.25 slugs
On the yellow forum in the classified section there is a guy selling .25 slugs 73 grain and 56 grain. my question is how fast do you think that we could push them down the barrel of a Condor. he tested them in a Sumatra carbine. I would post the link but I dont know how. The wife is in France 🙁 and took the brains with her. 😳
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For only having time to get off two tries, I’d say those were pretty good. Unless you’ve shot hundreds or thousands of rounds at long range, you don’t just pop off MOA groups any time you pull up to a bench.
Now if you can just find someone to test who can actually SHOOT well at 100 yards… 😆 Tofaz…? It’s up to you, man!
Nice shooting Rob. It’s nice to see that the slugs are stable all the way out past 100 yards. I’ve seen other slugs that were good at 50 but tumbled before 100. That’s one worry off my list!
OK… here we go…. I figured I’d post some ‘real’ 100 yard groups rather than Tofaz’s ‘100’ yard groups which are probably closer to 25 yards…. 😆 I’m kidding, Ced… I only say that because I know you’ll post 100 yard groups that smoke mine, but here is what the 72gr slugs can do in the hands of a mediocre long range shooter…
I had just enough time to do two 105 yard groups before the threat of rain drove me indoors. Yardage measured by rangefinder. Little to no wind. First group looked good but second group had a called flyer in it. Even so, I think these look pretty damn good. The 8ring bullets show no sign of tumbling at 105 yards. I’m more than happy with the results. I’ll have to admit that I dont do a lot of long range shooting. My terrain dictates that most of my hunting shots will be inside 35 yards with very few going over 50 yards and so I concentrate on 50 yards and under.
Both groups together…
First group close up….
and second group with the called flyer….
Those are awesome pics and some good info. Did not go shooting this weekend as i forgot the wife had to go out of town. This weekend should be the ticket though. Lot of target shooting and test to come.
That wasn’t a half bad idea. 😀
That is really cool though. That could make some absolutely devastating wound channels in little fuzzy critters. 🙂
Got a few hundred more eun jins to burn through, shouldn’t take long, then I think I’m going to switch to these. 🙂
looks like they work well, worth persuing. Next test on a crow or ghg. (with pics of course) 😈 😈 😈
Thanks for taking time to break away from the all important honey-do-list to show us all how it works; even though I’m quite sure it really hurt your feelings to be shooting when you could have been doing important stuff like mowing the lawn and taking the trash out.
Clearly, I have got to get a life! I got to thinking about the hollowpoint idea and since drilling holes in slugs was better than anything else I ought to be doing, I did it.
The first step was just to take some trash slugs and check out a simple cavity in the nose. I took 3 slugs and drilled the nose out. On one of them I used a wide bit that left a sharp rim, that’s the hole labled “widemouth” below.
On the right side of the picture above are the holes left by 3 of the next 6 slugs I made into HPs. The first 3 had flown close enough to continue the experiment… For the next 6 slugs I decided to be a little more consistent and made them all the same, or close to it. Here are the slugs after making them HPs.
Clearly, I need to work on my drill press as it has way too much wobble. The machining looks like I was carving with a spoon! It is not that apparent but to make these HP’s, I drilled the slugs 3 times. I first used the large bit to make a simple concave face to the slug, then I used a smaller bit to take the hollow area deeper and then I used an even smaller bitt to go down about a third of the way into the slug.
These slugs started out as roughly 63gr 7 ring slugs sized to .252. After drilling them out the weight was down to 55gr. I decided to take the 2 slugs that were 55.2gr and one 55.4gr and shoot a group to see if they were worth messing with. Here’s the first picture again but this time look at the right side:
That’s a nice group considering there were no second chances here! I don’t know if the double is the 2 slugs that were the exact same weight or not. But those 3 holes are good enough to hunt. That’s 43 yards BTW, a pretty decent airgun range and the best I can get here at home.
Given that the group was decent, I decided to shoot an apple and a jug of ice to see what the HP’s would do. I had intended to save one round for a “request” but I only nicked the apple on the first shot so I ended up using all the custom slugs…
Here’s the target:
Here at max zoom:
And here’s what happened:
The apple is a mess and the ice is shattered throughout the bottle. If it matters to you, the ice was precisely -2 degrees F.
The slug did not penetrate the ice bottle deeply but did transfer a lot of energy.
Iwas only able to recover one of the slugs that went through the apple. Actually, both slugs shot at the apple went through the apple and through the coloring book behind it. I guess one of them lodged in the wall…
Well, there you have it; 55gr .25 caliber hollowpoints at about 850 FPS…
Maybe you could cut some sort of notches to get it started? Something like a modified crow magnum pellet. I dunno, but it would be really cool if you could get these big things to peel back. That could cause some massive damage.
Wouldn’t want to see the cavity that deep on slugs this long if they were to be hollowpointed.
I have seen how hollowpoints with exaggerated cavities (like %75!) perform (or don’t perform, I should say) on game.
I think a really deep cavity will just take longer to build up the hydraulic pressure necessary for expansion, and would likely fail.
Hollowpointed trashcans like these could be an ideal fur/predator round in the .25 if they didn’t over-penetrate due to the additional weight behind the expanding point.
Experimentation on coyote, raccoon, and nutria could go a long way in determining the ideal slug-weight/speed/cavity depth.
That would further establish the .25 in my mind as the best all-around airgun caliber to have for hunting stuff under 50lbs.
Now that’s an interesting idea! I suppose if I got a V block set up perfectly on my drill press, that might be doable. I might just try that. A hollow base model might work too…..
I wonder if you could drill a hole down half or so of the length of the slug, and make it a massive hollow-point of sorts. 😀
Well, I’m dying to see some groups from Cedric to see if these slugs will print reliably accurate groups from Condor .25 barrels. I’m also curious to see if the trend for the 8 ring slugs to shoot better than the 6 ring slugs holds up. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Condor .25 to do any comparisons with. All I have in .25 is a Barnes that shoots smaller diameter slugs (very accurately I might add) and a Sumatra carbine that has never been very accurate. I’ve cut the terrible choke off the Sumatra and today I decided to do a little more Dremel tool work on the crown (no, I’m not a gunsmith by any stretch of the imagination!). I then pulled out some slugs here and decided to compare the 7 and 9 ring versions since no groups of those have been posted yet. Unfortunately, all my 9 ring slugs have already been sized to .251 and the Sumatra barrel just barely engraves those slugs. Given the length of the 9 ring though, it might not make that big a difference.
To take as much “gun” out of the equation, I shot with the gun connected to a regulator set at 3200psi. The Sumatra has never developed a proper curve for me despite a bunch of different settings being tried so I just tethered it to get rid of the constant drop in velocity.
Here are the two groups:
I’ll leave it to you guys to figure out if we’ve learned anything. I will note that those are the only groups I shot today so they are not “cherry picked.” I also want to point out that at least out to 43 yards, the 9 ring slugs were stable.
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OK, I know these arent MOA 100 yard groups, but thought there’d be a bit of chatter about them. Wasnt more folks interested in 100 yard groups with the big slugs? Damn…. tough crowd.