Best home-made medium for testing bullets?

I've done something like this:

How To: Make your own Ballistic Buffalo

Basically a lot of soaking wet paper with other things of your choosing added in.

I've seen people stuff gallon jugs full of wet newspaper. Whatever medium you choose just use it repeatedly to make the tests as accurate as possible. Try to make some type of measure when making the medium for consistency.

From what I've seen, aside from homemade ballistic gelatin, wet newspaper in plastic jugs seems to work fairly consistently (if they're prepared consistently). One of the worst is probably water-filled jugs, which rarely seem to yield any useful information.

Some technique in forensics (to obtain the "markings" on recovered bullet for cross reference to the slug that killed) uses IIRC a type of "pillow stuffing" which doesn't "deform" the bullet in any way, just "stops" it. Bullet is recovered as an "egg shaped" mass which has to be cleaned up. I'll try to find it and post specifics later if I do.

I'm pretty sure it's some type of synthetic fiber (nylon, ...)

Dr. Fackler published an article in which he suggested using a single water-filled cardboard milk carton and a box densely filled full of polyester pillow stuffing to test handgun bullets. The bullet is shot through the milk carton, where it expands, and the polyester fibers catch the bullet without damaging it. Penetration can be estimated using a formula found in the book "Bullet Penetration," by Duncan MacPherson.

Water soaked newspaper provides a reasonable indication of rifle bullet deformation, fragmentation and penetration. There was an article published in one of the IWBA Wound Ballistics Review journals describing the procedure in detail. Soaked newspapers are good medium for testing handgun bullet expansion, but penetration results do not realistically represent soft tissue penetration performance.

Is it just me or does ballistic gelatin seem too soft and lacking bone-like material? I've never played with the stuff first hand, so I don't really know.

Click to expand...

There's been some recent discussion about ballistic gelatin as a realistic soft tissue simulant and how it relates to the human body at:

http://www.m4carbine.net/showthread.php?t=57037
http://www.m4carbine.net/showthread.php?t=57622

Scrolling to the last 2/3 of this web article (starting at "Wound Ballistics Misconceptions") you'll find discussion from Duncan MacPherson, Dr. Fackler, which address soft tissue variation in the body and tests involving bone: http://www.firearmstactical.com/tacticalbriefs/2006/04/03/0604-03a.htm

for realism, use a pig carcass. Thats how I found out that a .380 actually does pretty darn good, contrary to the so called "experts". A pig is the closest you will get to the human body, other than a dead person. Gell block is just a standard used for lab results, it is nothing like human flesh.

Trespassers...

johnmerrit what was the pentration with 380 and the pig, i did a full magnum loaded 357 mag with 125 grain hp at about 1700fps and penetration was about 7 inches

cheesecake... I hate the stuff

Fruitcake ... !

klav ... send me the cheescake for tasting ... I mean testing.

I think a chimp would actually be more analogous to a human body but a little more hard to come by than a pig!

I'm also interested in the penetration of .380 into the pig.

Dirt.

The fancy-smancy version is Scientific Mud/Dirt Test or for those into letter-soups: SMDT.

How raised, what you do...and you know what?
There are some members here that still do this, and it would baffle folks as to the background of these folks.

For some time I tried to come up with a simple way to test and compare the expansion of JHP and JSP bullets.
I tried the usual stuff like a row of water jugs, wet phone books, elaborate bullet traps, etc.
Finally I settled on one water filled plastic jug backed up by a cardboard box of rags to catch the bullet.
I found that mostly a .32, 9mm, 45ACP, etc, bullet will do about everything it's going to do within the first water jug, so more than one jug wasn't necessary.
This test won't tell you much about overall penetration but neither will stiff like wet phone books.
This is a very simple and fast way to get a reasonable comparison of bullets and loads.

A couple examples of common bullets after going through a single one gallon water jug.
Remington .223 JSP shot from a 11 inch barrel Kel Tec PLR.
45 ACP Speer Gold Dot shot from a 3 or 4 inch barrel Kimber (I don't remember which).



If you think wet phone books/newspaper gives you any useful information at all, consider this.
Two good 45ACP defense loads only penetrated these wet phone books 2 1/4 inches.
Two FN 5.7 (pistol) bullets penetrated 6 inches after turning sideways a couple inches into the books. The FN 5.7 V Max at 4 inches mushroomed, so didn't penetrate as far as the two other FN 5.7 bullets.

For about a decade I used the same chunck of play-doh stored in a 5 gallon bucket. I must have shot the stuff hundreds of times. If you find one of my "expansion tests" posts from The Firing Line in 2001 or here in 2002, and perhaps one from 2009, it was using the same Play-doh. It kept something crazy until all-of-a-sudden it molded up. It did offer picture-perfect expansion most of the time.

These days, I simply don't have as much free "fun" time as I did then, but if I were needing new material simply to see in what fashion a particular JHP expands, I would probably use Plumber's Putty. It's low maintenance, low mess, reusable and cheap. I could see the stuff lasting me for another 10 years if I kept it right. I don't know if I would be able to make 6" cubes from it as I did with the Play-Doh, but these tests are so informal that I would just rather shoot a blob of it anyway.

"...my own bullet testing on reloads..." Reloading isn't about that. It's about the best accuracy out of your firearms.
"...ballistic gelatin..." Isn't about bones. It's about penetration in soft tissue. In any case, handgun bullets have already been tested in ballistic gelatin. Ballistic gelatin is expensive stuff too.

that's a great medium