Thread: FMJ on animals

Anyone got much experience with FMJ on animals?

As a general idea it's bad-very very bad, but sometimes certain ammo is ok on some sizes of animals.
What ammo do you have and what do you want to hunt?

My old man used ex army 303 ammo for donkeys years on Deer, Pigs and Goats........ worked ok for him.

When I was an apprentice I made a drill jig for him so he could drill out the tips of the projectiles and turn it into hollow points.

Cheers
Pete

The Mk VII .303 ammo would tumble ferociously, so I have read. Pretty base heavy with a cardboard or alloy tip.

Its very iffy particularly if you are planning to shoot goats with 223 FMJ. The normal thing to do I this situation is to pull all the projectiles out and replace them with cheap soft points keeping the same powder charge.

head shots you'll be right

Originally Posted by Toby

head shots you'll be right

Your on to it Toby

Cheers
Pete

Unless you miss the fairly small brain and shoot it's jaw off, then it's bad, very bad.

um might depend on the velocity/range for the 55gr in an ar15? From what I read at high velocity the 55gr is meant to tumble on impact and split at the canular causing a bad wound just like a softpoint? so same effect as a soft point, but at longer ranges that doesnt happen, it just goes straight through.

That's how M193 performs inside like 100m, generally. If I had to I would use FMJ. Not really any point if you have any other option.

When I was a bit younger & had bugger all money ,the local gun smith (ex military trained) showed me how to file off the tip of FMJ ammo to perform as well as soft point sporting ammo.
The trick is to file the point down until the lead core shows ,you can drill a small hole in as well but don't really need to .
We use to get some wicked exit holes with it ,goats mainly & there was a lot of them around here . Cheap ammo to go out & bomb up a big mob & a lot of fun .

Nathan fosters website is a mine of info, he reckons that the norinco 55gr .223 would perform as well as hunting ammo something to do with the bullet design makes it work as Eugene Stoner intended

Originally Posted by Marty Henry

Nathan fosters website is a mine of info, he reckons that the norinco 55gr .223 would perform as well as hunting ammo something to do with the bullet design makes it work as Eugene Stoner intended

Unfortunately he is prone to making claims on calibres he has not used or extensively experimented with.

Originally Posted by Marty Henry

Nathan fosters website is a mine of info, he reckons that the norinco 55gr .223 would perform as well as hunting ammo something to do with the bullet design makes it work as Eugene Stoner intended

I dont think, or I have seen no proof Stoner knew exactly what the effect would be. Could be wrong, so if someone has a URL Im interested in reading it. As a target guy I have not paid much attention to the wounding side of it, paper is paper. Anyway I spent some time digging in my info as I got interested in the Q and my books have quite a lot on it.

The first commonly issued M16 had a 1 in 12 twist (lets ignore the 1 in 14 oopsie) and first, the 55gr FMJ. From what I have read that bullet only worked because it was only just stable and because of its very high velocity, 3200fps. So as long as you are above 2500fps the proper/real FMJ is going to split in 2 major pieces at the canalure plus fragment and do a lot of damage, it also reads that it needs to be not over-stabilized.

So shooting the proper 55grain FMJ in a 1 in 12 twist (typical?) 22inch barrelled boltie at a terminal velocity of no less than 2500fps might work very well (<250m?), Note by 2300fps the bullet is no longer snapping in half by the way from the photos/research I have seen.

There are also FMJs and FMJs. So Belmont sells what they call seconds, 556nato, 55FMJs at $28 (ish) per 50 strikes me they are cheap, seem pretty accurate from my target testing so could work really well in a bolt gun on an animal below 200 or maybe 250m. The FMJs in say barnual ammo? I have no idea if it breaks up the same, it might be stronger as its steel jacketed? best avoided I suspect. If hand loading for a bolt gun, well it looks like you want them as fast as possible to work better.

If you are going to have a go, let us know how you do, I for one am very interested if it works, especially as its cheap!

Stoner didn’t intend anything with .223. The cartridge was selected for the AR15 after research done at Aberdeen proving ground. Stoner/Sullivan's original intended cartridge was 7.62x51.