Corbon ammo, high velocity hype?

[walking arsenal]

A while back my ammo of choice was corbon ammo. Why? cause i could find it in all the shops i went to and it had never failed me.

I stopped using it.

Why?

simple.

I ran a backyard ballistic test by firing 10 rounds of corbon 125 grn .357 sig ammo into a garbage can full of water.

i ran the test by standing on a deck about 6 ft from the water, firing strait down into the water.

the results were pretty wild, no uniform mushrooms or even shrooms at all. instead what i got was complete destruction of the bullet. it did it all, fragmentation, jacket seperation a couple rounds simply just turned to dust and small particles of copper.

This aint right, this shouldnt do that.

so now gold dot and win silver tips are my round of choice for my carry pieces.

but, i was at gander mountain the other day and was eyeing the familiar little white box and got to wondering, are these really that bad or was it just the sig round? i never did test fire anyother calibers.

anyone else have any similar experences with corbon, is the stuff good for self defense or is the brand just a lot of high velocity hype?

i may pick up a box of .40, .9mm, .38 special and .45acp and run another similar test to find out, ill wait until it gets warmer though.

WA

 

[mete]

First garbage cans of water are hardly a good test. Then which Corbon are you talking about ? They have Powerball ,DPX[all copper bullet] and others.I suggest you find out how it meets the FBI standards of penetration and expansion and find out how it has performed on the street!

 

[walking arsenal]

It was just the standard JHP.


It WAS a backyard test, I didnt happen to have any spare ballistic geletin sitting around or i would have used that.

If someone knows were to find the FBI stats i would be interested in them.

I only dropped the brand because of my "unofficial" test and some bad word of mouth from some of the shooters on this forum.

here is the previous post

http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=96887&highlight=corbon

 

[Preacherman]

Cor-Bon has a mixed reputation. They do produce very high velocity ammo, and their older designs were deliberately intended to fragment, rather than hold together, so as to avoid overpenetration and ensure a complete "energy dump" into the target. Their newer DPX ammo with Barnes X bullets seems to be a departure from this earlier practice, as the bullets hold together much better and penetrate deeper, or so I'm told.

Unfortunately, Cor-Bon had a very serious consistency problem for some years. In a given box of ammo, velocities might vary by as much as 20%. This was not acceptable to me, and I stopped using their ammo for a while. I'm told that matters have improved over the past couple of years, but not having chronographed any of their recent production, I can't confirm this.

 

[mec]

I've shot a considerable amount of it with most being shot over a two year period ending a couple of years ago. Prior to that, I had made sporatic observations over a period of about five years.

What I saw consistently was that the rounds clock slightly faster than advertised from the same make guns corbon uses for their tests. Also have noted very small extreme spreads and standard deviation. The lighter jhps for a given round fragment more than the heavier ones but all show considerable expansion. Even those that throw off a lot of fragments retain a substantial core at the end of expansion.

Only cases from the heavy hungting loads for revolvers present any difficulty with ejection. the Jhp load cases come out of the chambers with little effort.

Anomolies include one batch of 380s that were clocking 1120+fps from a PPK. A later lot was averaging 1080. The 110 grain .357s were going considerably faster than advertised, getting 4" velocities from a 2.25" sp101.

40 s&w loads going back to the first 135 grain bullet they used and extending to a couple of years ago consistently clocked just over 1300 fps second over a considerable number of ammunition lots.

 

[Gordon]

I guarandamntee their heavy bullet penetrator and hard cast loads aren't hype! I don't know what the hell they put in the 200 grain .357 ammo, which gives me almost 1200fps out of a 3.5" barrel! with VERY small deviation and normal to moderate extraction. I can't load that (maybe I'm sissy about 'tamping' the H110!). Their Makarov load is also incredible!. Whups both are discontinued (I bought it all) guess people BUY the light bullet hype!

 

[bpisler]

Early cor-bons with the sierra jhp's were in fact designed to break up to limit penetration.The newer designs such as the powerball and DPX should have deeper penetration if that's what you're looking for.The last few boxes of cor-bons if shot seemed to have a large muzzle flash compared to earlier ones but were very accurate.BTW those were 125gr and 140gr 357mags fired from a 3" 65-3.

 

[alex-v.]

It WAS a backyard test, I didnt happen to have any spare ballistic geletin sitting around or i would have used that.

Have you tried "poor man's ballistic geletin". It is well soaked newspaper or phone books or magazines (my favorite). Soak the paper product for a day or more and then let drain for several minutes. Shoot into that. It has a high water content but also some resistence that is caused by the paper.

I have had results that differed from plain water using this media. And, the results seem to be pretty consistent from one bullet to another in the same batch. This makes it easier to compare different bullet nose profiles, etc.

 

[Rob96]

Water is more destructive to a bullet than tissue or gel.

 

[mec]

when hornady was testing the xtp they called it a "hard" medium. The widespread theory is that if a bullet won't expand on water it won't expand in anything. It does make for an even, pretty mushroom

 

[Rob96]

I was always under the impression that water would make bullets expand that don't expand in other media or tissue

 

[walking arsenal]

alex

Newspaper huh? never thought of that. i'll give it a go sometime.

what other medias work good?

I'd like to try CBS or maybe NBC as a test media, possible legal implications? i dunno.

 

[RyanM]

You might want to try building a "Fackler box." It's basically just a 3 foot or so long "gutter" made of wood, that you can put ziploc baggies full of water into, and shoot bullets through them. Penetration depth is 1.8 times that of ballistic gelatin, I think. 1.6 times for cardboard milk containers filled with water, 1.5 for plastic, if you don't want to build a box.

 

[walking arsenal]

(takes notes)

Ziploc, milk cartons..........

 

[Magnum88C]

Having read most of the FBI tests of Cor-Bon ammo, it seems the high velocity rounds (not just the Cor-Bon) were never the top performers and usually did not display enough penetration. I.e. they limited the expansion TOO much. Now that was for the self-defense ammo. I've had good luck with their highly penetrative hunting ammo.

For self-defense I'll stick to Gold Dots and Hydra-Shoks.

 

[mete]

Corbon's DPX all copper rounds provide expansion and penetration .Tests show they are an excellent round and will be available in more cartridges this year ; 38+P, 357, 357sig, 44 spec, etc.

 

[alex-v.]

You might want to try building a "Fackler box." It's basically just a 3 foot or so long "gutter" made of wood, that you can put ziploc baggies full of water into, and shoot bullets through them. Penetration depth is 1.8 times that of ballistic gelatin, I think. 1.6 times for cardboard milk containers filled with water, 1.5 for plastic, if you don't want to build a box.

We did build a wooden box of about 3 feet to hold the wet paper in a straight row. It was helpful but not necessary.

There used to be an excellent web site where the guy went into greater detail on how to soak and then use wet paper, or "wet-pack" as he called it.