6mm ARC Terminal Testing & The SJS Pig Fest!

[Zee]

Joes cheek shot

For info purposes, Joe’s shot hit the 1.5” thick jaw bone, went down the neck just below the spine, and entered the frontal chest. Never could find that bullet. But, the path was pretty dramatic.

[mitdr774]

Thats still fairly impressive for a 6mm bullet. Not exactly working with a lot of weight to begin with and velocity is somewhat hampered by the cartridge. If I hunted deer above the shotgun zone I would probably give a 6ARC a hard look as an option.

[Ernie]

Crap, I thought walking in the fog looking for pigs was dramatic, might have had to get my youngest some counseling if he saw his old man wrestlin' and stabbing pigs with you

I’m a counselor on the side. We can accommodate.
:resultsmayvary:

A multitude of thoughts and emotions ran through my mind when I read this

[Ernie]

Cattle can be exciting at times...At least it didn't require running
It all makes for great memories.

[CPJ 2.0]

Cattle can be exciting at times...At least it didn't require running
It all makes for great memories.

They can also be stupid.

[GrapeApe]

A bovine ghillie suit

[Zee]

A bovine ghillie suit

I train my cattle.

[CPJ 2.0]

A bovine ghillie suit

I train my cattle.

We gonna tell them that the nut holding ritual isn’t just some weird poop you have us do but we are actually checking to make sure Buddy has his Glock stored in his sack holster?
Crap. I wasn’t supposed to say that.

[Bigslug]

A bovine ghillie suit

"Maybe if I dress like a tree, these weirdos won't see me and will stop running up to fondle my balls"

Gotta take my hat off to War Pig. He survived and thrived after encounters with lesser men and was only felled by real practitioners bringing their A game. He's worthy of a good cook. I used to frequent a local Mom & Pop Mexican place before Mom & Pop retired. As I said of Ramiro's al pastor, "Every pig should die so well"

Looks like this 6mm ARC will do everything required of it in Zee's itinerant shoe salesman role. It could certainly be enhanced for penetration with other bullets if it was needed, but I ain't seeing any "failure" there.

[Zee]

A bovine ghillie suit

"Maybe if I dress like a tree, these weirdos won't see me and will stop running up to fondle my balls"

Gotta take my hat off to War Pig. He survived and thrived after encounters with lesser men and was only felled by real practitioners bringing their A game. He's worthy of a good cook. I used to frequent a local Mom & Pop Mexican place before Mom & Pop retired. As I said of Ramiro's al pastor, "Every pig should die so well"

Looks like this 6mm ARC will do everything required of it in Zee's itinerant shoe salesman role. It could certainly be enhanced for penetration with other bullets if it was needed, but I ain't seeing any "failure" there.

Well, that’s a cow. But, they do like their udders scratched as well.
The bullet did well for a cup/core and not a bonded bullet. I don’t buy their “barrier blind” designation. We saw bone treat it pretty poorly. But, it still did its job and decently well for the velocity and not being bonded.

[Bigslug]

Farting around on the Hodgdon load data site, it looks like an 85 grain Partition or TSX could get up to 2900-2950 FPS with Leverevolution, CFE, or BLC2 out of a 20" AR fairly easily. Could be fertile ground for eeeeevil thoughts.

[Zee]

Fun to play with. But, I don’t know that it would add any more terminal performance.
Striking both shoulder bones (entry and exit) on a broadside 90ish pound pig. And I mean the heavy round bone just above the joint. Not the thin scapula. It still lodged under the hide on the off side and the base held together.
From a shoe sales aspect, that’s perfect. Good internal damage. Dropped the target. No exit or collateral damage.
Dream come true.

[Zee]

I’m not looking at it from a hunting view point where people want exits for a blood trail. I want damage. I want internal disruption. I want penetration. I don’t want the risk of collateral damage.
Results were pretty much perfect.

[Zee]

Now, that said……on broadside shots, with no major bone hit, all other bullets exited. With good internal disruption, but we don’t in know the state of the bullet after it exited.
Judging from the recovered bullet on War Pig where only one rib was hit on entry from Jerm’s shot, and how well the bullet held together…….id say they were pretty intact.

[Bigslug]

Good stuff! I guess here's the $64,000 question then: As a working LE cartridge, is it doing anything for us that the massively well-established 5.56 can't do with the right bullet? That's kinda the key thing. I think part of the early perception of the .40S&W's effectiveness was that it hit the field at the same time as the FBI protocols that used the "new math" for determining what a bullet should do - - there was never a "let's figure this out" period like there was with the 9mm. As such, you have to forget about a lot of "old bullet" 5.56 data. Both it and the ARC are close in diameter, close in speed, and if the projectiles are equally constructed to stop at something like the FBI's "ideal" maximum depth of 18" in Jell-O, it really comes down to how fast the pigs die. If the only real difference is maybe 0.1 to 0.2 inch of expanded diameter, figuring that out definitively will probably take A LOT more pigs. WORK. . . WORK. . .WORK.

(See. . .this is how you convince the bosses at the shoe factory to keep subsidizing your hunting trips. A case or two of good 5.56 for SERIOUS comparative testing is WAY more fiscally responsible that just rushing right out to buy a whole lot of new rifles. We have to be SURE you know. . . )

Where it starts to get frustrating is that after you collect all that data, the door kickers are going to assume that it'll perform exactly the same out of their 11" SBR. I got to assist in a 5.56 gel test in which as the barrel lengths and velocities went down, the penetration went up because the bullets that were designed to fragment out of a rifle no longer did out of the shorties. Gotta love science, but she's a heartless bitch at times..,

[Jay]

Farting around on the Hodgdon load data site, it looks like an 85 grain Partition or TSX could get up to 2900-2950 FPS with Leverevolution, CFE, or BLC2 out of a 20" AR fairly easily. Could be fertile ground for eeeeevil thoughts.

On a somewhat related note, my 75gr Vmax load is just north of 3100 using Leverevolution. And that’s a gas gun load my buddy worked up for his that just happened to shoot 1/2” groups out of mine. And they shot within 1” POI from 108 grain factory loads. No need to try to improve on that. I never tried that load at Pigfest. It was intended for coyotes, but I used the 20 Practical on those.

[Jay]

I get the impression the 6ARC platform isn’t intended to replace the 5.56 at all in the shoe sales business. It’s meant to fill a gap. The 5.56 would remain the general purpose, primary role for door kickers and day to day work. Then there’s the 6.5 Creed. So the 6ARC would fill a role in between as kind of a “designated marksman” role out to a reasonable distance in a platform that is still just an every day AR. Or something like that.

[Zee]

Good stuff! I guess here's the $64,000 question then: As a working LE cartridge, is it doing anything for us that the massively well-established 5.56 can't do with the right bullet? That's kinda the key thing. I think part of the early perception of the .40S&W's effectiveness was that it hit the field at the same time as the FBI protocols that used the "new math" for determining what a bullet should do - - there was never a "let's figure this out" period like there was with the 9mm. As such, you have to forget about a lot of "old bullet" 5.56 data. Both it and the ARC are close in diameter, close in speed, and if the projectiles are equally constructed to stop at something like the FBI's "ideal" maximum depth of 18" in Jell-O, it really comes down to how fast the pigs die. If the only real difference is maybe 0.1 to 0.2 inch of expanded diameter, figuring that out definitively will probably take A LOT more pigs. WORK. . . WORK. . .WORK.

(See. . .this is how you convince the bosses at the shoe factory to keep subsidizing your hunting trips. A case or two of good 5.56 for SERIOUS comparative testing is WAY more fiscally responsible that just rushing right out to buy a whole lot of new rifles. We have to be SURE you know. . . )

Where it starts to get frustrating is that after you collect all that data, the door kickers are going to assume that it'll perform exactly the same out of their 11" SBR. I got to assist in a 5.56 gel test in which as the barrel lengths and velocities went down, the penetration went up because the bullets that were designed to fragment out of a rifle no longer did out of the shorties. Gotta love science, but she's a heartless bitch at times..,

Chris dropped a decent sized pig on the spot at 285 yards with the 6 ARC and wasn’t a CNS hit!
I doubt a .223 could do that.

This cartridge is intended to fill a gap between light field use gas (.223) and a bolt gun (6.5CM/.308). There has never been anything in between. We did the short barreled gas .308 for a bit, but that wasn’t the answer.
Think of it as a middleweight cartridge for guys who don’t wear shrubbery.

[Bigslug]

Cool. Do you have a plan to keep the ammo and mags separated? Like color coding the mags and lowers something other than standard AR black for the ARC?

I've seen a dishwashered Glock. I've seen a .40 loaded into a .45 that bulged the barrel. I've gone from "they couldn't possibly. . ." to, "eventually, they will almost certainly. . ."

Shouldn't take much of a speedbump, but there probably needs to be one.

[Zee]

We are still in the testing phase.

[Wambli Ska]

Good stuff! I guess here's the $64,000 question then: As a working LE cartridge, is it doing anything for us that the massively well-established 5.56 can't do with the right bullet? That's kinda the key thing. I think part of the early perception of the .40S&W's effectiveness was that it hit the field at the same time as the FBI protocols that used the "new math" for determining what a bullet should do - - there was never a "let's figure this out" period like there was with the 9mm. As such, you have to forget about a lot of "old bullet" 5.56 data. Both it and the ARC are close in diameter, close in speed, and if the projectiles are equally constructed to stop at something like the FBI's "ideal" maximum depth of 18" in Jell-O, it really comes down to how fast the pigs die. If the only real difference is maybe 0.1 to 0.2 inch of expanded diameter, figuring that out definitively will probably take A LOT more pigs. WORK. . . WORK. . .WORK.

(See. . .this is how you convince the bosses at the shoe factory to keep subsidizing your hunting trips. A case or two of good 5.56 for SERIOUS comparative testing is WAY more fiscally responsible that just rushing right out to buy a whole lot of new rifles. We have to be SURE you know. . . )

Where it starts to get frustrating is that after you collect all that data, the door kickers are going to assume that it'll perform exactly the same out of their 11" SBR. I got to assist in a 5.56 gel test in which as the barrel lengths and velocities went down, the penetration went up because the bullets that were designed to fragment out of a rifle no longer did out of the shorties. Gotta love science, but she's a heartless bitch at times..,

Chris dropped a decent sized pig on the spot at 285 yards with the 6 ARC and wasn’t a CNS hit!
I doubt a .223 could do that.

This cartridge is intended to fill a gap between light field use gas (.223) and a bolt gun (6.5CM/.308). There has never been anything in between. We did the short barreled gas .308 for a bit, but that wasn’t the answer.
Think of it as a middleweight cartridge for guys who don’t wear shrubbery.

Sounds like a good LE SWAT shoe salesman tool.

[Ernie]

I’m not looking at it from a hunting view point where people want exits for a blood trail. I want damage. I want internal disruption. I want penetration. I don’t want the risk of collateral damage.
Results were pretty much perfect.

[Jay]

I got the “Father Time” coyote skull back the other day.

7FD88FBC-FC15-49CA-A1E1-F3E73057AF1C.jpeg (2.92 MiB) Viewed 6903 times

[Zee]

That’s awesome!

[Ernie]

That is really cool!