Thread: Stop The Presses! Hornady Discovers Meplat Trimming (DRVT)

After watching Hornadys video on DRVT and feeling like I got stuck in the marketing teams latrine, I went to the patent.

Turns out if the meplat is too small it's hard to manufacture consistently. And if the meplat is too large the BC suffers. Who would have thought? Maybe I missed the point.

Anyway, for tipped bullets .20-0.51" diameter the ideal meplat ratio is 0.07:1-0.18:1 according to Hornady. Checkout FIG .4 and FiG .5 in the patent.

Haha I also had that video in my YouTube feed. Maybe they just needed an excuse to add $10 a box to the eldm's

They’re only telling 2/3 of the story

Internal ballistics and external ballistics

A proper meplat diameter is crucial for proper terminal ballistics

berger did something on this a few years back when they separated the target and hunting lines.
they talked about having a slightly larger opening on the target bullets to ensure better concentricty.
the hunting lines also have a thiner jacket.
( since then they have upgraded machine capability.)
Z

From what i gathered from it was
if the tips too pointy you get better bc but its less constant across many bullets say 1-50 and will cause a flyer
If they make the tip a little more blunt it means a slightly lower bc but it stays far more constant across all bullets

Also they been using it for years they only just announcing it as now its got the patent

So if you make the bullet right it works good then?

Originally Posted by No.3

So if you make the bullet right it works good then?

No that's not really what this is about. @199p summarises the essence of it very well.

For a company that often gets accused of being all marketing and no substance, the marketing department of Hornady does a fantastic job of reinforcing that notion at every opportunity. That's kind of dumb, because what some of the podcasts have shown is that the guys that work there in engineering and ballistics are keen shooters like a lot of us who have the qualifications and smarts to work at the business of figuring out what they don't know and how to make stuff better.

If you listen to the podcast about the drag variability it involves a lot of rigorous and tedious work to isolate the error they have seen at random and be able to reproduce that error. Once you can reproduce the error then you can try ideas to minimise the error. That seems to be the crux of this subject.

I don't know if I've been sucked in by the slick marketing, but the ballistics series of podcasts are great listening/watching to understand the subject much better. They've done enough different episodes now that I think they're doing genuine statistically valid testing and can see the value in sharing that with their market. Not everyone wants or needs to know this level of information which is absolutely fine - but it's there if you're curious.

Take the flashy loud marketing for what it is, but when Jayden, Miles, Jacob and Joe talk it's worth listening to IMHO. I'd like to think my bullshit detector is good enough to know when we're being fed a line.

My favourite comment about Jayden Quinlan was someone who said " he looks like your drunk uncle but talks like a college professor"!

PS The episodes with Jeff Siewert are particularly interesting for the intersection of engineering and physics, often in medium to larger calibre applications.

So those of us back in the day with .303's and lots of those cheap cardboard round packets of FMJ's that we dealt to the tips with a flat file were ahead of our time

Originally Posted by Steelisreal

No that's not really what this is about. @199p summarises the essence of it very well.

For a company that often gets accused of being all marketing and no substance, the marketing department of Hornady does a fantastic job of reinforcing that notion at every opportunity. That's kind of dumb, because what some of the podcasts have shown is that the guys that work there in engineering and ballistics are keen shooters like a lot of us who have the qualifications and smarts to work at the business of figuring out what they don't know and how to make stuff better.

If you listen to the podcast about the drag variability it involves a lot of rigorous and tedious work to isolate the error they have seen at random and be able to reproduce that error. Once you can reproduce the error then you can try ideas to minimise the error. That seems to be the crux of this subject.

I don't know if I've been sucked in by the slick marketing, but the ballistics series of podcasts are great listening/watching to understand the subject much better. They've done enough different episodes now that I think they're doing genuine statistically valid testing and can see the value in sharing that with their market. Not everyone wants or needs to know this level of information which is absolutely fine - but it's there if you're curious.

Take the flashy loud marketing for what it is, but when Jayden, Miles, Jacob and Joe talk it's worth listening to IMHO. I'd like to think my bullshit detector is good enough to know when we're being fed a line.

My favourite comment about Jayden Quinlan was someone who said " he looks like your drunk uncle but talks like a college professor"!

PS The episodes with Jeff Siewert are particularly interesting for the intersection of engineering and physics, often in medium to larger calibre applications.

I think you might have missed where I was going with that, if you make the bullet with the right sized tip, all uniform across every bullet, and just at the 'Goldilocks' width (just right) we will have one bullet to rule them all and won't need to have to make a choice between target grade accuracy and hunting terminal performance. Oh look, a flying pig haha.

Of course the technical info is nice, and looking at my pile of G1 Berger 300Gr Hybrids - I've always wondered what would happen if the tips were all uniform. Of course, a perfectly uniform hole in the end of an 8.6mm width 300gr pill is starting to get into the territory of anal retentive - if you hit what you've aimed at, it is well coosed in my experience.

Which is better, a hole or a tip...?

ever looked even semi hard at bunch of sierra hpbt projectiles???? the tips are all over the show but the buggers still shoot accurately....
my understanding of target projectiles is that back in the day the hollow point ruled as theory was small air bubble was formed in the front..then along came Noslers ballistic tip to stop magazine damage..yes thats correct,it was put there to begin with to stop lead tip getting mashed up under heavy recoil.....and it seems it took over as the normal for accuracy