#GelTests

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report! This ongoing series is all about the rimfire firearm world and its various firearms, trends, and ammunition. Last week we took another look at Federal’s CCI 22LR Punch Personal Defense ammunition to see if it behaved the same when put up against clothing and also when fired out of a rifle. What we saw is that Federal 22LR Punch does indeed expand, but it only does it out of a much longer barrel than wouldn’t be practical to carry concealed. A number of you had requested that we try out some other types of higher velocity 22LR ammunition including CCI Stinger and CCI Velocitor. I was able to get my hands on a few boxes of CCI Velocitors and this week on The Rimfire Report we’ll be putting the CCI Velocitor to the test to see how well it performs in our gel tests.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report! This ongoing series is all about the rimfire firearm world. Last week we did some testing with various pistols and Federal’s 22LR Punch personal defense ammunition. While the results demonstrated that Federal Punch performs quite well and achieves sufficient penetration, it did not expand. Beyond that, the ammunition did seem to live up to its velocity claims which were also something nice to see out of a product that is specifically marketed for self-defense. However, a couple of you had mentioned in the comments that you would like to have seen the tests repeated using clothing, and also using a 10/22 rifle to see if it made any difference. So for this week on The Rimfire Report, we’re going back to the range with another gel block and some new guns to see how Federal’s 22LR punch ammunition performs in those particular situations.

Ballistics gel or ballistic gelatin is a fairly common and familiar substance that is often used to test the efficacy and performance of various projectile or bladed weapons. Ballistics gel is quite often used by independent persons and professionals alike to either test ammunition or view the effects of said ammunition on what amounts to a close simulation of human and animal tissue. After the infamous Miami Dade shootout, the FBI established a set of testing protocols to determine the performance of ammunition. It’s generally understood that on a bare “10% Ordnance Gelatin” block a bullet should penetrate no less than 12 and no more than 18 inches into the target otherwise it begins to lose points in the FBI’s complex formula for determining whether or not the ammunition is suitable for law enforcement applications.

The terminal effectiveness of modern bullets has been the subject of much study, but less well scrutinized have been the projectiles of rifles before 1900, fired by the blackpowder weapons that armed men throughout the age of empires. Fortunately, the Hungarian channel CapandBall has performed some very interesting terminal ballistic tests of these weapons from the pre-smokeless powder era. The video below shows his gelatin test of the M1867/77 Werndl rifle, compared to tests he has performed previously with the Austro-Hungarian M1842 Augustin 15.9mm and the M1854 Lorenz 13.7mm rifles: