I've changed my opinion

[Smokin Joe]

Through my 45 year handloading career, I always had the assumption that the Remington 405 grain was a softer (weaker, structurally) bullet than the Speer 400. I have held this opinion even after using both on deer and black bear, getting complete lung-shot pass throughs and not recovering either slug.

 I decided to do an experiment

 I placed each bullet on a piece of aluminum plate, centered them in a 5 foot section of 1 3/4" plastic pipe, held a 3 pound slug of 4140 over the other end, and let go.

 Here's the setup:




 Here's the result:





 The impact to the Remington was caused by 5 drops

 The impact to the Speer was caused by 3 drops

 I don't know what medium Speer used for that beautiful expansion test mushroom in their loading manual, but after this test, I'm fully convinced that it was room-temperature butter.

[stimpylu32]

SJ

While a simple drop test will tell may something , there are a bunch of things that it does not take into account like temp , the lead and jacket for that matter will soften up from the heat of the bullet being shot , the friction of the barrel and it moving through the air to target . Also the rotation of the bullet will center the impact and spread the force out more equally than just a weight being drooped on the bullet .

Then you must also take into account the design of the diffrent bullets , were as one may be designed to open up and work at say 2000 FPS the other may be designed to not open up till it hits 2500 or even 3000 FPS , or they may be designed to work at diffrent impact energies , so one may work at 1000 foot / pounds of energy the other may not till it reaches 2000 foot / pounds of force .

I do like the concept , have you tried it with more weight ? or a longer drop tube ?

stimpy

[EsoxLucius]

The Remington has a harder alloy core than the probable pure lead core of the Speer.  All you have to do is push the nose of one into the other and see that the Speer gives way to the Remington.  It also looks like the jacket of the Remington is slightly thicker than the jacket on the Speer.

Do you have a picture of 3 drops to each?

[Smokin Joe]

I agree that this isn't a real-world test; it was only designed to check the relative compressive strengths of these bullets. In a real-world test, the bullets wouldn't have an equal force applied to the base as in a drop test backed by a plate.
 The fluted jacket of the Speer caused it to start to open very fast.
 I haven't done any other testing yet.

[jhalcott]

 A simple hardness test on the nose will tell you what the cores are made of.

[BBF]

I admit of being a Speer bullet fan, those pictures are certainly interesting. IMO the difference in performance of those two bullets are probably minute, however the price is not if the Rems are bought in bulk.  I have a lot more Rems in stock then Speer's

[Larry Gibson]

I've shot elk with both bullets at 2000+ fps (Siamese Mauser) and this test does not equivicate to the actual performance of either bullet on game. Interesting experiment though, but not a valid test of "expansion. I know that's not what was intended but I see nothing there to change my mind. Actually both bullets exhibited great expansion on the elk. I only recovered one bullet. My thoughts were to lower the velocity to 1800 fps for pole patch hunting elk.  I believe both bullets would perform pretty much the same at that muzzle velocity also. 

Larry Gibson

[Glanceblamm]

I liked this test in general...it sure beats whacking a hard cast bullet with a glancing hammer blow to see if it will hold together verse fragmenting.

[gwindrider1]

The 350 grn. Speer is tougher than either of the 405's, or 400's.

[Smokin Joe]

Sounds like I'll have to stick the Speer 350 and a Hornady 350 in the tube!

 

[Smokin Joe]

Same test.....Hornady 350 and Speer 350.......5 drops each:

[AtlLaw]

A perfect test or not, I LIKE IT!     Thanks! 

[bilmac]

There was a guy who devised a bullet test by shooting 1/2 gallon milk jugs full of water all lined up in a row. I did his test a few times on bullets I shoot at game and the results did seem to correspond to the way they behaved on game.He even had a formula to correlate milk carton penetration to muscle penetration. The problem is that sometimes the bullets didn't always travel down this skinny line of milk cartons, and doing this test with a deep penetrating 45 bullet would be even harder, but if you're serious about compareing bullets this may give you a better result.

My 130 gr 270s would penetrate 7 cartons, so I would guess you would have to line up at least 10 to stop a 45. You do like milk right.

[quickdtoo]

How about twelve 1-gallon bottles of water!! 

Tim

http://beartoothbullets.com/WMV_Files/45-70-525.wmv

[bilmac]

Never tried to wash my truck that way before.

[cwlongshot]

Thanks for post this Tim!!  GREAT to SEE what happens!!

Joe,
 I have always said the same thing, the SPEER is tougher than the REMINGTON. Others on here have disagreed with me. This is not the normal test.. But does show a difference, that's for sure!!

 As for the 350gr weight bullets, these where designed for the 458Mag, as a lighter weight bullet. I have shot one Boar with the 350 Hornady thru and thru penetration but that's to be expected, Expansion was OK but only on the off side AFT busting shoulders and leg bones. Velocity was about 2000fps.

CW