-- not affiliated with this vendor --

got an email that they had done some interesting and rather extensive testing on various brands.

you can decide for yourself what to make of this info.

but info nonetheless and apparently all conducted with an objective, side-by-side methodology.

they tested 9mm, .40, .45acp, .380

https://www.ammunitiontogo.com...tm_term=AmmoToGo.com

HSTs do pretty well which is no surprise

one caveat I will note is they used a 'duty-length' .45acp gun but the .40 / 9mm / .380 loads were all tested with CCW-length barrels.

------------------------------------------------

I’m not sure I understand: How did a couple of 9mm bullets end up with smaller final diameter than the 0.355 inch they started with? The first one on the list shows 0.21".

Something to be aware of is the Clear Ballistics material is, as the article mentions, not gelatin. The test using only the synthetic (?) material can provide useful information, but for anyone truly interested in the matter, that’s something to keep in mind. I haven’t researched the issue very thoroughly, but one thing I’ve noted in reports about the Clear Ballistics material is that it’s somewhat elastic and bullets can rebound back from their deepest penetration in the block. That doesn’t happen with real gelatin, so I’ve wondered what other effects it may cause.

As for barrel lengths, using short barrels seems to be very common in these tests. I suppose that’s due to the popularity of such guns, but I always wonder how boosts in velocity would affect some results.

quote:

I’m not sure I understand: How did a couple of 9mm bullets end up with smaller final diameter than the 0.355 inch they started with? The first one on the list shows 0.21".

If I read the test protocol correctly, the shots were all fired through barriers before the gel, so that bullet may have broken-up.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
I’m not sure I understand: How did a couple of 9mm bullets end up with smaller final diameter than the 0.355 inch they started with? The first one on the list shows 0.21".

Same guys doing this who came up with >100% "stopping" effectiveness?

quote:

Originally posted by GaryBF:
so that bullet may have broken-up.

One evidently lost its expansion petals, but based on the photo, the 0.21" bullet was a Magtech 124 grain that evidently didn't expand at all and appeared to be fully intact.

Hi guys - Brandon from AmmoToGo.com here. Thanks for checking out our test. I thought I could provide some insight into the Magtech Guardian Gold mentioned above.

The Magtech you found was actually the victim of a coding bug on our part and that value of .21" is a bit misleading.

For most rounds, we were finding the average diameter across five rounds. With this Magtech Guardian Gold, we saw such a high penetration depth the rounds blew three three blocks and we could only recover three of the bullets.

So, we recorded two bullet expansion values as "X" when doing our testing. Our coding then mistakenly treated the "X" as a value of zero when we came up with the average expansion. Essentially - we were dividing by 5 when we really should have been dividing by three.

Since seeing your note over the weekend we were able to fix the bug. Now, we're only counting the three bullets that we were able to recover and measure. It doesn't make a huge difference as this round didn't expand much at all --- but wanted to let you know we appreciated the feedback. Thank you again for checking out the test. It's a resource we hope to keep adding to and hope it provides some value for other self-defense minded shooters.

Thanks for coming here and explaining the discrepancy. And at least you know that some of us are paying attention to your efforts.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
Thanks for coming here and explaining the discrepancy. And at least you know that some of us are paying attention to your efforts.

Actually - that was the first thing that we said when we saw this thread pop up. The attention to detail on your part is impressive! Glad to see we're not the only ones who care enough to "geek out" over this stuff!

Thanks for that info ATGBrandon. And welcome to SigForum! Visit often!

Let's see some 5.56 and 300 BO tests next!

Bruce

Ditto what RN Shooter said. There is a lot of pistol ammo info/gel block shooting but a dearth of 5.56. Love to see that. Regardless, that's great work you did, thank you so much!

I see the gel is calibrated before shipping but a BB test result to verify the blocks would be a welcome data point.

quote:

Originally posted by jimb888:
Ditto what RN Shooter said. There is a lot of pistol ammo info/gel block shooting but a dearth of 5.56. Love to see that. Regardless, that's great work you did, thank you so much!

lots of 5.56 info here

https://www.ar15.com/forums/AR...7-/16-719103/?page=1

(cross-posting for technical data) apologize if that is not allowed

--------------------------------------------