One more for my own construction purposes:
One more for my own construction purposes:
Brass Fetcher's chart shows the average diameter of the recovered bullet.
Many testers only report the maximum or average maximum diameter.
https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....istol-calibers
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
Before I call it a night, I thought that I would take a moment to let you know how much I came to enjoy the back 'n forth, @JCN.
I realize that it must have been frustrating for you to read many of my replies and for that, I apologize sincerely. Some of it I found frustrating, too. I've always been very ''hard-nosed'' and direct which served me well in precincts to which I was most often assigned. Sometimes, more often than I care for, that quality can obscure the message because it is perceived as me being hard and unyielding when in fact I care (maybe more than I should) that people are given truthful answers.
Thanks for keeping an open mind. That's a rare attribute these days.
If you need anything in your endeavor, just say the word.
Last edited by the Schwartz; 12-02-2022 at 12:32 AM.
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
Why don't you just try some organic gel? It's really not much more difficult or expensive than clear gel if you use some Knox or WinCreast gel in bulk. You could achieve this for around $16 to $20 a block, yes it's a one use block. However, the normal price of clear gel is about 140 dollars shipped for a block cost of 14 dollars, if you get 10 remelts out of it. And that is assuming that you get 10 remelts out of it.
We could isolate Russia totally from the world and maybe they could apply for membership after 2000 years.
After the initial outlay for a decent 6''x6''x16'' mold, some release agent, a 5-gallon bucket and drill with a mixing paddle attachment (which isn't very expensive) even at $20 per block your use of either alternative gelatin seems to be an appealing option for those looking to use a gelatin medium that will meet the BB calibration requirement. It's not hard to get 5 shots into a block of those dimensions so you've gotten the expense of testing down to $4.00 per shot.
Not bad.
Last edited by the Schwartz; 12-02-2022 at 07:27 PM.
''Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.'' ―Albert Einstein
Full disclosure per the Pistol-Forum CoC: I am the author of Quantitative Ammunition Selection.
This has been a fascinating discussion!
Thank you JCN and Schwartz for your insights. I've been playing around with CBG for a while now, and have looked for organic gel results for a comparison. I've seen Brass Fetcher, 5pins, Shooting the Bull, and a few random videos on YouTube. It's too bad there hasn't been much publicly posted organic gel tests.
Especially since I own all the stuff except for the gel itself.
I have buckets, power tools, BB gun, chrono, FBI mold….
But….
This might not sit well with people, but I have a semi-unusual set of circumstances.
1. I have way more money than time.
2. Hassle and inconvenience costs me time which dwarfs the money part.
3. I am thankful for and trust the work that professionals have done for duty ammunition in a duty length firearm. That’s the gold standard and it’s done very well.
So IMO, I don’t have to do any ballistic testing at all because picking HST (in a 4-4.5” barrel) is the easy button.
It’ll work great all day long.
Most of my testing is comparative. Where I’ll test a different gun or load against the gold standard and get a sense of whether it over or under penetrates relative to the gold standard.
For that, I often don’t know what I want to test next.
So I do a lot of feasibility testing and one-off testing that’s often spread out over days or weeks on the same block.
This is about half of what I’ve done before I stopped saving recovered bullets.
So full FBI testing isn’t my goal. Because the professionals have done that already.
Some of what I test is by definition, compromised ballistics (pocket guns, short barrels, weak calibers).
Or out of curiosity, some scenarios like different types of body armor and using a short slab of gel backing to see how much zip the bullet has after getting through armor.
For example stuff like this:
So I’m not so interested in the gel if that makes sense.
The main downsides for me on organic gel are:
1. 4 degree temperature requirement. I do this for fun and don’t want to rush or be beholden to a temperature time pressure.
2. Reduced ability to do iterative testing on the same block. Say I test Underwood 380 XTP and it falls short of my requirements… there’s no point in testing the Fiocchi XTP in gel. I can then pivot and change the plan to include testing something else like the 380 Xtreme Defender. Being able to see the bullets in gel with the clear stuff is nice for that.
3. Waste of food and having pieces of food everywhere. There’s not running water at the place where I sometimes shoot and shooting foodstuff gets messy. Not to mention if I use other barriers that I’d like to reuse (like wood or steel), I don’t want to have to disinfect them with jello particles stuck everywhere.
So for example in some of my testing, I found out that the Barnes TTSX doesn’t have enough velocity out of a 300 blackout Rattler to get through soft armor.
I tried barrel extensions to get a little more velocity, but it still fell short even extending up to 9” because of pressure loss in the expansion chamber.
Eventually found the sweet spot with a true 9” barrel, so that’s what I bought for the Rattler and made a hybrid.
Figuring that a 4.5” blackout doesn’t do anything (for me) over one of my short barrel MPX in 9mm which is lighter and faster.
Not that it really matters, but I like testing and learning about stuff like that.
Clear gel also lets me do stuff like this inside the house without leaving food particles everywhere.