fmj vs. plated

[moooose102]

i have a question. will plated bullets (raineer) penetrate as well and not deform as well as a fmj bullet? i am talking 230 grain 45 acp in particular, but any experiences you have would help. i am going to load up some rounds to take deer hunting, NOT as a primary weapon, but as a back up, or for a shot that would be impossible with my rifle (< 25 yards away, at a 5 or 7 o clock position) without spooking the deer off.

 

[JGAreddog]

It does depend on the thickness of the plating of course but from what i have tested the plated come apart much much earlier than FMJs. If you do some digging on google you could most likely find a ballistic gel block test between the 2. This would much better answer your question. Good luck!

 

[RyanM]

I really wouldn't want to shoot a deer with a .45 ACP hardball. You'd spend all day trying to find the thing. Load up a decent 230 gr JHP instead. XTPs are good, and penetrate deep.

But to answer the question that was actually asked, against soft tissue only, there's no difference between FMJ, plated, or lead, at .45 velocities. None will deform at all. If it hits bone, plated would be in between FMJ and lead in how well it holds its shape. I'd say a bit closer to lead. If you really want to use a non-expanding bullet, try to find a flat-nose FMJ, as a flat-nose (or JHP) has less of a chance of skidding off bone. I've heard of a .30-30 roundnose softpoint at 50 yards skidding off a deer's skull. It knocked it out, but didn't kill it.

 

[ants]

I've compared copper plated vs. fmj

Newspaper is not meat or gel, but when I work up loads I shoot 45acp, 9mm, 44mag and 380Auto over a chronograph into stacks of newspaper (rifle too, but not copper plated). I've shot several thousand copper plated and fmj bullets of the same caliber and powder charge side by side, then unravelled the newsprint to recover the bullets. After several years of shooting and recovering thousands of bullets, the copper plating has NEVER torn off the core. The entire bullet deforms, but it doesn't lose the copper plating. The whole bullet usually stays in a single lump unless it gets hit by the next bullet.

FMJ loses the jacket 5 to 10% of the time. It usually opens up larger than copper plated and gets much more jagged, especially when it hits other bullets already stuck in the paper.

One important distinction is the lead core. Berry's and Xtreme tell me that they use a lead alloy for their copper plated bullets, so it's not soft lead. Zero and Hornady use soft lead for their fmj cores, so perhaps it's not a surprise that the fmj might deform more than copper plated.

I also hunted deer with copper plated in 44 magnum in 2005, but the bullets passed straight through the buck and were not recovered. From that experience I will recommend soft point or hollow point bullets for soft animals like deer. Bear or wild boar or elk or moose would be different.

 

[pingpingping]

I'm not saying you can't, but it is illegal in some states to hunt deer with fmjs.

 

[Brillo]

I've measured the plating on Rainiers and Berry's bullets in my laboratory. It's about 0.004 (four thousandths) inches in thickness. It's also dead soft pure copper. I strongly suspect that it offers virtually no resistance to deformation over a pure lead bullet of the same hardness. The copper jacket on jacketed bullets is 0.015 inches and is produced from work hardened copper. This construction will resist deformation vastly more than the copper plated bullet. Those are the facts, you decide what you need for your application. There are some very good points made in the responces above.