2 incidents come to mind for me.
The first one: One day we stood up a stack of four phone books cover to cover back to front leaning against a 1 inch rebar for support.
Standing back about 80 yards I unleashed with my M1 Garand chambered in 30-06. The round punched through the phone books blasting a 6-inch wide, perfectly round, exit hole in the last of them and it sliced through the metal rebar leaving a half-circle C-notch in its wake. The top of the metal rod lilted over to the right like a "Y" without the top left fork. The round presumably continued its journey into the depths of the dirt backstop never to be seen again.
The second event (though chronologically speaking it was the first of the two): When I first began shooting I took a safety course. This was probably right around 1989 or 90. The then named Black Talon round was about to hit the market and my instructor had gotten hold of a box. He invited me to stick around and watch him try them out.
He fired one 9mm Black Talon into a stack of wet newspaper from about 2 feet away. I did not pay much attention to the thickness of the stack but it had to have been at least 14". At least, that's how I remember it.
The round penetrated halfway through the pile before coming to a stop. When we retrieved it we found the round had expanded into a textbook mushroom, the jacket flowered and curled back -- it pretty much did what Black Talons were designed to do. Turn into an F-ing buzzsaw!
What was most impressive; however, was that while it never exited the paper, the round still chewed out an exit hole. That thing slammed into the newspaper, dug a hole into it and spit the remains out the back!
At the time neither I (a new shooter) nor my instructor (to whom Black Talons were a new invention) had ever seen anything like this.
The first one: One day we stood up a stack of four phone books cover to cover back to front leaning against a 1 inch rebar for support.
Standing back about 80 yards I unleashed with my M1 Garand chambered in 30-06. The round punched through the phone books blasting a 6-inch wide, perfectly round, exit hole in the last of them and it sliced through the metal rebar leaving a half-circle C-notch in its wake. The top of the metal rod lilted over to the right like a "Y" without the top left fork. The round presumably continued its journey into the depths of the dirt backstop never to be seen again.
The second event (though chronologically speaking it was the first of the two): When I first began shooting I took a safety course. This was probably right around 1989 or 90. The then named Black Talon round was about to hit the market and my instructor had gotten hold of a box. He invited me to stick around and watch him try them out.
He fired one 9mm Black Talon into a stack of wet newspaper from about 2 feet away. I did not pay much attention to the thickness of the stack but it had to have been at least 14". At least, that's how I remember it.
The round penetrated halfway through the pile before coming to a stop. When we retrieved it we found the round had expanded into a textbook mushroom, the jacket flowered and curled back -- it pretty much did what Black Talons were designed to do. Turn into an F-ing buzzsaw!
What was most impressive; however, was that while it never exited the paper, the round still chewed out an exit hole. That thing slammed into the newspaper, dug a hole into it and spit the remains out the back!
At the time neither I (a new shooter) nor my instructor (to whom Black Talons were a new invention) had ever seen anything like this.
I upgraded that handgun soon after that and I never shot a car rim after that. 
