Bonded Bullets – Goldilocks or Just Hype?

Left to right, jacketed and all copper bullets, three recovered bonded bullets, and two new bonded bullets from Nosler.

The Setup

I squeezed off a shot at the cow elk running downhill and straight at me. At 140 yards, I knew it was going to be a solid shot, and wasn’t surprised when she went down. However, as elk can do, she quickly staggered back up again. I hit her again broadside and even then decided on a third shot as she was struggling when she went down.

The prior year, I had taken a bull with the same 270 Winchester with one shot using a Nosler Partition. I only recovered half of that bullet, which caused me to reconsider bullet choice. The bullet did its job, but I wasn’t confident in the final configuration. So I had done some research and purchased a couple of boxes of Trophy Bonded Bearclaws for my cow hunt.

My Experience

The two recovered bullets gave me a bit of a surprise. One had gone through the base of the neck without hitting much bone and lodged in the chest. The other went through the near shoulder and rested in the outside hide. They were almost identical beautiful mushrooms. They had expanded more than double-diameter and both weighed right about 130 grains of the original 140. I was absolutely impressed.

Trophy Bonded were early pioneers in bonded bullet technology. What they lacked in aerodynamics, they made up for in terminal performance. If you think about my experience with them, they dumped 100 percent of their energy in the animal and achieved maximum penetration. They did not leave exit wounds, which suited my needs just fine.

What a Bullet Should Do

Bullets have a job to do in big game hunting. Specifically, they must first penetrate near-side armoring of bone and muscle and drive through the vitals. While they do this, they must dump energy into the vitals to create the damage needed for a quick kill. If the dumping of energy were not critical, everyone would hunt with armor-piercing rounds. Expanding bullets solve the second half of the equation.

Expanding bullets can be overly frangible. They must not expand or fragment so much that they cannot enter the vitals. Yet, they must expand enough to avoid just sliding through the animal without doing damage. For deer and antelope-sized game, so many options are available that work with most cartridges. When we hunt elk to moose sized animals, we need to think a little harder.

More is Better

In the “old days”, when bullets were bullets and jacketed Power Points ruled the world, we had ways of solving the problem. First, instead of dainty 120 grain bullets, we just bumped them up to 200 or 250 grain bullets. If that bullet sheds half of its mass, you are still getting a tremendous amount that penetrates. This led to development of the magnums. Heavy-hitters from 300 and 338 Winchester, 7mm Remington, and even 375 H&H started to really catch on in North America.

By driving a much bigger bullet at still blistering speeds, we could then really kill things. I’m a huge fan of magnums for a number of reasons. They push aerodynamic bullets really fast and reach out a far distance. They do compensate a little bit for mistakes in the field. However, I’m convinced that in the hands of novice shooters, they also create mistakes.

A New Day

Bullet technology provides us now with bonded, all-copper/alloy, and specialized hunting hollow-points. Aerodynamics have been significantly improved since the days Sierra and Speer battled it out in the boat-tail world. Now we can select from jacketed, bonded, solid, hollow-point, and a number of variants.

Left to right, note complete lead core separation from first jacketed bullet, and near total loss of copper expanding petals on the all-copper muzzleloader bullet. The middle three bullets are recovered bonded bullets and the two on the right are .277 Nosler bonded bullets, unfired.

Each of these bullets can improve performance in the hunting field. Now a hunter can better match his own rifle’s caliber to the game he is hunting. This expands the usefulness of the rifle and also can result in improved accuracy and effectiveness in the field.

Bonded Bullets

The bonded bullet represents a relative Goldilocks for many cartridges. It tends to provide expansion that rivals any other jacketed bullet. This provides massive wound channels, hemorrhaging, and energy transfer. It also tends to retain a very high percentage of its original mass. This allows the bullet to retain momentum and penetrate far more deeply than most jacketed bullets.

Bonding is a process whereby the manufacturer uses heat, electrochemistry, or just plain who knows to bond the inner soft lead to the outer stiff copper. This allows engineers to design expansion ranges that are quite broad. For instance, a Nosler Accubond will not shed more than about 40 to 50 percent of its mass at 3,200 fps impact, but will still open satisfactorily at 1,800 fps impact.

Bonded tends to bring out the best in a suitable cartridge. It helps a cartridge like the 270 Winchester extend its elk-killing range. It helps the 300 WSM to really hammer an elk without wasting the bulk of its energy in the dirt on the other side. Bonded bullets help a 22-250 to be an adequate deer or antelope cartridge within a certain range. Bonded bullets do exactly what expanding bullets were always meant to do. They expand enough to dump the energy into soft tissue and organs without falling apart and penetrate through the first few layers of bone and muscle.

Exit Wound Controversy

Most folks desire an exit wound. There is good reason for this. An exit wound provides a better blood trail if your animal is wounded and travels very far. I happen to agree with this philosophy to some extent. Hit your animal inside the chest cavity and you don’t need an exit wound. It is dead on its feet. If you hit it in the leg, you will get a lot of blood and usually an exit. If the shooter hits it in the neck, almost any bullet will produce an exit wound. So that really just leaves us with the gut-shot animal or your desire to penetrate both sides of the hip if poorly shot.

Often bonded bullets will produce an exit wound on a gut shot. It will also penetrate both sides of the hip if in an appropriate cartridge for the game. My philosophy has evolved. I see the advantage of an exit wound. That bullet wastes energy, however, in providing that opening on the other side. A heavy-hitting caliber might have plenty to spare, as long as it dumps enough. We’d all use armor piercing or full metal jacket rounds, if maximum (100 percent) mass retention and an exit wound were the gold standard. Silly.

Where bullets like the Barnes copper bullets really shine is when you are using a somewhat light-for-game caliber and bullet weight. It will get you a lot of expansion and drive all the way through the vitals. I’m far less concerned about exit wounds than I am making sure the energy gets dumped into the vitals. I used a 100 grain Barnes TTX in my 25-06 to take a mature cow at 350 yards. The bullet performed perfectly, twice. It gave me two nice exit wounds and did a ton of damage. If I’d had access to a 110 grain bonded bullet at that time, I probably would have considered it instead.

Final Thoughts

There really is no silver bullet when it comes to big game hunting. More is better to a point. Unfortunately, recoil gets you to that point, and you flinch. Practice gets you around that, again, to a point. The bonded bullet squeezes a maximum amount of performance out of most cartridges when used on deer, elk, moose and the like. The highly optimal combination of mass retention and massive expansion really is what a good North American big game bullet needs to be.