45ACP penetration

[max popenker]

Does anybody here have any reliable penetration data for .45 cal M1911 ball ammo, when fired from m1911 pistol and any subgun (M1928, M1, M3), against pine wood and/or Ww2 era steel helmets, for example?

there is an old argument here, stemmed by memoirs of the Soviet Ww2 vet, who was issued a lend-lease Tommy gun. He test-fired it and .45cal bullet was unable to penetrate a wooden handle of a standard shovel
He then fired at same from his 7,62 Tokarev pistol, penetrated the target, and discarded the Tommy-gun as heavy and weak and thus useless weapon

I have serious doubs in this story, but cannot prove it wrong with hard facts, as I live in Russia where .45 cal weapons are inacessible to general public

Maybe someone can shed some light on the issue, or, better still, shoot some objects from his/her .45ACP hand- and long guns (subgun or carbine, doesn't matter) with ball / FMJ ammo, and post results

Even better, is fomeone can make some quick and dirty comparative penetration test for 9x19 Luger, .45ACP and, if possible, 7,62x25 Tok

Thanks in advance for any info and help

 

[ObsidianOne]

Just go to YouTube and search for a comparison. I found dozens.
I assure you, a .45 may be a slow moving round and may lose a very decent amount of velocity if obstructed (i.e. I once shot at an empty plastic lighter fluid container, hit the dirty in front of it and it penetrated one side, and remained intact in the container instead of exiting), but it is very potent and would be capable of penetrating a shovel handle, lol.

 

[CHEVELLE427]

MANY YEARS AGO we were at a dump site and someone had dumped some toilets.

we had 9mm, 45acp and 44mag hand guns

i shot a toilet with the 9mm it broke and fell apart
i shot one with a 45acp it also broke but it more like busted up into pieces,
i then shot one with my 44 mag it just blew apart.
not quite what you were looking for but that day i lost faith in a 9mm and have not owned one again till just this year,
(new ammo new light weight guns high cap mags makes 9mm look better.)

1911 45acp has been strong for 100 years now so there must be something to it.

i carry a 45acp and also have the same gun in 9 and 40sw

think of it like this .
you got hit with a moped it is gonna hurt
you get hit with a truck it is gonna hurt more

9mm looks good because of the massive fire power it has now days 18+1 is a lot,
but if you can get the job done with 7-13 rounds of 45acp

 

[dexter]

google ( box o' truth) you mite find what your looking for.

 

[MtnCreek]

there is an old argument here, stemmed by memoirs of the Soviet Ww2 vet, who was issued a lend-lease Tommy gun. He test-fired it and .45cal bullet was unable to penetrate a wooden handle of a standard shovel
He then fired at same from his 7,62 Tokarev pistol, penetrated the target, and discarded the Tommy-gun as heavy and weak and thus useless weapon

There’s also stories about russian troops taking German light fixtures with them back to russia and then wondering why the lights don’t come on when they flip on the switch………….

 

[barnetmill]

In pine wood boards my one test of military FMJ is that the 9mm luger out penetrates the .45 ACP. But that has almost nothing to do with my decision to switch from the 1911 to the G19. Both rounds require multiple hits on an armed assailant to incapacitate an armed assailant. I know that is heresy for most here. Neither the 9 or .45 come anywhere close to say .30 cal rifles. Not my intention to start a caliber war.
The .45 ACP is a good combat round.
Comparing a .45 ACP penetration to a 7.6x25 will have a steel core Tokarev winning most contests. There is a difference in pistols between 800 and 1450 fps relative to penetration.

 

[ofitg]

The Marshall/Sanow book, Handgun Stopping Power, lists penetration of various handgun rounds against 1/2-inch plywood. The .45 ACP 230 FMJ penetrated 5.6 sheets of plywood. The list did not include data for the 7.62x25 cartridge.
As barnetmill noted in the above post, the 9mm does a good job against wood - the 9mm 123 FMJ penetrated 8.8 sheets of plywood, better than any other load listed in the Marshall/Sanow tests.

The 7.62x25 has a reputation for penetrating body armor better than the .45 ACP, so I suspect that the 7.62x25 would be superior against wood and other common obstacles.

 

[481]

In pine wood boards my one test of military FMJ is that the 9mm luger out penetrates the .45 ACP. But that has almost nothing to do with my decision to switch from the 1911 to the G19. Both rounds require multiple hits on an armed assailant to incapacitate an armed assailant. I know that is heresy for most here. Neither the 9 or .45 come anywhere close to say .30 cal rifles. Not my intention to start a caliber war.
The .45 ACP is a good combat round.
Comparing a .45 ACP penetration to a 7.6x25 will have a steel core Tokarev winning most contests. There is a difference in pistols between 800 and 1450 fps relative to penetration.

IIRC, wasn't there a test of the .45 ACP 230 gr. FMJ @ 800 fps in which it penetrated 6 inches of white pine boards?

I believe that Wikipedia may have some of M&S penetration data for FMJs in human bodies, too. Just gotta look at the correct caliber.

 

[Overkilll0084]

Maybe a stupid question. Why would one use a shovel handle as a metric of firearm performance? I would think that a Russian soldier in WW2 would have no end of enemy soldiers on which to do real world testing.
Call Mythbusters.

 

[Old krow]

google ( box o' truth) you mite find what your looking for.

Agreed. Box O' Truth has some side by side tests of common handgun calibers. Most that I remember were shooting solid structures, i.e. mock up walls and such.

 

[rfwobbly]

It's probably already been tested and videoed on a web site called "The Box O Truth".

This is what retired test engineers do with too much time and too many guns.

http://www.theboxotruth.com/

 

[Dazen]

Here is a link where he was shooting a Kevlar Helmet with pistol rounds. http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot29.htm

That guy sure does know how to enjoy a day shooting !

 

[gym]

To a degree it would make sense with plywood. As the 9mm makes a smaller hole making it easier to penetrate a solid brittle object, where the 45 is a larger diameter projectile travelling at a slower speed. The energy of the diameter would tend to slow down the larger heavied bullett unless you had more speed behind it.But flesh is different, the larger round at speeds in the 800fps range will still do more damage because of size, and distances we are deaing with"diameter of the bullett. It's like shooting a needle and a pencil and shooting the needle at a higher rate of speed, it will penetrate further because there is less drag, but the pensil will do more damage until you extrapolate for distance. At some point the heavier weight of whatever bullett will cause it to loose it's effectivness just because it ran out of gas.
To me this is just simple deduction, I don't claim in any way to be a ballistics knowledable handgunner.

 

[lemaymiami]

Here's a real world penetration example for the .45... The weapon was a Sig Sauer, the round was fired into a car door at a range of about three feet. The round penetrated door, glass, the front car seat (on the diagonal, descending, roughly 8 to 10"), and the man who was sitting there. The bullet transitted his chest cavity from left to right almost entirely, taking out the aorta as it passed through the torso. Most of us used Speer Gold Dot hollow points at the time so I'm pretty sure that was the round in play.

The young officer involved was very shaken up since all he was trying to do was arrest a guy stealing a car (subject was in a surveilled parking lot and was observed during the entire incident). What appeared to be a large handgun (night time, poorly lit parking lot) in his hand as he turned toward the officer turned out to be a large socket wrench that he was using to break out the ignition lock. It was a very bad scene although absolutely justified by all who reviewed the incident. On the plus side the shootee had a long criminal history - and for a month or two we didn't have one car theft in our city (one of 27 different cities in Dade county, the Miami area).

By the way I'd suppose that issues about handgun round penetration are very serious business the farther north you go. Down here in paradise there's seldom much, if anything between your skin and any bullets....

 

[Burt Blade]

Wood penetration data is very handy if you expect to be confronted by a PCP-hopped Pinocchio.

But society frowns on systematically collecting, shall we say, "highly relistic" terminal ballistics data.

 

[suemarkp]

As others have said, the 7.62x25 is a good penetrator both against armor and solid surfaces. One depends more on energy and the other on momentum. That value applied against the frontal area of the bullet determines penetration. What this means is given 3 cartridges with similar energy and momentum values, the smaller caliber penetrates more. But it also makes a smaller hole so it could be less effective.

I think a piece of hard wood, and definitely the helmet, will depend more on energy than momentum. The 7.62, 9mm, and 45 have very similar energy levels.

 

[TenMillimaster]

No clue if soviet tokarev ammunition back then was steel core, but quite a lot of surplus tokarev ammunition is steel cored, which would definitely fare better than lead cored ammunition in terms of penetration.

 

[BBQLS1]

7.62x25 was also used in many sub guns like the ppsh41. Some of the ammo has the energy of .357 Mag. Combine that with a steel core.... watchout!

 

[JustinJ]

max popenker: "I have serious doubs in this story, but cannot prove it wrong with hard facts, as I live in Russia where .45 cal weapons are inacessible to general public"

Aren't all firearms inaccessible to the general public in Russia?

What part of Russia are you in?

 

[max popenker]

Aren't all firearms inaccessible to the general public in Russia?

Not all.
Shotguns are mostly Ok, rifles are more restricted but also Ok
privately owned handguns or pistol-caliber carbines - no way
Full-auto - no way.

What part of Russia are you in?

North-West To be specific, Saint-Petersburg

 

[TenMillimaster]

If I was a soviet, I'd cut open a 7.62x25 and a .45ACP and see what I was shooting and how much it weighed... I'd take heavier and lead over lighter and steel because steel cores don't expand nearly as well. Less wounding ability.

 

[Slamfire]

In my youth, I worked with a lady who fled East Germany before the wall came up.

I don’t know if she was physically assaulted by Russians, but it was possible, regardless she did not have a high regard for them. Basically considered them uncivilized, uneducated brutes.

The only example I remember is her describing Russians washing/peeling potatoes in the toilet.

And that is where that Soviet Vet story should go. In the toilet.

Won't penetrate a shovel handle: Bosh!

 

[max popenker]

I don’t know if she was physically assaulted by Russians, but it was possible, regardless she did not have a high regard for them. Basically considered them uncivilized, uneducated brutes.

Well, I can assure you that there were no love lost between Russians and Germans when Russians came to Germany in 1945

I'm not vouching for what happened after the 1945 in eastern Europe (I'm not a big fan of Communism in general and its Soviet version in particular), but in 1945 Germans surely got what they deserved for during 1941-45 timeframe.

 

[Nushif]

[...] but in 1945 Germans surely got what they deserved for during 1941-45 timeframe.

Let's hope nobody ever judges us as a nation quite as harshly as you just judged the Germans.
Let's also not go any deeper into this nationalistic and borderline political direction. Please?

 

[JustinJ]

"I don’t know if she was physically assaulted by Russians, but it was possible, regardless she did not have a high regard for them. Basically considered them uncivilized, uneducated brutes."

So she agreed with Hitler? And that has what to do with firearms?