My son and I had some fun today doing a ballistic experiment. We wanted to see how much a bullet expanded after being shot through a line of milk jugs filled with water. We used a bolt action .22 with CCI Stingers, and Winchester Wildcats.
The stingers are a copper clad high velocity hollow point, and the wildcats are a solid round nose lead bullet.
We lined up 5 jugs and shot at 30 yards. It was cool to watch the first jug burst apart with the water gushing out. When we looked at the rest of the jugs we found that only 2 jugs had been hit out of the 5 we had lined up. We found pieces of the copper that clad the stinger bullet in the first jug, and the rest of the bullet was in the second jug. The bullet had expanded in a very uniform manner,and had increased in diameter from .22 to about .310!
The wildcat bullet made it all the way into the 4th jug,however it did not expand at all. We could see the rifling on the bullet. Other than that, and a slight marring on the bullets nose you couldn't even tell it had been fired.
A very good time!