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.
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.................