Very much new to shooting a .308 , this season I had to shoot whatever I could find , Norma 150 white tail and I want to get some better preformance and was researching monolithic
seems like I need to drop some weight to 130gr ttsx , I look and 99% of the monos require
+/- 2000fps to open them. the .308 seems very anemic past 300 meters , thus has me worried about energy transfer with 150-165 mono’s .
question is should I just stick to CC like partitions & accubond in .308 or do the barns & sako
preform @ those low FPS <300 meters ?
You don't
need to drop to a lower bullet class weight. Mono bullets usually retain more of their original bullet weight inside an animal than a C&C bullet does, so a 130 grain TTSX bullet will probably have a greater retained bullet weight inside the animal than a 150 gr C&C bullet would. A lighter bullet fired in the same gun as a heavier bullet will have a higher muzzle velocity which will shoot flatter and may possibly have more initial energy than a heavier bullet would. BUT, the lighter bullet will usually have a lower Ballistic Coefficient than a heavier bullet, so the lighter bullet will loose it's velocity quicker and at longer distances, the higher BC bullet will be traveling faster.
Out to 300 or even to 400 yards, I don't think that there would be any significant killing difference between a 130 grain TTSX bullet or a 150 grain Accubond bullet fired from a .308 Win.
I'm guessing CC means lead core. Something about bullets. They are designed to work a certain way. Some can certainly fail now and them but generally the bullet seldom fails, the shooter does. Take a lead core varmint bullet and try to endo an animal and likely your gonna be disappointed and blame the bullet. Take the right bullet and poorly place the shot and again your gonna be disappointed and blame the bullet. Take a monolithic bullet and miss place it and again, blame the bullet. In each case the shooter is to blame, not the bullet. The 308 is very poor past 300 meter's. The only way it will work is if the shooter properly places the bullet. Shooting out that far and more is all about shooting, if you fail, don't blame the rifle or cartridge, the next guy might just make it work! I know nothing to speak of about monolithic bullets other than it seems you have to go down in weight with them. My guess why would be a 150gr mono bullet might need to be seated to deep in a case. But a heavier 165gr lead core bullet driven at about the same speed as a 130gr mono will deliver more pounds of energy till some where going through the animal. Reason being the lead core bullet loses weight penetrating and the mono doesn't. Normally a mono entering will deliver about the same energy all the way through the animal. The lead core bullet will expand and actually lose weight penetrating. Two things penetrate velocity and weight. 130gr mono should exit with the same energy it enters with. The 165 gr partition is designed to maintain 70% of it's weight so it will exit with less energy than it enters with. Bonded bullets, at least Noslers, are designed to maintain 70% of their weight. But here's the kicker, most all of them on a chest shot will exit the animal unless something heavy is hit. So with that in mind, really doesn't matter what bullet you use as long as you can shoot it well and place it well. Wouldn't phase me one bit to shoot at game with a 130gr mono bullet. What phases me is the cost of the bullets!
I should add that a 165gr lead core bullet that loses 30% of it's weight penetrating weights, in theory, 115.5 grs. That means somewhere penetrating it's energy and weight dropped below the 130gr mono bullet.
In 50 some years of big game hunting, I have only shot at one animal past 350 yards. That was back in 1966 when I didn't know any better, and I shot at my first elk with a borrowed .30-40 Krag and that bull was so far away that the front bead completely covered him. Luckily back then there weren't many hunters in the woods, and 12 more shots and one plus mile later I finally killed him.
Accuracy and bullet placement is the major key in all hunting. A 140 gr Ballistic Tip bullet from a 7 mm RM in the chest of an African Waterbuck will kill him a lot faster than will a .375 H&H bullet in his foot. But that's another story.
Because copper mono bullets are less dense than lead C&C bullets they are longer for the same weight bullet and will probably have to be seated deeper which will take up some powder space, but I think that the main reason that you can shoot a lighter weight class mono bullet is what I described above.
In a lot of cases, the killing power of any bullet is the destruction of vital organs deep inside the animal. That destruction is the result of the amount of energy transferred from the bullet to that organ. Many C&C bullets fail to quickly kill an animal because the bullet comes apart and fails to deliver enough energy to the organs deep inside the animal.
All bullets quickly begin losing velocity and energy as soon as the bullet hits the animal, and the deeper the bullet penetrates, the more energy it loses. If a bullet stops inside the animal, the velocity and energy of that bullet at the point where it stopped is zero. The shape of the nose of the bullet has a big factor to how deep that bullet will penetrate AND how much energy that bullet will transfer to the animal tissue. A full metal jacket bullet has very little surface area at it's point and it will often completely penetrate the animal and the bullet will transfer very little energy to the animal tissue. With an expanding bullet, as the front of the bullet mushrooms, it flattens and transfers more if not all of it's energy to the animal's tissue.
An animal's hide is very flexible and elastic. When my main elk bullet was a .30 caliber 180 grain Nosler Partition, I would very often find my bullet just under the skin on the off side of the animal. The lead in the front half of the bullet would be gone and the copper nose would have opened back to the partition, making it a large flat surface that, when it got to the hide on the other side of the animal, it didn't have the energy to punch through the hide and the flexibility of the hide kept the bullet inside. If those bullets had penetrated just 1/8" more (of hide), they would have completely penetrated those animals, but they very definitely would not have exited with the same velocity and energy as they had when they entered the animal.
All bullets that completely penetrate an animal lose some of their velocity and energy inside the animal and do not exit the animal with the same velocity and energy that they entered the animal with.
I used to think that 300 yards was a very long shot at an animal. It still is, but in the last 4 or 5 years, I bought Weatherby Vanguards in .223 and .308 Win, and I practice almost every week shooting them from a prone position at steel gongs at our range out to 430 yards. I'm at the point now where I do not expect to miss the 300 yard gong, and if it's not too windy, I expect to hit the 430 yard gong at least 4 shots out of 5. Practice, practice, practice.
