amoebicmagician
Samopal Goblin
I have to disagree with this for several reasons.
first off, deer are not extremely thick skinned, and while you don't want a dead-soft bullet, true hard cast lead alloys are EXTREMELY HARD and don't tend to mushroom well- they basically pencil right through- like the Garret Hammerhead is designed to do.
Secondly, a 357 grain bullet is grossly grossly GROSSLY overweight for the task at hand. Not only would you not be able to hit anything with it without specially sighting in your rifle for those heavy bullets, but you're going to have a nuts-o rainbow trajectory with rounds like this.
I'd stick to a ~250 grain flat meplat Keith style bullet, as has been suggested, with a medium hard lead alloy and a gas check if you're loading it hot enough to stretch the upper limit of the .45 LC's ballistic envelope.
As has been said already, the Hornady Lever-lution line of bullets are GREAT for hunting. Not only do they offer a better ballistic co-efficient with the ability to safely use spitzer bullets in a tube fed rifle, but the rounds are loaded specifically to be used in rifles that reap the benefits of modern metallurgy, and are therefore quite hot compared with other factory .45 LC.
A friend and I once decided to try a few of the Hornady rounds in a few of his ruger handguns, a redhawk and super redhawk specifically.
Anyways, the redhawk is chambered in .45 LC, and as most of you probably know rugers are supposed to be able to handle anything, they're built so tough that many specialty ammo manufacturers that contraindicate the use of their cartridges in most guns will have ruger's handguns on the very short list of guns acceptable for use with said ammo.
So we try it in the super redhawk first, and that sucker was an arm breaker! the SRH is chambered for .454 casull, so we knew we'd be fine, but even so we were a little apprehensive shooting it with the Hornady ammo. After firing three rounds each, we then tried to load the Redhawk.
Only problem was, that the red polymer tip protruded out the front of the cylinder just enough that the gun wouldn't lock back up when loaded.
My guess is that Hornady does this intentionally to stop people from doing exactly what we were trying to do.
Anyways, a little trimming with my pocket knife and the rounds fit into the redhawk, JUST BARELY.
Before we shot the Hornadys out of the RH, we decided to shoot a few of Dave's (my buddy) handloads out of it, just to see if we could gauge the difference in power between the two. The Super Red Hawk is an Alaskan model, so the Red Hawk was by far the larger handgun, and we expected it to be much softer shooting, and with the handloads, it was.
With the Hornady, the effect was much the same as with the SRH- a wrist jarring monster that was tough to hold on to.
Just as a final experiment we put a Hornady and a .454 casull in adjacent chambers of the SRH alaskan, to be fired off in quick succession, just to see how close in power they were.
I couldn't note too much appreciable difference.
