Oldbloke wrote:Blade, I really think they need hollow points to work well. Particularly if they are sub-sonic.
Wet news paper was something people used to use years ago.
How do you make ballistic gel? Anyone got the recipe?
I disagree
Lots and lots of people put food on their tables for many decades with the cheapest round-nose ammo available at the time, and still do so today.
Put a round-nose bullet, even subsonic, into the right part of your target and it will drop on the spot as if struck by lightning.
I've looked at ballistic gels, and they are fairly easy to make, though not real cheap due to the volume of gelatin required. It's basically gelatin dissolved in water, then allowed to set in the fridge.
But being animal-based, it goes off fairly quickly, even if kept refrigerated. You can a variety of chemicals to retard degradation, but not prevent it entirely, and these chemicals increase the cost significantly.
Clear Ballistics do a synthetic gelatine which will last essentially forever, without refrigeration. It's significantly more expensive, but in the long-term works out cheaper.
I just don't consider gel to be a true indication of how a bullet will behave in flesh and bone, it's more a means for testing bullets in a consistent medium for comparison with others than it is an analogue for flesh.
This is something I put together some time ago to post here but decided it wasn't relevant. It's not finalised for publication, just some basic notes I started putting together.
Been crook in bed all week, so I spent a lot of time perusing stuff online
I finally got some 190gn Sub-X .308" bullets to play with last week, designed to function down to 900fps in 300BLK.
It also lead me to look into clear ballistic gelatine, or more precisely, gel that doesn't go mouldy so quickly.
I found some experiments using a small amount of 5% Hydrogen Peroxide added to the gel. It seems to effectively defeat the mould growth, without significantly altering the ballistic properties of the gel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brBVi-UTTlMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzSiSJPL6ashttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j6nT_scSx4This bloke's home recipe is:
9000ml water
3000ml gelatine powder
600ml 5% hydrogen peroxide
240ml propionic acid
But this only makes 12.84 litres, doubling these numbers would make a test block about 500mm long by 230mm square.
The "standard" commercial test block is generally 400mm by 150mm square, but bullets often pass right through it, or veer out a side, sometimes requiring several shots to recover a bullet. It's roughly 9.3 litres volume and weighs about 8.2kg.
A kilogram of gelatine is about A$40-80 delivered.
A gel test block 500mm long by 250mm square is 31 litres volume.
https://www.clearballistics.com/shop/10 ... -20x10x10/