| |
|  |
Another crappy test by B4Ctom1
What we shot
50 BMG: ball, tracer, spotter-tracer, AP, API
7.62 NATO: ball, AP
7.62x54R: incendiary
What I personally loaded; pulled incendiary Canadian .303 Brit bullets into grafs 7.62x54r since they both use a .3105-.311" bullet, pulled IMI M61 AP bullets into 7.62 NATO, and only a few of the various 50 BMG Tracer, API and AP rounds we fired. I shot pics and video.
What they were shot from:
7.62x54r handloaded incendiary was fired from my ultra rare Hungarian M/52 Mosin Nagant Sniper
7.62 NATO ball and AP was fired out of a synthetic stocked remington 700
50 BMG rounds of all types were fired from My custom single shot
more on it can be seen HERE
Here are the pics
The plate.
It is approximately .875" thick, and appears to be of the same colled rolled steel used in some armored vehicles.
First with the 7.62 NATO M80 ball to show the plate is no pushover.
Followed up by the 7.62 NATO M61 Armor Piercing.
This plate further impresses by stopping three 50 BMG plain "Ball" rounds in their tracks. One of which embeds in the plate. It could be wiggled but it wasn't coming out without a fight.
A 50 BMG tracer round actually faired better. It nearly made it through!
The lower velocity 50 BMG exploding M48 Spotter-Tracer round barely made a mark.
The 50 BMG Armor Piercing made it right through.
The 50 BMG Armor Piercing Incendiary made it through like it was butter, with a light explosive "bang".
I made a video, here I am saying stupid things while filming:
http://www.outlawperformance.com/movies/theplate.3G2
Disclaimer: Never ever shoot at steel, because dangerous, or deadly ricochets can occur. Firing at water, rock, steel, or any other hard object is for absolute idiots. I am a certified jackass, unless you are qualified or certified by the sanctioning body, never perform these tests.
Some of the shooting, is just shooting rounds at a hill a ways away. It was cold and rainy, we were more into shooting the plate than making some sort of show for accuracy. If you were expecting some sort of exhibition of marksmanship, you are watching the wrong video.
All of the property you can see in the video is private. There are no live power lines in these privately owned poles you see in the background. Also the barn you see near the trees is unoccupied. It is one of the shooter's families old stone barn. What is beyond the horizon is another 10 or 20 miles of similar rolling prairie. No animals, children, or nuns were killed, injured, harmed, or otherwise mentally bothered during the filming of this video.
One thing is for sure, the fun was incredible. I would love to get the land owner to drag an old car out there to shoot for the next video.
I hope you enjoyed this.
A note about "Armor Piercing" ammo:
As has been discussed at length in other posts in this forum, just because it is magnetic doesn't mean it has a steel core. Because of the same gilding process used on the shell casings, a soft steel bullet jacket and copper plating or washing of the bullet could be the case, a magnet will stick to it. This causes issues at ranges that have "no magnetic round" rules. It also allows unscrupulous ammo sellers to bag this ammo up and claim it is rare AP ammo.
Another problem is that some ammo has a mild steel core for cost of production. Steel is cheaper than lead as a commodity in times of war. Contrary to belief, not all "steel core" ammo is necessarily "AP". Once again unscrupulous sellers will claim standard production mild steel cored M855 5.56, x54r, x39, 8mm, etc ammo is "AP"
Real AP ammo is all tungsten steel cored. For example, ALL 50 BMG "ball" ammo is steel core, every bit of it. But as you saw, in the first 50 BMG pics, when using this steel cored "ball", the mild steel sucks when it comes to AP capability.
Most of your 7.62x54r silvertip ammo has a mild steel core. Once again even at identical velocities and bullet weights, a Czech silvertip 7.62x54r round for example would have no chance against that plate. But if I loaded the same Czech round with an M61 AP bullet, I have no doubt it would penetrate identically to the 7.62 nato rounds I loaded up. M61 AP rounds are tungsten cored.
I wouldn't recommend that you try steel, because mild steel cores, bullet jackets, and even AP cores bouncing back at you and killing you isn't funny, unless you are a full on jackass of course.
But, if you want to be dumb like me...
There are some in 7.62x39, 30-06, and 8mm mauser if you look around hard enough. Using a magnet isn't a good test because many "copper" jackets are actuall a "copper cladding" which has enough steel in it to be magnetic but not really hard on your barrel.
For you 7.62x54r shooters there is some Bulgarian "steel core heavy ball" which is identified by it's painted silver over yellow tip. This two color tip ammo is at least "semi-AP" because instead of a mild steel core, I believe it uses a similarly dense hardened steel to increase its weight or in some cases actual tungsten.
I myself have not disected the core of this ammo to insure this is correct. I do have a couple rounds so maybe next time I can shoot them at the plate to see what happens.
The plain old yellow tip ammo is lead cored heavy ball, so it wouldn't have much of any kind of AP capability.
For those that want to "roll your own" there are the 150 grain M61 AP bullets I used in this test. These .308 inch bullets work fine in 7.5 swiss, 30-06, 7.62 nato, 7.5 french.
For testing purposes, with some mild loss of accuracy (shooting closer to same accuracy as most military surplus) These same .308 inch M61 AP bullets can be used in .311-.313 inch guns such as the 7.7 Jap, .303 Brit, 7.62x54r, 7.65 argentine.
This means fun for all that reload.
The sad part is that with my searching I have only found two places that have ANY kind of .308 AP bullets.
One is http://www.patsreloading.com
308 147 AP projectiles, 500-$94.99, 1000-$179.00, 2000-$174.00 per 1000, +shipping
and the other is the place I got mine http://www.polygunbag.com
#1 Plus Premium Grade M61-AP .308 FN/Israeli, 152 grains, Part# BU20, (currently sold out)
As far as even components, this is all there is. This applies to every non-ball round in every caliber. AP, tracer, incendiary, API, all of it.
This isn't a new problem like ammo prices now, this has been diminishing for years. Thanks to laws from back in the early 1990's, when this is gone there will be no more. Years ago there were warehouses full of 30-06 pulled AP and even API rounds. Now there are a couple boxes of rounds from a hand full of sellers. Some even sell rounds individually.
Because of this law there won't be any allowed to be sold to you "after the war", and none are legally allowed to be imported either. All there is, is what was laying around at the time the law went into effect. At the time this was millions and millions of rounds and bullets. Today as you can see it is not near that.
So buy now, or say "wow I should have gotten a couple of those rounds or bullets for fun some day..." later.
TITUS RACING - THE SHOP
Need hosting? I shopped around and I have more storage and bandwidth than I ever dream of using for less than $50 a year! click below.
Acenet Inc Enterprise Web Hosting
These cars built more affordably with parts won on Ebay by clicking the service below
  | | |
Site Navigation