510 Wells Bullet

KnotRight

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This is a bullet that we shot at Billy's and might be a question for Michael.
When looking at the base of the bullet how do you reload it? The is a rim around the bottom. I need to get my calipers to see if the bullet is 510 or the rim.

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Knotright........

This is a Cutting Edge Bullets Safari Raptor. This particular bullet is Obsolete, but only because I changed the width of the cavity, or Hollow Point many years ago to facilitate lower velocity shear point...........

OK OK, WTF is that?

Raptors are designed to "Shear" 6 Blades at 1.5 to 2 inches inside aqueous medium, or tissue. These are called "Blades", not petals, as they have sharp edges, and the slice and dice their way through tissue along with the remaining center bullet, which is now a 100% Meplat of caliber solid. The blades travel along close with the center bullet for around 4-5 inches of penetration after shear. Then those blades start moving away from center wound channel and remaining solid bullet and become projectiles on their own. Ripping and destroying, slicing and dicing everything they come in contact with, vessels, arteries, internal organs, everything. Smaller animals 200 lbs or so, I have seen these blades exit far side roughly 10-12 inches away from center bullet. On buffalo they do not exit, and blades will be found along with internal organs in the mush and mess. Center bullet now acts as a big solid and will exit in almost all cases unless it is a rear to front, or front to rear, and on most big bores you are looking at 4-6 feet of penetration with the remaining solid.

These bullets are designed as "Bore Riders", only the Bands come in contact with the rifling in the barrel. There are three bands up front to guide the bullet into the bore, and the one band in the rear is to guide it as it leaves the barrel. Without that band in the rear, accuracy is for crap. The bands REDUCE bearing surface significantly which reduces pressures and also barrel strain.

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Here is an excellent comparison showing actual bearing surface of two different bullets. In the beginning we also tried a 2 band version, that actually worked very well in some cases....... later we found that 3 bands at the top did not significantly increase our barrel strain, or pressures, but did increase our versatility from one cartridge to the next with seating depth and crimping abilities...........

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And here you can see how velocity makes a big difference in performance with Raptors...... and this is the same bullet you guys were shooting the other day. I later increased the width of the cavity, reducing the shear velocity as well............Before they were named Raptors officially, they were called Non-Cons, short for "Non-Conventional", these bullets DO NOT behave like Conventional expanding bullets.....................

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Thanks Michael. Interesting in that the "New" style bullets like the ones in the 6 and 6.5 CM are longer bullets that seem to have more surface contact with the barrel. Is it because your bullets are used in much shorter ranges?
Any idea what the BC is on your bullets? While at your range you mentioned bullets for the 45/70. It would be interesting to see the comparison of yours 45/70 with the Missouri 405 gn coated lead bullet. I know you said that you get them from Midway but do not remember the brand.
 
More bearing surface does not equate into more accuracy. There are lots of guys shooting these same, similar banded bullets at 1000 yards plus. Dan, the owner of CEB, shot a nice tight 3 inch group with his 375 H&H at 600 yards with 235 gr Raptors, 3 bands top, one band bottom.......same.........

I do indeed shoot short range, because I hunt dangerous game. 50 yards is WAY OUT THERE LONG RANGE for that sort of work. But has zero to do with accuracy......... The BC on these is HORRIBLE, but not even much of a concern, as most will be used at far less than 50 yards......... There is one thing that is directly related to higher BC with the Raptor bullets. Raptors love velocity, the more velocity you get, the more of everything you get with the Raptors. We made some Talon Tips that can be inserted into the Raptors, on average this buys you an extra 125-150 fps Impact velocity at 50 yards. It makes a big difference with these bullets. The "Lever" Raptors are designed to work in Lever guns, they have a shorter Nose Projection to feed/function in levers. But what this also does, you seat them deep in the bolt gun cartridges, and add a talon Tip to them! I actually designed a cartridge specifically to take advantage of using the Longer Nose Projection of the Safari Raptors and adding a tip to those and work feed/function in the magazine, 500 B&M, which is a 2.5 inch RUM case, smaller twin to the 500 MDM.......

It would be interesting to see the comparison of yours 45/70 with the Missouri 405 gn coated lead bullet.

What sort of comparison?
 
Just some comparison of the bullet design. I found some of the bullets on Midway and it looked like a slug with some type of nipple on it. This is not a 458 caliper but assuming this is what you where talking about.

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Thanks,
 
I remember that thread and after looking at the 510 bullet I was thinking that might have the rim at the bottom too.
 
I remember that thread and after looking at the 510 bullet I was thinking that might have the rim at the bottom too.

Most all bore rider big bore bullets or otherwise will have a band on the bottom that engages rifling and is engraved. Without that accuracy is poor........
 
Thank, just trying to figure out how you would load and crimp the bullet. Really did not take that close of a look at the loaded rounds.
 
Thank, just trying to figure out how you would load and crimp the bullet. Really did not take that close of a look at the loaded rounds.

Exactly the same as you would any common bullet............... The only B&Ms that require crimps, and even then not much of one is 500 MDM, very minor, and 50 B&M Alaskan... Crimp between bands......


Here might be a good example, these are 45 Colts, the far left is a Cutting Edge Solid, banded bore rider type bullet, and you can see it crimped between bands at the top...............

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In addition this is a .308 caliber 100 Raptor, you see the bands, same or similar to the big bore bullets. I use them in 300 BLK, 7.62X40, 308 Winchester and 300 Winchester, all seated, but NO CRIMP, just neck tension
is of course plenty to hold the bullet proper. You can remove the Talon Tip from the 100 FB Raptor, and use it in 30/30, and crimp between the bands, in the groove...........

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Here is another revised version of the 100 Raptor as it is today..........

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Just got my calipers and measured the rim and bands. What was throwing me off, that it seem that the rim band was bigger than the 3 bands in the middle of the bullet by touch. After measuring I get it. Should have measured it first. At first it looked like only 1 point of contact with the barrel but it has 4. Now it makes sense.
 
Just got my calipers and measured the rim and bands. What was throwing me off, that it seem that the rim band was bigger than the 3 bands in the middle of the bullet by touch. After measuring I get it. Should have measured it first. At first it looked like only 1 point of contact with the barrel but it has 4. Now it makes sense.


Yep, you got it now..................
 
not to hijack... but @Michael458 do you help to design the projectiles or just testing the pressures and ballistics?
after meeting you and studying the projectile I have been pondering ideas in the design of bullets.
 
Interesting in that the "New" style bullets like the ones in the 6 and 6.5 CM are longer bullets that seem to have more surface contact with the barrel. Is it because your bullets are used in much shorter ranges?

The long range bullets are optimized for ballistic coefficient and sectional density, which means a long skinny smooth bullet. Which means more bore contact area as a side effect rather than a goal.



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not to hijack... but @Michael458 do you help to design the projectiles or just testing the pressures and ballistics?
after meeting you and studying the projectile I have been pondering ideas in the design of bullets.


The Raptors and Safari Solids were designed and tested here, with a lot of modifications over a 2 year or so period. We were doing several tests each week with different designs, ideas, and tweaks, 1000s on top of 1000s of rounds fired, all big bore, and hundreds of terminal tests to get it right. It was no small undertaking. I also had a good friend from NC that did a lot of heavy lifting and worked very close with me to get these bullets to the field.

No big bore bullet has ever had as much effort and tests involved before going to the field to prove itself.

Today these same concepts developed here and tested here are in every caliber that Cutting Edge makes bullets for, some flowed over to North Fork Technologies, some with Lehigh, and now I see many others making similar bullets to the Raptors.

We started our search in 2007 for the "Perfect Solid", which flowed to the Raptor designs as well. We went to the field with the first #13 Solids in fall of 2010, and later with solids and Raptors in 2011. Other versions were in the field in 2009 as well............ Perfection was in 2011 however. And even then we continued to tweak some of the designs after that. Today, all the heavy work is done
 
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The really big push came because of the .500 caliber rifles. In 2005-2006 there were no "rifle" .500 caliber bullets. For the B&M Series of rifles to work, I first had to have real Solids. Solids are absolutely required for buffalo, hippo, and elephant. We had no solids. JD Jones had recently started a relationship with David Fricke, Lehigh. JD was getting lots of things done with Fricke, and we requested several different types of bullets. But it was taking way too long to get bullets in hand. JD pushed some things through, and from 2007 through 2009 I was working with a couple of copper solids I had Lehigh do for me. They had done some Round Nose 510 gr bullets, that just did not work, Round Nose veer off course during terminals. So I had them take the nose off and flatten it, it ended up being 485 gr and a decent bullet. The other was a 510 gr bullet similar to the Barnes Flat Nose design, it worked even better. I was successful with it on both elephant and buffalo.

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In 2009 two things happened, first I met a fellow from NC that was extremely interested in some of the work I was doing and came down to visit with me. He was introduced by another good friend of mine that works in the firearms industry. We became fast friends, as we shared the same interests in research and development. He also is a hunter, and we began a search for a "Better Mousetrap" than what the industry has been feeding us for years.

SOLIDS.

My pal was also extremely talented, and had a lathe. We started testing everything, every concept, every wild ass thought we can come up with concerning solids. As stated, we were testing different concepts weekly, and or several times a week. We were burning through truckloads of wet print.

We were beginning to understand, and learn the factors involved concerning the penetration of Solid Bullets. We tested meplat size and learned from that. We tested literally 100s of different Nose Profiles, we learned from that. These were the most important factors, and we needed to tweak those into existence.

That same year, our friend in the industry introduced us to Dan Smitchko, owner of Cutting Edge Bullets. Dan is the same age and had an extreme interest in what we were doing, and agreed to help as best he could. Once we got past some of the development stages of things, making the bullets fell into Dan's area and the CNC machines. Now, instead of taking 6 months to get a prototype bullet done from Lehigh, it was taking a week with Dan. He had committed to the project.

JD had sent a bullet down for me to test and look at, a 450 gr .500 caliber bullet. This bullet had always tested very good, and it was a design that JD had procured from another fellow in .429 handguns many many years ago. JD had used the design in cast bullets in his endeavors for years with success. It tested well here, but came up slightly short in some areas. One thing that I liked best, it was always 100% Dead Straight penetration. I gave the bullet to my pal, and told him we needed to explore the angle off the nose. The JD bullet was 15 degree angle off the nose with as I recall around a 70% meplat. We took that and tested angles from 10 degrees all the way to 20 degrees angle off the nose. What we found was that from 11 degrees to 15 degrees we got really good results, dead straight line penetration with 65% to 70% Meplat of caliber.

We settled on a 13 degree angle as being optimum or near optimum. We sent this to Dan at Cutting Edge and we went to work from there........... We brought the bullet to the field with a lot of hard work, testing, and lots of tweaking in between.......... But in the end we got it right. North Fork was working along the same direction as we were. I had also become fast friends with the owner of North Fork and we tweaked some of the North Fork designs as well.......................

This story can go on, and there is a hell of a lot more to it. But this is the basics of how, who and just one of the things we did................ The bands and band design is an entire book full of info alone.................

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