This Shotgun Slug might be an Ideal ANTI-BEAR round

How do you come up with new innovative ammunition? Well, one way is just ask your viewers to come up with their craziest ideas and allow us to test them out. You make it, we mock it. This is Jeff of Tal Flair Mills and today we have some beautiful slugs submitted to us by Brian of Northern California. And like many slugs we get, these are almost too pretty to shoot. This unusual slug consists of four bullets cast in an epoxy resin. Now, fortunately, Brian includes some design notes and trust me, this is extremely helpful to me to keep from giving you the wrong information. Brian calls this slug the Copper Top. It is one and a half ounces and uses three 150 grain 308 full metal jacket bullets, one 110 grain 308 jacketed hollow point, and a stainless steel base all cast in an epoxy resin. The way this is supposed to work is that center bullet is supposed to act like a wedge or a plunger that drives the three slanted longer bullets outwards upon impact. Now, even though these have never been tested before, that sounds like a pretty solid theory on how they're supposed to work. Now, one of my responsibilities is just to make them work, make them function. So I have to come up with a recipe, all the components, the gas seal, the wads, the sabos, the type of powder and the amount of powder and hope that I get that right. For today's test, we'll be using 28 grains of steel. That should give us a velocity around 1200 feet per second. Now, in terms of energy, that's over 2100 foot pounds of energy. Let's head out and see how these 660 grain monsters perform. We're back. Oh, my gosh. We've had a couple weeks of very hot temperatures here. 105 degrees just day after day after day. And today it's only supposed to get to 101. I got to get this done. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get a heat stroke today, but I've got to post something. We're going to post, you know, we're going to test out Brian's, what he calls the copper top. We are 20 yards away. We're going to shoot at Stephen's flak jacket. And we're aiming at that. We're going to find out, you know, are these accurate? And if Stephen's, you know, flak jacket will actually stop one of these. And I got a little sticker on there. So let's see how it does. All right, shot number one at the orange sticker. Jeez, that's a lot of a lot of force there. These are heavy suckers. So we're at 1186. So I was predicting around 1200. For today's test, we are using a fully rifled shotgun that gives us the needed spin for stability. But look how accurate that first shot is. That is very, very promising. But the million dollar question is, will a flak jacket like this actually stop a one and a half ounce 12 gauge shotgun slug? Now, a lot of the online experts will tell you that a flak jacket like that will only stop, you know, like hand grenade fragments. It won't stop any bullets, right? Now, believe it or not, it was able to stop this monster one and a half ounce slug from going all the way through it. Now, the blunt force trauma, all that energy hitting your chest. Well, that's a different story. Now, even though the slug did not pass through the vest at all, the energy, that big bulge of energy going into your chest is going to break some ribs. It could just absolutely kill you just in that respect. Now, I'm certain this flak jacket will not stop any rifle rounds, but I think it would stop buckshot and most pistol rounds. So far, I would say it gives similar protection to a 3A Kevlar body armor vest that most police use. Of the bullets I pulled out, this one looked very unusual. Kind of looks like a bird head or a duck head. Well, let's continue with the test and see what else these things can do. Next up, we have a brand new rebuilt lead plate. Freshly cast, no impacts in it. Engage. Oh, looks like a little to the left. So 11-94. Now, in this shot, we had a very subtle malfunction. The nose of the slug is kind of pointed to the left, causing it to veer to the left. Now, this could be caused by anything from a poor sabot separation or the gun just recoiling in a kind of a weird way and causing the slug to jerk over to the left like that. Hopefully, this is just a fluke and the rest of the test will go a little better than that, but at least we hit the plate. Here, we see one of the sabots coming into the frame. You'll notice that there's aluminum tape on the inside of it and that was a little bit of fine tuning on my part to increase the bore fit to make it a little bit tighter. So about two and a half inches center to center, we're off. I'm not sure what happened there. That first one was so promising, but a hit's a hit. Very deep crater. Get all that debris in there, resin. The bullets are... I hope you can see this. Gotta light it up a little better. Bullets are just embedded in there. And let's flip her around. Almost came through. Look at that. Almost came through. Even at 1200 feet per second, that thing had a lot of energy. Next, we have the wet Uline and Granger catalogs. This has been soaking in the bucket for over a week. It is very, very fluffy. It's very juicy. There's probably like two and a half gallons of water in that it absorbed up. It's really heavy and it swelled up almost to the diameter of the bucket. I still have a steel plate behind it in case anything, you know, wants to go all the way through. We can stop it and take a look at what came through. Okay, and this simulates flesh. It's what I call the poor man's ballistic gel. Okay, that was dead center. That was absolutely accurate and it did pass through, hit our plate. Impressive. Very impressive. So we have 1207 on that shot. It's just creeping up a little bit as it gets warmer. Makes sense. Beautiful performance on this one. No weird stability issues or anything like that. Dead center in our wet catalogs. And if we look closely, we can see one of the bullets flying off to the right there. It's all smashed, but it looks like we had separation on that. And that's what I was hoping to see once we got to this fleshy type target. Full pass through. I can see sunlight through there. I don't know if you can see that or not. Exit out the back. Oh, look at that. That is a big hole. Something hit the plate. Found this jacket from the bullet. Kind of looks like a witch's hat. Best description. I don't know where the rest of it is. I might be able to find it out here. The lead core and all that. But so far, that's all I've found so far. Try to keep this all in frame. Pop open the tape. It's amazing the tape doesn't snap. Spyderco, thank you. So the first catalog, which is almost two inches thick. Just a hole. Second, mostly just a hole. Oh, wait. You see that triangle shape? Ah, very good clue there. Let's go a little more, more. The triangle shape. Something's happening there. Something is happening. That's a wild wound there. Like a pyramid went through there. So now, okay, now we're bigger pyramid shape. So it appears it opened up. I just can't find any of the pieces. But absolutely impressive accuracy on that one. I'm loving these things so far. Good job, Brian. Okay, we got the ballistic jello shot next. This target was sent to us by Steven and his brother, Andy. They just randomly send us some cool targets every once in a while. Always appreciate that. And it's just a paint bucket full of jello. But I'm starting to like this target. It kind of, it's kind of cooler than just a water jug. Because there's chunks involved. Let's hit it. Now check this out. We have picture perfect performance on this one. This is how it's supposed to work. Now watch how the three bullets are flying off in three different directions. That's pretty cool. And I purposely didn't put anything behind this target. So that we'd hopefully be able to see that occurring. Now remember, it was just a theory that Brian had that it would work like that. So it's always pretty cool to be able to prove that his theory actually works. Now this one did shoot just a tad low. Not by very much, to be honest. But you know, that's just human error, if anything, on my part. On how I set up the aim and all that. But technically, I still hit the sticker, right? Okay, looks like we hit the sticker just a little bit low. But we hit the sticker. I'm happy for that. Good hydrostatic action. Big hole out of the back. Freaking Jell-O everywhere. I think the coyotes like Jell-O, though. Up next, we got the Tal Flater head. This is a brand new recast. Nothing but the best for Brian today. Everything's brand new. And we're just going to shoot right around the ear area, I think. Just dead on. See if we can see any fragmentation as the projectiles exit. That's the plan. Whether we capture that or not, that's a different story. Here we go. Good foaming action there. 1188 feet per second. Everything is go on this shot. The accuracy, the placement. But we did not get any of the separation that we saw on the Jell-O target. Maybe the steel can cause the initiation of the bullet to push down a little harder. I don't know. It just did not separate. It just kept on trucking downrange there, though. Other than that, beautiful shot, I must say. Now, inside the head is just a water bottle filled with soapy water. And that gives us a little bit of a time delay. So we can see the projectile leave the back of the head before all the chaos happens. It's pretty cool. Nice entry wound there. Definitely hit the bottle inside there. Just a water bottle with soapy water. See a little track action. I don't think it may not have come apart. But you can kind of see the track coming out. And there's, you know, that is the exit. But very good soapy foam action on that one. Next up, we have a 3 16th inch mild steel plate. That's about five millimeters or so. If you're in Europe. And usually most lead slugs will just put a big dent in that. Maybe there might be some like three and a half inch foster slug shells that would go through that pretty easily. Okay, here we go. A lot of energy there. Wow. 1174. Okay, here we go. Now, if I was a betting man, I would have predicted this would have just blown a hole right through that plate. But nope, apparently it's just too soft to do anything. I mean, it transferred a tremendous amount of energy to the plate, but did not go through it. Here we see some of the bullets still flying through the air. Some of the jackets really mangled it up. But wow, that's a surprise to me. It was pretty good. That's a heck of a sticker there to remain on there after getting blasted by a slug. That's usually stickers will just get stripped off the plate. So that's a good sticker. So anyway, did not penetrate, just left a big old dent. All the components in that in that slug apparently are just too soft. If there was, you know, some steel in there or brass, probably would have gone through. And so far, I'm finding the Sabos and I pick them up too, of course. And you can see the aluminum tape shimming I had to do on these just to ensure that they're very, very tight. Didn't want any slippage at all in the Sabos. Look how, you know, very good marking of the of the rifling. I think these things actually clean the bore out every time you shoot it. Next, we got the battle tested aluminum plate. I think it's one inch thick and I'm just aiming at that little red dot on there. It's more of an accuracy shot because I don't think there's much chance he's penetrating that thing. That's very difficult to penetrate, in fact. Okay, hit it. It makes a great ring, though. I love that ring. 1193. You're getting good readings on the Labradar LX today. Okay, hit it. Look at that. I'm getting kind of good at this stuff, right? But this shows you how well Brian made these things. Remember, these things are just kind of homemade and to get that kind of accuracy is quite impressive. Where did it hit? It almost removed the magic marker. They hit right there. That's where our magic marker was. Great accuracy. Can't complain about that. That's where the front plunger bullet hit. Almost see some marks left from the tips of the bullets inside there. Okay, he's been pretty accurate for the most part. We had one that kind of strayed a little bit. But we're now at 40 yards. Was that 37 meters? Something like that. Anyway, it's a one gallon jug of water. I just put some color in it in there. It was clear and you couldn't see it very well. Now you can see it. That's 40 yards. Now, I'm not aiming point blank at it. I'm actually aiming at the bottom edge of it. So we'll see if that guess is right. You know, hitting something at 20 yards is one thing. But because these are so accurate, I think it's worth trying to hit something kind of small. Smaller than a wild hog, that's for sure. At 40 yards. Okay, any bets? Here we go. We got it. Here we go. Now, the way the jug lurched to the left, I thought we hit a lot further on the right. I thought I just clipped it, but it was nearly dead center on this jug here. So I'm pretty dang impressed with not only my shooting skills, but also again with Brian's engineering. Now, it's hard to tell, but I do think we had bullet separation on this shot too. It's actually not a bad shot at all. Here's the center line. So I was aiming right here because the red dot is sighted for 20 yards. So for whatever reason, as we go out a little further, I have to drop the aim. So it's no longer point blank, in other words. Okay, this is our last one and we're saving it for the blessing kill. Freshly recast the other day. Because we're only about, I don't know, seven yards away or so. Okay, here we go. Oh, full pass through. Lots of energy. Block stayed on the table. That's always good. Okay, here we go. Well, look at that. We got a really decent shot on the ballistic gel. Notice how the ducks are pretty much flying upwards together. That shows me the energy is just 100% all the way through the block. Normally, just the first few ducks will fly up really high and then it'll just taper off quite a bit. Now, initially, it looks like we got some kind of separation. We see multiple wound tracks near the end of the block. But did it perform like the wet catalogs or the jello shot target? Let's take a closer look and see what happened. See if we can find that slug. Really good placement. Very impressive accuracy with these slugs. Didn't seem to get what we saw in the wet catalogs. It kind of shows you how sometimes the results we get in ballistic gel differ than what we get in the wet catalogs. Sometimes the ballistic gel is just not dense enough. Not, I don't know, fibrous enough. But we got separation of something there near the end. Big, big temporary wound cavities. Permanent wound cavities. Just a big old mess in the block. I did catch the slug in the Kevlar and it is mostly intact. See, it looks like we lost that single bullet out of the nose and that's probably what that track is from. And did not find that in there. It might be on the ground somewhere. I'm not sure. But in this case, the resin was just a little too tough to cause it to rip apart. With more velocity, maybe it would have worked. Or with more velocity, it would have created a lot of problems where we, you know, getting gas seal blowouts and stuff like that. But overall, the balance of these things was very good. I imagine it's very difficult to get all that junk balanced so it spins. Normally, it doesn't warble down range. But that's it. So last one. It is so freaking hot out here. I am going to go home, get some ice water. But I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you, Brian. But I think this would be a fantastic bear round because when you're hitting bone and thicker flesh and stuff, that thing's going to come apart because it totally came apart in the wet catalogs. Looked like a flux capacitor shot through that thing. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video. If you don't mind, rate it. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Doesn't matter. If you have any questions or ideas or comments, don't be shy. I like reading your comments. It is a lot of work, but I think it's very important that you know that I read the comments. I don't just fire and forget. All right, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.