Saturday, April 28, 2007

Stopping Power


Cartridge : Federal Tactical rifled slug (Load # LE127RS)

Firearm : Pump-action shotgun with cylinder-choked 20" smoothbore barrel

Calibration : All Depths corrected (From 9.1cm @ 586 ft/sec)

"Single shot fired to center of block from 10' distance. Shot impacted at 1321 ft/sec, penetrated to 14.4" and was recovered at 1.010" average diameter. Interestingly, the recovered bullet resembled a donut in that the center of the expanded slug had split from the main portion of the projectile. This fragment was recovered butted up against the alongside the front face of the expanded slug.

The 16x6x6 inch block, upon being struck with the projectile, flipped 1.5 feet into the air and off of the test stand. Permanent cavity was 6” in diameter, until 10.5” depth."

Ballistic gelatin is not the media to use for testing shotgun slugs; no fault of the man performing the tests, mind you, but its obvious that the gello cannot stand up to a .73 caliber 438 grain projectile hurtling along at 1300+ fps. The fellow doing the work should be applauded for his efforts, but I simply cannot read most of his writing as it is internet-choppy to the 9's. Kudos anyway.

An interesting point is that Federal's LE127RS is their Hydra-Shok hollowpoint, and the slug inside the gello block looks nothing like the advertised recovered Federal round using the same media. Would have been nice to extract the slug and post a pic but there I go being all critical again. I'll put in a call to Crazy Jay to see if he can't line up something like this, and before the turn of the next millennium we should get the results.

Anyhoot, click the pic to see the devastating punch this slug can generate. Bearing in mind that Federal also makes a faster version that spins along at 1600 fps.

Ouch.

Now imagine a Remington Buckhammer. All 602 grains zipping merrily along at 1500 fps. This is where I begin to drool.

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