Making a Bullet Trap to Test Terminal Performance

stovepipe

Shades of Finn Aagaard! (RIP)

Good stuff. Great pics.

VLD pic is bazar.

PaulS

I used a "Fackler Box" to test bullet penetration and expansion for years.
The advantage of the box is that it uses gallon ziplock bags filled with (salt) water. That way the results don't depend on the composition of the paper and its moisture content.

Anyone can ask me for the plans - the box is easy to build and repair.

slimjim

PaulS, you have an impressive trap but there is more time and effort needed to make and set-up than I have.

slimjim · Last edited by slimjim on Thu Dec 29, 2011 9:18 pm; edited 1 time in total

I had the opportunity to head to the range today so I took the bullet trap with me to do some more testing. I was out of phone books but had plenty of community news letters so tried them. They did the job well. Here are the results with more surprises. The box I had was wide so I set two gallon jugs side-by-side in front of it. This was a repeat of the test to see if the 150gr VLD bullet would yaw 90-degrees again and if the 130 GMX would perform the same. I fired the 150gr VLD first at the right-hand side. Based on the lack of "action" with the water jug last time, I figured the jug beside it would remain in position. That is exactly what happened. The jug did not move. It just sat there and leaked water. I chambered another 130gr GMX and fired at the second water jug as a control. Both jugs vanished on impact of the 130gr GMX. Here is what the front of the trap box looked like. The right-side wasn't even wet where the 150gr VLD hit. The left-side had the outer layer of cardboard blown away.

slimjim · Last edited by slimjim on Thu Dec 29, 2011 9:22 pm; edited 2 times in total

The first thing I did was Look at the back of the water jug from the 150gr VLD impact. It had the elongated tear which told me that the bullet yawed 90 degrees again. The bullet appeared to stay sideways through the papers and was in two pieces. It's hollow-point was still intact like before. The 150gr VLD penetrated further than the 130gr GMX which had a nice expanded bullet as you can see in the inserts in the picture below. The depth of penetration is represented by the bullets laying on top of the papers (spread the papers apart at these locations and that's where we found the bullets). Based on the reaction of the water jug and how little energy went into it from the 150gr VLD, I would expect that it penetrated farther than the 130gr GMX (as occurred did before).

slimjim

My friend had a .300 Win Mag with us so we shot a 150gr Rem Core-Lokt bullet through the remaining gallon jug into the center of the trap. The reaction to the jug was more than with the 130gr GMX but there was no penetration into the first phone book, none! The inset in the upper right shows how we found what remained of the bullet.

slimjim · Last edited by slimjim on Thu Dec 29, 2011 5:48 pm; edited 1 time in total

Here's a close up of the three bullets. The 150gr Core-Lokt is of the older design and does not have a bonded lead core. The bullet obviously is not made for this velocity. The remaining lead core was loose in the jacket and came apart as I handled it. All the copper bullets I've fired into the trap, TTSXs and GMXs, have reliably and repeatably expanded.

slimjim

I searched and searched for other lead fragments but did not find any in the newspapers. You can see a few flakes had fallen off the core in the picture above. I went back and relooked at the box. On the outside I found these tiny flakes of lead. Tiny as in place you finger up next to mine in the picture - looks like about 6x. These flakes of lead certainly don't have any killing power left in them and have the potential of meat contamination.

Ominivision1

Looks like Hornady has its stuff together!! Very Happy

You can still see the rifling marks on the Hornady. The VLD really surprises me with its tumbling and flattening of the jacket. Another surprise is the core-lokt bullet. Shocked

stovepipe

No suprise on the Core-lockt. Most all HV cup-n-core will frag when they hit water. Faster you push them the more resistance the water will put up. Pieces will keep getting smaller too.

Cool experiment!

What was the water jugs in front of the trap for?

I likey wet newpaper. Kinda heavy though, and soggy.

slimjim

I wasn't totally surprised by the Core-Lokt. I expected to see a lot of weight loss but the lack of penetraction was a complete surprise. We started separating the papers but found no bullet path down the center of the box, then I looked at the outside of the box and saw the bullet. When the 150gr VLD yawed this time its bullet path shifted up and right from a dead center hit. I was lucky it stayed inside the box.

slimjim

stovepipe wrote:

What was the water jugs in front of the trap for?

The water provides the hydrostatic force to cause bullet expansion similar to muscle tissue which is mostly water.

I've also found the reaction of the water jug is telling about the force of impact and transfer of energy. I never would have thought that a .223 could have more force of impact than a .270. Yet, the water jug remained stationary on top of a 2x4 block of wood when the 150 VLD hit it yesterday. The construction of the bullet makes a difference.

stovepipe

Yeh- I've had ricochets from shooting at jugs so I never do that anymore. Once was enough.

If you get a chance try some wet newspapers, they get really pulpy after a few hours and I didn't get ricohets. I've also interspersed (2) sheets of 1/2 ply between budles to simulate something hard.

Either or....liked your experiment sir! That backwards bullet blow up is interesting. Was the water flipping and fragging it or ???? Looks like the nose never hit in pic set one and it looks like it did hit in pic set 2 but failed.

slimjim · Last edited by slimjim on Fri Dec 30, 2011 9:11 am; edited 1 time in total

stovepipe wrote:

Looks like the nose never hit in pic set one and it looks like it did hit in pic set 2 but failed.

The reason I thought the hollow-point tip of the 150gr VLD looked so clean and untouched in the first pic was the bullet actually went backwards throug the paper protecting the tip. In the second shot the bullet stayed side ways deforming the tip more than in the first shot, but the tip of the bullet is still decernable and shows no signs of expansion.

stovepipe

That's nuts! Ya gotta tumbler then? Maybe it aint gone to sleep yet and it's yawed jsut enough to flip it on impact?

Maybe run a box out to 200y and redo?