Extreme Shock

Extreme Shock
By Patrick Sweeney - Guns & Ammo Magazine

Extreme Shock (www.extremeshockusa.com) is a new manufacturer, and I went off to see what the new revolution may well be. The company is tucked away in a secluded corner of Virginia near the Kentucky border. It is at the end of a twisty county road leading up a narrow valley that, on a sunny day, would make me wish I still had my old 1968 MG.
As we all know, modern smallbore ammunition is some variant of the "cup and core" design. A brass tube, closed at one end, contains a lead core. By shaping the jacket and core, ballisticians create bullets that expand when they strike but do not come apart. In regular bullet designs, fragmentation is a bad thing. But Extreme Shock technicians not only accept fragmentation, they embrace it. The key is the new composition of the bullet core, a sintered tungsten alloy. Extreme Shock has gone to great effort to learn the dynamics of both ends of the process: the bonding of the tungsten-nytrilium composite into a core and its controlled disruption in the target.

In a nutshell, they've designed barely controlled-rate disintegrating bullets for a number of applications. At the short end, they have handgun bullets that will catastrophically disintegrate, and thus limit penetration to just as many (or few) inches of bad guy as you need. The idea is to limit penetration of other objects such as aircraft fuselages, hydraulic lines, etc. At the other end are bullets that disintegrate violently but still drive fragments more than a foot deep in various test media.

Some of you are shaking your heads. "We've done that, and what you get is shallow penetration, nasty-appearing wounds and game that runs off." Well, yes, you've done it with lead. But lead has mechanical properties that make it a poor candidate for sintered-core designs. First, lead will re-bond to itself. It doesn't take much pressure to get two pieces of lead to adhere. So your carefully contrived sintered-lead core, on impact, re-melds itself into a solid core. Or it doesn't, and the relatively lightweight lead fails to penetrate deeply enough.

That's right, relatively lightweight--compared to tungsten, anyway. If you were to construct duplicate bullets of lead and tungsten, the tungsten bullet would be 72 percent heavier than the lead. Add to that the chemical magic that Extreme Shock has done to prevent its powdered tungsten from re-amalgamating and you have a whole different situation.

I don't pretend to fully grasp the new dynamics, only to note that lab tests and field reports indicate they are definitely on to something.
The basic mechanics work like this: The bullet, in its gilding metal jacket, strikes the target. The jacket decelerates and begins to break up while the core keeps moving forward and begins flowing. The denser core breaks through and out of the jacket, then floods the target. As the tungsten composite is extremely dense, it does not slow down at anything like the rate that lead does. The design of the jacket controls how deep it penetrates before the core separates and then disintegrates.

The target is struck with a high-velocity mass of dense particles, delivering all that energy in a very short time. Oh, one more thing about tungsten: It is very hard. Unlike lead, which is so malleable you can practically shape it with your bare hands, tungsten is harder than hardened steel. The particles of the Extreme Shock bullets do not re-bond with each other, and they are not significantly deformed by striking bone.
At the Extreme Shock plant, I had an opportunity to see how the various designs modify the terminal disintegration rate--and look at an impressive number of dead-critter photos. As did the old-time hunters using a .45-70 as a "medium" caliber to hunt big game, I found the idea of using a .22 Hornet on deer and 9mm or .40 S&W handguns on big boars to be just a bit unsettling. Just like those old-timers shaking their heads at a .30 Krag besting a Sharps in .45-110, I have to scratch my head. But dead is dead.

There is one use that I do grasp immediately. If you are using frangible ammunition indoors, you really have to look into Extreme Shock. The bullets used in other frangible ammo are made by pressing copper/brass/bronze particles into a bullet shape and then loading them into a cartridge case. Using a bonding agent and the natural adherence of the metal, the makers get the bullets to stay together until they hit the steel plate or backstop. Most of the time, anyway.

A couple of weeks before I visited Extreme Shock, I had a police officer in a patrol rifle class have a malfunction with frangible ammo. A bullet had broken in half at the case mouth during feeding. The back half of the bullet stayed in the case neck; the front half of the bullet dropped into the barrel extension of his M-4. Instant stoppage, and one that required tools to clear. I can well imagine what might have happened if the front half had instead gone into the chamber and then the bore. It, or parts of it, could have acted as a bore obstruction and perhaps damaged the barrel.

The Extreme Shock ammunition, with its gilding-metal jacket, has no such potential. Anyone who shoots indoors with traditional bullets has an increased potential for lead exposure. While tungsten does have some medical effect on the human body, it is nothing like lead in its health effects. So those who have to use lead-free ammunition indoors should seriously investigate Extreme Shock.

In addition to visiting the factory, I shot a lot there from various firearms into their selected ballistic medium, which is not gelatin but a waxy substance that is denser and greasier. The results were impressive, as every block showed violent expansion from the disintegrating bullets. At home I shot gelatin and water. What I found was that the effects on gelatin and water differed from the test medium used by Extreme Shock. I mentioned this to another shooter, and he immediately jumped on it as "proof" that the ammo doesn't work.

Let's back up for a moment. We've used ballistic gelatin as a test medium for years because it is the closest simulant to pig muscle that we've found. Simulant, as in, "close but not the real thing." It should come as no surprise to find our simulated goo is not exactly like the real thing and that a new product might react differently in the simulant than it does in real critters. All bullets expanded more violently in water than in the Extreme Shock test medium, and while some replicated the factory effect in my gelatin, others had widely differing results. I had brought and shot groups as well as any other ammo I've tested.

I also found the various loadings performing just as Extreme Shock described them: The Air Freedom round, meant for decreased penetration, blasted through much less wallboard than regular JHPs do. The Fang Face, designed to give more penetration than the Air Freedom but still not penetrate structures as much as standard JHPs, did just that. Where a regular 9mm JHP will exit as much wallboard as you care to stand and space (more than a dozen is common), the Fang Face will stop in six to eight and the Air Freedom splatters the fourth board with dust. In tactical rifle calibers, the .223 and 7.62x39 loadings use heavier-than-usual bullets for an impressive decrease in noise from suppressed rifles.

Are the designs fully realized? Does Extreme Shock have an answer for every shooter's situation? "Not yet" and "No" are the real answers. But remember, it took decades before smokeless-powder cartridges had effective bullets. Just because Extreme Shock isn't perfect now doesn't mean there's nothing to it.

Me, I'm hedging my bets because I'm not sure I "get it," but I'm sure there's something here. I guess I'll just have to go out and personally expire a few critters to figure this out for sure