Think I’m convinced

[NugginFutz]

A draw back is the Grendel will not always pass thru deer leaving a blood trail.

Hardly a drawback unique to the Grendel. Shot placement, ammunition selection, MV all play a part of whether or not a pass through is achieved.

Lmao, I have seen 300wm not pass throw a deer and leave a blood trail.

Indeed. The higher MV's tend to dump all their energy quite quickly, especially with the thinner jacketed bullets.

Shot placement

Pretty much says it all.

...is very easy to do well with the Grendel!

Can't argue with this, at all. The mild nature of the Grendel really facilitates lots of trigger time. Trigger time = greater proficiency (usually).

Neither did my .308 two years ago. Broadside deer hit absolutely perfect through the lungs (no leg impact) at 30 yards with a 130 TSX just under 3000 fps. Beautiful copper mushroom just under the hide on the opposite side. Surprised the heck out of me that it did not exit!!!

Sometimes we can deliver what could be considered the perfect shot, and yet things like this will happen. Having read through the Knock Down Survey, I've seen more than a few "WTH!" comments, including DNS's magic killer elbow shot. (Hog was hit in the elbow, and the bullet traveled up the arm and exited three hogs over (or something equally bizarre).

Whether you get pass through on an animal or not has to do with bullet construction, weight, impact velocity etc. Very little if not anything to do with the cartridge.
A Grendel shooting a copper bullet will penetrate way more than a 300 WM shooing a 125 BT at 3500 FPS

Thank you! The bullets do not know what rifle they were shot from, any more than the game animal does.


All in all, for the shooters in the survey who reported pass through data as part of their post, the data aligned this way:

For just deer (WT, Stag, etc) 85 reported pass through, while 11 reported no exits. That's approximately an 87% pass through rate. While I have no similar data for other calibers, I'd call 87% some very good performance.