Today I was a little bored so I did some amateurish ballistic tests. I wanted to see what the 22lr can do at 50 meters against a so called Wetpack. (Thats a tightly packed block of soaking wet newspaper to simulate flesh, though its usually a bit tougher).
Also, to simulate bone (forehead), I added a 1.5cm (0.6'') thick, round clay pot shard in front of the wet pack.
(In retrospect I think it was way too hard and tough to simulate bone)
Enough talk, pics!
Soaking the newspaper in water:
The setup, wetpack in shopping bag with the clay shard taped to its front.
Lets shoot it with a
22LR CCI Sub Sonic Hollowpoint from about 50 meters.
1 Shot at the clay shard and 2 directly into the pack for good measure.
Busted the clay shard pretty good, but made only a very shallow ''wound''. The bullet completely disintegrated into tiny bits on impact. You can see the two other hits at the bottom.
Removed the bag. The bullet and the clay fragments made it about 2cm (.8'') into the pack, creating a thumb sized hole.
The other two bullets made it deep into the pack, looking at the wound channels they started mushrooming about 1/3rd into the pack.
And they almost made it through.
Taking into account that I shot from a slight downward angle they penetrated about 13 centimeters of wet newspaper. Thats 5 inches for those of you who use the blasted imperial system.
Remember with wetpacks you have to add roughly 35% to the penetration to get the actual penetration depth for real tissue.
Then I gave it another shot (pun intended) with different ammo.
.22lr RWS Rifle Match, which is a round nose going about 1150 fp/s. I wanted to see if the slight increase in velocity and the round nose would make a difference.
Same setup, one on the clay shard and two directly into the pack.
Again, the clay pot shard turned the bullet into dust only creating a shallow wound, maybe a little bit deeper than the HP from the previous test, but not enough to make any significant difference.
The other two bullets zipped right through the entire wetpack, thats 16.5 cm or 6.5 inches. Interestingly they started to tumble about halfway into the pack creating an oval wound channel and exit.
Here are the bullets, the two mushroomed on the left are the Subsonic Hollowpoints which I recovered from the first test, the flattened out bullet on the right is a round nose that made it through the pack and was stopped by a cinder block as it was exiting the pack sideways.
What I learned from the test:
* When shooting hard targets bullet type does not seem to matter when you're using a 22lr.
* When shooting soft targets bullet construction makes a difference in penetration and terminal performance, even when using the tiny 22lr.
* 22LR HP's mushroom perfectly even at low velocities.
* Round Nose 22lr's seem to have tendencies to tumble
* Clay pot shards might not be the best way to simulate bone
* Wetpacks seem to be much tougher target mediums than those made of ballistic gelatin, you'll get way more penetration when using gel. It is said to add 1/3 of the penetration into wetpack to get a rough idea of what the bullet would do in real tissue.
* .22lr sub sonics are so quiet the bullet impact is louder than the muzzle report.
And yes, I wanted to blast the remaining pack into oblivion with a well placed 7.5x55 using an explosive A-MAX bullet at 2900 fp/s. But that would have created too much noise.
I NEED MONEY!
