Quote:Aren't these supposed to be too fragile for larger critters. Please share your experiences and thoughts.
Well, let's think about this. Where does it say that they are too fragile for anything? It isn't on the box, right? It isn't on Speer's website. They are just marketed as varmint rounds.
Marketing is a funny thing. A company can have two really good bullets that perform virtually the exact same way and market one for hunting and market the other for precision shooting. After all, all the people in the know will
know that you don't use a precision bullet for hunting and you don't use a hunting bullet for precision shooting. Neither would be considered "reliable" for the task, right? However, the two bullets are virtually identical in every way. One gets a tip added of one color and the other gets a tip added of a different color. Marketing.
People also threw around the notion that a bullet is or is not designed to do something. "Well that bullet is designed for varmints, not big animals like hogs or deer." Okay, that may even be true, but in reality, what does it matter what the designer had in mind? If design intent was the be all to end all of function, we would not have kelvar vests (kevlar was developed for tire belting), viagra (blood pressure medicine for which it failed the trials), and countless other products. Doing a brief google search and you can find many, some of which are pretty funny. The point here is that design intent is only part of the creative process and not necessarily part of the end user process.
Speer TNT 90 gr. bullets are marketed as a varmint bullet. They do come apart inside of hogs. I have never found a complete or mostly complete TNT bullet inside of a hog. I think the largest piece I ever found was about 30 grains and usually they are smaller than that.
Penetration can vary from about 7" to >10" depending on what the bullet hits inside of the hog. Overpenetration is not out of the question on hogs less than 160 lbs (hogs shot inside 150 yards and the TNT leaving the barrel at 2800 fps). What overpenetrates is a fragment or fragments. I have managed several twofers with TNT bullets, on smaller hogs where the 2nd hog was close behind the first and the 2nd hog is often peppered with multiple pieces, indicating that the bullet had fragmented inside the first hog. Permanent would channels are often in excess of 1" and sometimes approaching 2" or so in size, though this is usually not reflected by the hide. The wound channel is not a clean cut wound channel as you may get with bullets that hold together well. Inside, the channel is quite irregular. There may be smaller wound channels deviating from the main channel as some bullet fragments take different courses (not uncommon to happen with fragments of any bullet, of course).
There are some other varmint bullets that do not function nearly as well at TNT in hog-sized game. They do appear to be much more delicate and don't work nearly as well as the TNT round, but how would you know without trying? At the same time, there are some hunting bullets that are not great performers for hunting either. Controlled Chaos bullets were designed for "animal control" but their brass versions in 6.5 don't seem to open up at Grendel or Creedmore velocities. They tend to pencil right through despite design intent and marketing.
Aside from Hornady SST 123 gr. factory ammo, my favorite ammo is Federal Speer TNT 90 gr factory ammo. I actually prefer the TNT load because of the reduced risk down range from a bullet that overpenetrates. I have literally killed hundreds of hogs with the TNT bullet. I like it.
