7mm 175 gn ELD-X on Elk?

[TheViking]

I had my first 175 ELD-X kill over the weekend with about a 100lb whitetail buck. Impact velocity was a modest 2500 FPS - not screaming fast, not super slow - and I slipped it just behind both front shoulders so I didn't loose too much meat. However, had I nicked a shoulder, I'm sure I would have lost a LOT of meat - wow... That thing was an absolute grenade inside the chest cavity.

On post mortem, it had shredded both lungs, the liver, AND some of the guts on the way through, and left little chunks of lead and jacket everywhere. If I was visualizing the swath of destruction, I'd say it's probably about the size of a basketball on the inside. I presume this is because fragments were spreading out in all directions. There was an exit, so at least some percentage of it held together and went all the way through, but it sucked a piece of lung out of the hole, so the blood trail was kind of sparse. Luckily he only went about 30 yards, so it wasn't a big deal (and maybe he would have bled better had he gone farther).

Anyway, it obviously worked, and if the goal is to create as insane a wound tract as possible, these appear to be really good at that. That said, if I had dropped this in a shoulder, I have 0 doubt I would have lost the entire shoulder (possibly both if it hit both of them on the way through), just for concerns of lead fragments if nothing else.

Since accuracy/shot placement trumps almost everything else, and in this gun, these are far and away the most accurate bullet I've tried, I'll keep running them in this one. But I remain not convinced that this is the best way to harvest meat; I think an Accubond with a smaller wound tract (that is still more than adequate if you pump it through the chest cavity) would leave me with more and better eating.

Way too much gun for that small of an animal. If you continue using that cartridge for deer, I agree on using a better constructed bullet. I recently used a federal fusion tipped and had great success. It holds together a lot better, but still dumps ~20% of its weight into the animal, more of a happy/medium.

 

[NorthIdahoDude]

Way too much gun for that small of an animal. If you continue using that cartridge for deer, I agree on using a better constructed bullet. I recently used a federal fusion tipped and had great success. It holds together a lot better, but still dumps ~20% of its weight into the animal, more of a happy/medium.

Ummmm - it was a 7x57 with a muzzle velocity a hair over 2500 FPS; already 'less gun' than almost anything else I own (308's and 30-06s and 7mm-08's). What exactly do you think is 'too much' gun about it?

But yeah, I think we are on the same page, I am feeling like I like the Partition/Accubond/Interbond/Fusion/etc theory best - about the front 1/3rd of the bullet should go off like a grenade and the back 2/3rds should go through like a drill bit - best of both worlds when it comes to the two primary mechanisms of how wounds are created - weight retention+penetration being one, and fragmentation/shrapnel being the other.