.38 special ammo mods

[Puncha]

G'day Dudes and ladies,

I remember reading a novel many years back about Elliot Ness and in one chapter, how a potential assassin tried to off him with a .38 revolver loaded with LRNs that had Xs carved into the slug.

Do such home modified HPs really expand when shot into soft mediums? If the sale of hollow point ammo is banned in one's locality, is it possible to modify flat nosed lead rounds into passable HPs?

For example, could one take the undermentioned round,

http://www.magtechammunition.com/si...tails&templateId=14&pageId=103&search=details

cut an X-grove on the flat lead point and depend on it as an SD round? Would it give better terminal performance than your regular 158gr 755ft/s LRN load?

 

[Ohen Cepel]

Besides the fact that a lawyer would tear you apart "the normal bullet wasn't deadly enough for you so you had to ....."

I don't think it would make it work much better. The guys making this stuff now have it down to a pretty fine art. Also, might destroy your accuracy if you throw off the balance or aerodynamics of the bullet.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Dr.Doug]

There's a similar scene in the movie "The Bear". The evil, bloodthirsty hunter carves an 'X' in the nose of his lead bullet, then shoots a dead tree branch to give the viewer a visual of how devastating the 'new & improved' round is. Funny thing is, he has a change of heart before using it on a bear.

Methinks the authors/screenwriters have little real life experience in these things.

I agree with Ohen; this would be a bad choice, both ballisticly and legaly.

Doug

 

[Quantrill]

As a kid in the 1950s, we carved X's on .22LR rounds to make them more deadly. I never saw any difference, at least on squirrels. Later on in life, I made up a fixture that one could put in .38sp with Lyman #358429 Keith bullets loaded and drill hollow points into. It was much less labor intensive just to buy lead hollow points and I never did any real research on the home maders. Quantrill

 

[Smith357]

I would think that the cuts would have to be as deep as a hollow point is drilled to have any effect, and that would screw up the external ballistics.

 

[Kurac]

Just get a .357 magnum and push some 125 SJSP to about 1,500 fps and you will get the effect that you are looking for, maybe even a bigger effect than you would expect.

 

[Leanwolf]

DR. DOUG- "... Methinks the authors/screenwriters have little real life experience in these things."
________________________________________________________________


Count on it!

Very, very few screenwriters (or directors, or actors, or producers) know anything whatsoever about firearms and shooting, other than that they want all guns confiscated from the worker peasants.

L.W.

 

[nitesite]

I believe that unless you have a cavity to initiate hydraulic expansion the modification you mention will actually just force the four segments back together on a round nose bullet. And if any of the segments were to open it would not be uniform on all four, and those that did would actually break off.

 

[bakert]

Cutting a X on bullets to make them more deadly is a myth that's been around for years.

 

[grendelbane]

I have spent the last 20 minutes searching, and I can not find my reference. However, some where in my library is a book about a famous trial of the early 20th century. In it are pictures of the bullets used in the crime. They were .32 ACP, and had an X filed in the nose of each one.

They also did not deform after firing, so the modification was unsuccessful.

However, it does show that such things were done at least once, so I think that we can cut the script writers a little slack on this one.

I remember a Mike Hammer novel where he cuts an X into the noses of .45 ACP rounds with a pocket knife. Mike must have been a lot stronger than I am!

Art imitates life, and that is what has happened in this case, I believe. Some people actually did cut X's in bullets, and novelists and script writers picked up on that, and showed it in their works. Through the magic of fiction they made such efforts successful, where in real life they were failures.

 

[Average Joe]

I once saw a gangster move, where this guy was rubbing garlic on his bullets, as he was loading them in a 50 rd drum. His cohort asked what he was doing, and he said, " if the bullet don't kill him, the garlic will give him blood poison" Its all Hollywood myth. Putting an X on a bullet won't do anything either.

 

[scbair]

Cutting an X into a low-velocity lead slug does little, if anything, to increase it's terminal effect. Everybody knows ya gotta use mercury in the bullet!!