Value of Hunting Bullet Tests in Ballistic Gel |

Today hunting bullet designs are changing rapidly especially rifle bullets. Accordingly, a mechanism of ballistic gel is used to see the potential terminal ballistic damage done to the gel as it simulates wild game body parts and fluids. One can see the track voids left in the gel to signify the radial damage to surrounding tissue. Historically, water or melon like a water melon, or containers of water was used to demonstrate the power of the round but had difficulty capturing the bullet damage track or level of penetration. Thus standards and gel formulas were created.

Below was a pistol bullet track in gel. Note the larger track damage at the entrance.

From www.gundigest.com

The gel often made of either clear 10% silicone gel like the FBI uses or a 10% amber gelatin to track and recover the bullet. If you look at my last article, you can see the tremendous and violent track done in the first 10 inches and often throws the 20 pound gel block in the air and in slow motion it wants to explode with very high velocity rounds. That is a lot of bruised meat!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mjiqGPwrIwA

On entrance to the gel the bullet may encounter bone thus experiments are performed at different speeds and different bone-skin or skin and no bone. Most of todays bonded bullets will mushroom. Monolithic copper bullets, on the other hand, are designed to open and flare like a banana peel into petals. And some of the peels flare like an aircraft propeller while others fold to either make a mushroom or some are designed to peel and detach to make a mother bullet that peels off the smaller copper petals to radiate additional bullet damage.

Those of us that see faster bullets, see gel blocks correspondingly explode thus giving the impression that faster is better. That is partially true, but if your deer meat is all bruised and blood shot from your super fast bullet, then it won’t look or taste well after cooking. Will it? Thus ideally we want it all, a fast (dead right there) kill, but less blood shot meat and more edible deer meat to eat. Right? A compromise is needed and that means you need to try the bullet on game too.

Gel test to simulate a long range hit is also important. What does the wound track look like at slower long range velocities like 1800 fps. Did the bullet mushroom or flare as advertised? What about bone? All this needs experimentation and examination to reach an edible conclusion if we are going to cook it.

Good Hunting!