Bottom Gun
Member
Please note - I’m not interested in a discussion of calibers for bear but rather in bullet performance regardless of caliber.
Not long ago, I had a couple of close encounters with black bears that started me thinking about my choice of bullets in my field carry load. I had been using Gold Dots in my .357 Sig. I was concerned that Gold Dot bullets might not give me the penetration I would need if I had to shoot a bear.
I did a bit of research and discovered the solid copper bullets made by Lehigh Defense. These bullets use what Lehigh calls fluid transfer technology. I was impressed by various ballistic gel testing videos of Lehigh’s Xtreme Penetrator and Xtreme Defense bullets. In gel, the Lehigh bullets penetrated deeper and disrupted more gel material along the way than any of the other bullets tested in comparison including Gold Dot and HST bullets.
Some folks argue that these gel tests do not duplicate animal tissue and are therefore unreliable. That’s possible but looking at the gel strictly as a test medium, the Lehigh bullets outperformed everything else in the same medium. That has to count for something.
Others, having tested these Lehigh bullets by shooting them into a hunk of butchered meat, argue that their results are nothing like the gel tests and are more consistent with shooting a hunk of meat with FMJ bullets. Their reasoning is that muscle is more elastic than ballistic gel.
Still others maintain that live tissue and organs exhibit more fluid characteristics than butchered meat and say therefore the gel tests are nonetheless somewhat valid.
So, I bought some of the Lehigh XP and XD bullets and loaded some test rounds. Accuracy is good but I’m curious about performance. I’m thinking that in worst case they should be at least as effective as a hard cast SWC on a large animal.
My question is, has anyone actually used these Lehigh bullets on a live animal? What were your thoughts?
Not long ago, I had a couple of close encounters with black bears that started me thinking about my choice of bullets in my field carry load. I had been using Gold Dots in my .357 Sig. I was concerned that Gold Dot bullets might not give me the penetration I would need if I had to shoot a bear.
I did a bit of research and discovered the solid copper bullets made by Lehigh Defense. These bullets use what Lehigh calls fluid transfer technology. I was impressed by various ballistic gel testing videos of Lehigh’s Xtreme Penetrator and Xtreme Defense bullets. In gel, the Lehigh bullets penetrated deeper and disrupted more gel material along the way than any of the other bullets tested in comparison including Gold Dot and HST bullets.
Some folks argue that these gel tests do not duplicate animal tissue and are therefore unreliable. That’s possible but looking at the gel strictly as a test medium, the Lehigh bullets outperformed everything else in the same medium. That has to count for something.
Others, having tested these Lehigh bullets by shooting them into a hunk of butchered meat, argue that their results are nothing like the gel tests and are more consistent with shooting a hunk of meat with FMJ bullets. Their reasoning is that muscle is more elastic than ballistic gel.
Still others maintain that live tissue and organs exhibit more fluid characteristics than butchered meat and say therefore the gel tests are nonetheless somewhat valid.
So, I bought some of the Lehigh XP and XD bullets and loaded some test rounds. Accuracy is good but I’m curious about performance. I’m thinking that in worst case they should be at least as effective as a hard cast SWC on a large animal.
My question is, has anyone actually used these Lehigh bullets on a live animal? What were your thoughts?
