--GROOVED WADCUTTERS vs. HOLLOW POINTS--?

What do you mean by a "grooved wadcutter"?
Denis

You mean a hollow-point wadcutter?
Or just a cross-cut V channel across the nose?
Denis

Sounds like the description of a hollow base wadcutter seated backwards... a few loads like those are out there, I think Federal loads one now under the HST banner I believe...

the Black Spot said:

If we know that HP's clog up on clothing to form essentially WC's...

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Unless you are writing from pre-1990, they usually don't. Early generations of hollow-points suffered from this problem at times, but modern testing of JHP's include performance through heavy clothing to test this phenomenon. Teh FBI protocol, for instance (which most major manufacturers engineer most loads to satisfy) requires testing through 4 layers of denim.

Check the copyright date on your information sources... you are likely reading some stale information.

I'm with ATLDave here. Hollow point pistol ammunition has been around for 40+ years now. If it wasn't doing something more than grooved wadcutters (first time I've ever heard that term - thanks!) it would have been exposed as useless by now. Notice how "soft nosed" pistol ammo isn't around any more? It may take time, but reality eventually wins out.

Monac said:

I'm with ATLDave here. Hollow point pistol ammunition has been around for 40+ years now. If it wasn't doing something more than grooved wadcutters (first time I've ever heard that term - thanks!) it would have been exposed as useless by now. Notice how "soft nosed" pistol ammo isn't around any more? It may take time, but reality eventually wins out.

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I suspect the OP has been reading (or has been told of) Jim Cirrilo's excellent books about his time in NYPD's Stakeout Squad. Those were written about and during the early days of JHP bullets and terminal ballistics as a serious subject matter generally. They have a lot of fascinating information in them, but they are historical documents that don't reflect the past 2-3 decades of gun and bullet technology.

Nothing is guaranteed to do anything "no matter what."

But the issues with JHP's clogging and not expanding were addressed and largely solved decades ago. This is a non-issue today.

If somebody had the ability to make molds, they could make all kinds of strange bullets. I imagine a wadcutter like bullet the is set up a like an accordian would expand well.

But that being said I think the modern JHP is all you really need and putting money towards developing new rounds would be foolish. I'm not convinced a flat nose FMJ is really that much worse to be shot with. I assume if you were going to die you were going to die. It might give a slight advantage but shot placement wins.

HB

Hollow point ammunition has been around a lot longer than 40 years. What the OP is talking about is cutting a notch in the nose of a bullet to make it more likely to expand. Some use to refer to these as "Dum Dum" bullets. Here is some information on the history of hollow point bullets.

"The first hollow-point bullets were marketed in the late 19th century as express bullets, and were hollowed out to reduce the bullet's mass and provide higher velocities. In addition to providing increased velocities, the hollow also turned out to provide significant expansion, especially when the bullets were cast in a soft lead alloy. Originally intended for rifles, the popular .32-20, .38-40, and .44-40 calibers could also be fired in revolvers.

With the advent of smokeless powder, velocities increased, and bullets got smaller, faster, and lighter. These new bullets (especially in rifles) needed to be jacketed to handle the conditions of firing. The new full metal jacket bullets tended to penetrate straight through a target and produce little damage. This led to the development of the soft point bullet and later jacketed hollow-point bullets at the British arsenal in Dum Dum, near Calcutta around 1890. Designs included the .303" Mk III, IV & V and the .455" Mk III "Manstopper" cartridges. Although such bullet designs were quickly outlawed for use in warfare (in 1898, the Germans complained they breached the Laws of War), they steadily gained ground among hunters due to the ability to control the expansion of the new high velocity cartridges. In modern ammunition, the use of hollow points is primarily limited to handgun ammunition, which tends to operate at much lower velocities than rifle ammunition (on the order of 1,000 feet per second (300 m/s) versus over 2,000 feet per second). At rifle velocities, a hollow point is not needed for reliable expansion and most rifle ammunition makes use of tapered jacket designs to achieve the mushrooming effect. At the lower handgun velocities, hollow point designs are generally the only design which will expand reliably."

I believe it was in the Muzzleloading Caplock Rifle by Ned Roberts that he mentioned that hollow point bullets were used as early as the late 18th century but were not popular or seen often. But here we are relying on my memory of a book I read 25 years ago.

In about 1986 Guns & Ammo had an article on the 38 special and one bullet tested was a double ended Wad Cutter bullet. It looked like a WC that had two equal cavities so it could be loaded either direction. When loaded it looked like a reversed WC bullet but because of the double cavities it wasn't tail heavy and did not tumble like a reversed WC bullet will sometimes do. It expanded very well in the test. I have never been able to find any of those bullets or find out who made them. And I have looked.

Hollowpoint molds and bullets have been around much longer than 40 years. They started to become more common in pistol ammo in the 1960s and 70s. There were hollowpoint rifle ammunition and bullet molds in the 1880s, if not before. Ideal was making hollowpoint bullet molds at least in the 20s that I recall reading.

Softpoint pistol ammo was around because many guns didn't feed the hollowpoints tried. Its generally felt to be deeper penetrating and slower opening than hollowpoints. Old gun catalogs from the 1940s showed softpoint 9mm and other loads. Keith commented on them, wondering why they had been dropped, and stating they improved the performance of most auto pistol calibers they were available in.

As was stated above, most better grade modern hollowpoints are engineered to perform well even when shooting through heavy clothing. Many get ga-ga about black talons, but that technology was old, and has been surpassed by a number of loads. Hydra-shoks.Yeah, 1980s technology (cant find the eye roll smiley). Poor performance with heavy clothing, and not all that great without heavy clothing. Some still think its special stuff for some reason. I recall a forensic report of a suicide with a hydrashok in the 1980s that indicated the bullet didn't expand. Those in the business of dealing with holes in people aren't all the impressed by them either. Unfortunately, theres a lot of old information that's still taken as current or valid. And please don't take anything from a movie seriously without some serious research to see if its got any validity.

Edit: dang, late again. 2 more posts as I was pecking away. I forgot the British 455 "manstopper" bullets of the 1890s. They were basically a cup point/hollowpoint wadcutter in soft lead.

Ratshooter said:

Hollow point ammunition has been around a lot longer than 40 years.

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Of course it has existed longer than that. But if the OP's information is coming from 30 or 40 years ago, then big advances in the state of the art are not reflected.

Sounds like an exercise left for the student.
It would not be hard for the OP to attack some wadcutters with a triangular file and shoot them into water for a first approximation.

I'd say my hollowpoints expand. Fail to see the need for a "grooved wadcutter?"



Don

There has been a lot of stuff tested. But when it comes down to funny front ends on lead bullets, most of the work was done before the Gorenet and much of it before we board members were old enough for anything but cork bullets.

The "cut nose dum-dum" was pretty well thrashed out a couple of generations ago. True, the bullets were usually roundnose. Maybe a grooved wadcutter would do something different. But to quote a usually reliable source (Me!) the only way you are likely to find out is to shoot some yourself.

No, that is not a fair synopsis. There are other problems with a slotted wadcutter that make it less desirable as a SD round. After the clogged/non-expanding issue you already raised, the next technical problem tackled was how to prevent over-expansion and/or partial disintegration of the projectile before it reached the intended/desired depth. This is where the bonded jackets and heavy plating and other technologies came in. Another technical problem was how to preserve performance through barriers - not just denim. The FBI testing protocol includes sheet steel, plywood, and auto glass barriers (you can find a summary of the protocol here: http://www.brassfetcher.com/FBI Ammunition Protocol/FBI Ammunition Protocol.html ).

It takes considerable engineering effort to get bullets to pass this test. Most modern JHP's and some all-copper HP's are the product of this engineering and testing. As to "nothing further" tested, that is not a safe assumption.

Finally, as to the particular bullet design you're talking about, it's not going to get the same kind of engineering support needed to test, much less improve it to get it to pass, the tests, for several reasons. One is that the same basic design will not work in 99+% of autoloaders; since virtually all duty weapons are autoloaders these days, that's where the huge majority of the effort goes. Another is that, even for revolvers, a flat bullet is slow to reload, so this is going to be of little appeal to anyone planning a speedy reload under fire.

In short, the design has substantial drawbacks and was briefly advanced as a possible solution to problems with other designs - that were shortly thereafter cured in those designs. You'd have to explain exactly what you think this would do that existing JHP's don't do in order to get someone interested in a serious way.

Jim Cirillo worked on some grooved wadcutter bullets. They basically worked at expanding, but did so in two directions, not all around evenly as common hollowpoint or softpoint bullets do. Don't know if that has any practical meaning, but the bullets never really took off commercially. The part about not reloading easily may have been part of the issue, and they wouldn't be applicable to automatics. He also had other bullets with a serrated shaped nose, I believe with the intention of not glancing off bowling pins. They had a plastic cap to help them load or feed.

A couple of the names of his bullets were Felon Grabber and Pin Grabber.

https://www.google.com/search?q=jim...H7IMKHckQCsMQsAQIMw&biw=1188&bih=566&dpr=1.15

Back in post #9, I conjectured that Cirillo's works might be the source of the OP's questions. Of course, those books were written more than a decade ago about stuff Cirillo was doing and seeing in the 70's and 80's.

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