Thread: best 7mm projectiles...bush to 600

Yup @Gkp is on the money, you'll have to work out what's best for your rifle @Fisherman, make you own mind up.

At distance, point of impact on the animal is everything and really the bullet isn't that important as long as it is relatively soft and opens up to at least 2x calibre easily. Lots of bullets will do that, A-Max, ELD-M, ELD-X, NBT, GameKing, Speer BTSP blah blah blah.

Your challenge isn't the distance part, its the close up stuff. Any of the aforementioned cup & core types will tend to be messy at close range due to high velocity fragmentation. Hit heavy bone and occasionally you might have a problem. Close range hunting needs a bonded bullet or monolithic, if you value carcass quality. At close range I get mixed results with ELD-X and Speer BTSP, the animals always die quickly enough (usually instantly) but sometimes the bullet exits, sometimes not, and usually its messy, hardly surprising considering what you're asking a non-locked bullet to do. But most of my hunting currently is in the 300-600m range, hence my choice of softer high BC bullets.

Lets be honest, the perfect 0-600m bullet doesn't exist, never has.

So you have to compromise. And the compromise needs to be at short range, i.e. you must go for a softer bullet all round and accept the mess, because a harder bonded / locked bullet won't work well at longer ranges - especially on our game species - and isn't an appropriate choice.

The marketing spin says Accubond Long Range should be good but I've not seen any ballistic or terminal advantage over ELD-X on three red deer hunts with a mate using ABLR.