One of the visually cool things that you get when you shoot a lot of steel are these little bullet snowflakes – the bullet pancakes after hitting the steel leaving these little fused fragments of lead and copper jacket just hanging out. The delicious lead candy snacks I’m holding are all from a 230 grain .45 ACP FMJ bullet – it’s kind of cool to see how much energy is expended when they hit that steel target to reduce the projectile down to a fraction of its original weight and size.
While cruising the Brian Enos Forums this morning, someone in a thread about shooting JHP at steel targets posted a link to the following Youtube video, which gives a really cool visual example of exactly what happens to that bullet when it strikes a steel target on its way to creating the bullet snowflake you see above.
Pretty neat.
I keep meaning to scrounge some of those and weigh them.
Seems like I usually find just lead cores, the copper jackets seem to shear off.