was obviously 143 for the eldx and 140 for the eldm so the 143 is about 2.14 percent more weight final weight was 104.24 for the eldx and 97.92 for the eldm which was six percent more for the eldx so but what you really want to look at here is the percentage weight retention that's really the only number that you can compare apples to apples since the bullets weigh different weights to start with we had 72.9 percent weight retention on the eldx and 69.94 on the eldm which i think is consistent with what you were proposing or hypothesizing at the beginning which is that you'd have a little bit more fragmentation more loss so but we didn't get as much as i thought we would yeah what did you think we were going to get well you know for the first time doing this i'm not really sure what we thought we would get but i i did think i did think it was going to be a much greater difference i feel like i was wrong and that's okay we learned okay so having looked at all the numbers having looked at the ballistics gel having reviewed the high speed footage what is your conclusion at the beginning of this video we asked people should you hunt with a match bullet and what do you think based on these two bullets that's a loaded question nice um it depends it depends on a lot of things for me it would depend on where i'm hunting what i'm hunting the caliber if i was to take the 6'5 caliber myself i would hunt a deer with either one of these a black bear with either one of these yeah if i was to shoot an elk with one of these i think i would rather have the x myself just just my thoughts you guys make your own decisions but my conclusion is a little bit more simple these bullets are both very accurate yes this one is sub half moa for me in the right rifle with the right loads so i'm going with the 143 eldx now if this is the bolt that i had and you asked me hey would it be ethical to hunt with this bullet based on our data for me personally i would say i think so yeah but this is a special case these bullets are almost the same so close tweaked for hunting versus match so one of the things i think will be interesting to do would be to look at hornady's atip for instance and compare that to gmx exactly you know yes two non non-tipped well once aluminum tips they're not polymer tipped right uh they're different designs and one is a hunting bullet and one isn't yeah that's obviously an endless amount of data and an initial amount of testing that we could gather and do yes and other other manufacturers sure um and we're going to get different results i guarantee it definitely okay so we have two questions for you the first question is the question we asked at the beginning of the video would you hunt do you think you should hunt with match bullets tell us if you would and tell us why and second is we got the ballistics gel we got the high-speed camera okay what should we do next what kind of ballistic experiments would you want to see explored pistol rifle doesn't matter let us know what you want to see and what you think would be cool and we'll see if we can pull that off yep thank you travis for putting this together this was a lot of work i am super excited about this capability and the content that we're going to you know produce with these awesome tools thank you very much for watching that concludes this video and that means it's time to wrap it up i hope you liked this video if you did please give it a big thumbs up also make your voice heard if you have something to say please drop a comment make sure you're subscribed with notifications because you're not going to want to miss the awesome content that is coming up and finally flex your reloading pride you could look great in one of these t-shirts we've got multiple designs at the ultimate reloader store i'll see you later cause i'm off to go shooting [Music] you

Channel: gavintoobe

Views: 225,593

Keywords: 300 Win Mag, 308 Winchester, 6.5 Creedmoor, Ballistics Gel, Bear Hunting, Big Game Hunting, Clear Ballistics, Deer Hunting, High Speed Camera, Hornady 6.5mm 140 grain ELD-M, Hornady 6.5mm 143 grain ELD-X, Hornady Match Bullets, Hunting -vs- Match Bullets, Hunting with Match Bullets, Long Range Hunting, Reloading, Reloading Blog, Reloading Press, Reloading Videos, Slow-Mo, Ultimate Reloader

Id: Xm8wAXkVaxU

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021