Stick time or Dwell time and the importance of "imparted energy".

(Cowboy, cast bullet selection related, updated 9/12/2011)

On Saturday I had a go with my new to me 44 Rem Mag for the CLA game.  This is my second centerfire gun which I swore I would never get into.  But, curriosity killed the cat and call me fluffy.  The first centerfire gun was a 336CB in 30-30.  A beautiful gun and a wonderful cartridge with tombs of history.  I learned about casting and bullet selection.  Much debate occured as to how heavy a bullet you need.  Some used a 122g Loveriegn designed 311465 and just pushed it really fast.  Some used a 173g 31141 bullet and pushed it slower.

I was a newbie and made the naive statement, foot lbs of energy + foot lbs of energy regardless of bullet weight.  Light bullet fast, heavy bullet slow, it is all relative to how many ft lbs of energy is imparted to the animal.  WRONG!  To be honest, I was skeptical but filed away my schooling on Steelchickens and opted for the middle of the road, the 173g bullet, 31141.

Fast forward a year and I now have my second lever gun for Pistol Cartridge Cowboy, a 44 Rem Mag.  Interestingly one shooter has found this to work successfully at the 200y CLA game.  Even though I had my 30-30 already I just could not resist experimenting.  The 44's trigger is by far better anyway.  So the experimentation began.  I got the Lyman 429215 mold because I really did not want to get thumped that hard.

I will explore powder later.  Let's stick to "stick time" for now.  We can do the ballistics and energy calculation later.

I noted a 38-55 and a 30-30 failed to take down a ram whereas my slow moving 44 seemed to take down rams.  Seemed odd to me but the stick time lesson came back to me and decided to research it further.  I found THIS LINK which is post 15 in a long discussion and it does a good job explaining the importance of how different bullets impart their energy to the target. A 250g aspirin going at 500 FPS would have the same ft lbs of energy at a 250g lead bullets going 500 FPS.  But the aspirin would IMPART far less energy than the lead bullet.  That is "stick time".  Go to the top right link to read the whole discussion and you will also see it called dwell time. I have to do some additional research but I bet the 44's stick time helped on Saturday.  Speculation until I do some ballistics work, but at least the readers of this blog have a deeper understanding of stick time than I did 9 months ago.