J. Marshall Stanton, honcho of Beartooth is the kind of fella that stands behind his product...I always find that one of the most important aspects of any bullet maker...actually of any business. Marshall’s knowledge of cast bullets and there use is quickly seen in his Tech Guide...Comprehensive Guide for Attaining Unsurpassed Performance Using Cast Bullets....if you enjoyed Verl Smith’s book you simply have to have this one. It has 37 sections in 8 chapters of solid information. It is written in a way that is easy to read and enjoyable...not like some technical manuals that will put you to sleep, or make you thirsty, they are so dry....mayhaps that’s why I always need a beer while reading..hummm.

Marshall clearly makes a statement about the quality of his bullets...page five of the Tech Guide states in part... "none of these (Beartooth) bullets are ever machine processed or handled. Our objective is not to compete with manufacturers of....massed produced, machine cast and lubed bullets: but rather to offer a premium bullet, hand produced and held to strict quality standards." That says it all for any manufacturer...Beartooth in my tests lived up to this promise.

Beartooth rushed some very fine .378 caliber LBT gas checked 250 grainers to me for Elk season. But the elk were not co-operating! I guess they heard of Beartooth’s reputation. But a very stupid mule deer wondered into my range. The 38-55 Marlin spoke...using a fairly heavy med-level load of 40 grains of Acc2495 for 2050fps from the 24 inch barrel...at a little over 165 paces (150 yards or so) the B’Tooth went in behind his left ribs angling forward at a fairly sharp angle..like to say I planned that way, but didn’t...it went in behind the last rib, but the impact blew a hunk of the rib into the back left lung.

The Beartooth bullet’s impact velocity had to be near 1650 fps and over 1500 lbs of energy, more than a 44 magnum at point blank range. The bullet went on forward on a sharp angle to totally destroy the left lung, then it clipped a main spur from the neck spine. Instead of exiting, it went in an upwards direction and stopped behind the off side jaw...after severing a main artery in the neck. Absolutely perfect performance for a cast bullet on a fairly large animal..(184 lbs field cleaned). The recovered bullet weighed 144 grains. A jacketed soft nose bullet couldn’t have done it any better. When I had opened him, I found he practically bled out totally inside, from the severed main vein. He didn’t go more than 40 yards.

The LFN/LBT .378 design I used was terrific keeping it’s velocity. Though this bullet had a smaller meplat than the WFN/LBT B’Tooth design...it seemed to measure around .255 vrs. The .300 and larger that are available from B’Tooth. I was planning on that mysterious elk so I had Marshall send me the smaller meplat and cast at BNH 21 hardness. So I could get optimal penetration but still with a flat enough nose for shock value. BNH 21 will allow velocities in the 2000 to 2400+fps range without fouling, so even with a long distance harvesting situation, I would still have had a flat enough trajectory. With my starting velocity and a three inch high at 100 yards it’s still was 3/4ths of an inch high at 150 yards and down 4 inches or so at 200 and well over a foot drop at 250 yards.

Beartooth makes bullets in several different levels of hardness...so the shooter can load handguns to rifles, from low velocity to well over 2600 fps...without accuracy problems. I had a good friend that came to me at the June Shootist Holiday complaining that his new bolt action rifle was leading/fouling with very low velocity cast loads...no matter how hard he made the cast bullets. I explained that when you are firing low velocity cast bullets, they have to be softer not hard. Because there isn’t enough pressure for the hard lead to obdurate into the rifling to seal off the gas pressure. So the gas gets around the bullet base, cuts up the sides of the bullet, plating lead on the bore. The opposite is also true, if the velocity is high, the pressure high, but the bullets are not hard enough, the same thing happens.....you have to pick the right hardness for the velocity you are going to use.

Hard bullets will expand and kill well. And if designed correctly they will kill quickly. The Keith design was for over seventy years, the most effective and well known cast game bullet design out there. And it is still wonderful. When Verl Smith brought out his LBT design he just basically removed the step at the shoulder of the Keith...giving better long range flight characteristics. But he kept the idea of a good sized flat nose. Both in his WFN (wide flat nose) and his LFN (long flat nose) it is the meplat and it’s size that counts on game. The larger the caliber and meplat, the better for medium game like deer and black bear...smaller meplat for larger game where penetration and bone breaking is vital.

Some folks just don’t believe the cast bullet can be as good as the jacketed bullet, their right!...Because the cast bullet is better. WHY? Jacketed bullets rarely tell you on their box what game they are for...unless they are marked for varmint hunting. Handgun bullets thru rifle bullets...if you don’t know what strength and design velocity they are made for....you can get no penetration when you need it or too much penetration and no expansion when you don’t need it.

For one small example out of dozens...Winchester marketed at one time a 260 grain jacketed soft nose with a small H.P. in .452 caliber, that a lot of folks loaded very warm in their Ruger/colt45 and 454 revolvers in the mid 1980s...and went medium to big game hunting, only to find out the bullet would blow up in only a few inches when loaded above 1300 fps. Why? Because the bullet was designed to be a heavy weight for 700 to 750 fps for 45 ACP Autoloaders. I fired one loaded to 2200 fps from a Rossi 45 colt chambered levergun...at fifty yards I had a string of water filled gallon jugs...it completely obliterated the first jug...shotgun like holes in the front side of the second, just like a high velocity varmint rifle and a SX bullet. But never touched the rest of the other jugs. It didn’t say anything about it’s velocity range on the box.

A hard 250 grain LBT at the same velocity from the Rossi, exploded the first four jugs, ruptured the next two, and punched thru the seventh and disappeared down range. The same bullet from my Ruger 45 S/A at 1350 fps blew the first jug, ruptured the next two, and punched thru two more. Cast bullets in the 16 to 20 BHN hardness level are consistent from around 1200 fps to well over 2000 fps. If you load them right, they are deadly on game. One of the biggest problems we have with cast bullet reputation is the use of the wrong hardness for the velocity. But it is really very simple, because the overlapping range of hardness and velocities give the shooter today wide velocity ranges with the hardness selected.

In the early years of the 20th century thru the 1950s, cast bullets in 30-30 class rifles for example (the 300 Savage, 32 Special, and a number of other well used calibers in those days), were a big problem with this hardness factor...they were either cast too soft and fouled badly, giving very bad accuracy.. or they were too hard and penciled thru the animal giving no shock. Lubes of the times were not good, cast bullet design tried to copy jacketed designs, and tempering cast bullets was unknown. With the large 35 calibers and above, the flat nose will make up for other problems like too hard an alloy...but the 30, 32 and below calibers, need expansion without fouling. Col. Harrison of the NRA in the 1960s thru to the mid 1990s...rediscovered cast bullets for modern arms and their potentials with modern technology. The Cast Bullet Association picked up from him and amazed the world with cast bench rest 200 yard groups, as good as the jacketed bench rest shooters groups. And the business of commercial cast bullets exploded in the U.S. in the 80s and 90s.

And one of the very good producers is Beartooth. They produce bullets in almost all calibers, with many weight choices, and hardness choices...give them a try I think you’ll be as pleased as I am..... 

You can visit their site by CLICKING HERE.