I've never shot the ELR put the original powerbelts had terrible terminal performance on wet newspaper and plywood. If you want to know what the ELR's will do I suggest making up a bullet trap with wet newspapers or old test books and maybe throw in some plywood to simulate bone, or anything else you might have around. This will actually be better to gain knowledge about performance than anecdotal data from hunting scenarios because hunting scenarios very by many more factors than you can account for. Compare 3 or 4 bullets at different speeds (you can change distance or just powder loads) and you can at least have a good comparison of bullets your interested in even if your bullet trap is ideally suited to match an animal.
how far did the newspaper make it?
I understand the pursuit of real information but at the end of the day, shooting plywood and newspaper gives you information for that specific application. In the case of a polymer tipped bullet like the ELR especially, I don't believe the results on plywood are going to be relevant to shooting animals
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I don't recall the depths, my testing wasn't about what the bullet would do exactly to an animal as I can only test (hopefully) one or two bullets a year in an animal, but how one bullet compared to other bullets in the same circumstances. The Powerbelts penetrated about the same as other bullets in water jugs and wet newspapers even though they didn't expand like the others did. When the powerbelts hit something hard, like wood, they broke apart, while other bullets stayed together and continued to penetrate.
My main point in bringing it up here is to do what you can to test bullets yourself, and compare them to other bullets. It's really hard to test in animals but there are ways to compare bullets with whatever materials we have laying around, won't be perfect, but it is something.
