Black Hills 5.56mm NATO 50 Grain Barnes Optimized TSX Hollow Point Lead-Free

This Black Hills 5.56 ammo is specialized for self-defense and hunting. Designed with Triple-Shocks; Black Hills ammo developed these innovative bullets from Barnes which are made from 100% copper, containing no lead. These rounds are engineered to expand, with four razor-sharp cutting petals, allowing the bullet to pierce farther through tough bone and tissue. Triple-Shock bullets are able to retain almost 100% of the original weight, making it a superb option for hunting.

 

The monolithic (all copper) Barnes 50 grain TSX hollow-point bullet used in the 5.56mm Black Hills load is a proprietary design; it’s not the same 50 grain TSX projectile that is available as a reloading component. The proprietary 50 grain TSX was developed to provide better blind-to-barriers performance after passing through automobile safety glass (windshields) compared to the standard TSX projectiles. The original TSX bullets have unfortunate occurrences of the expanding petals shearing-off (or collapsing-in on themselves) when passing through auto safety glass. The proprietary 50 grain TSX has greatly improved on this situation (although the petals of the new 50 grain TSX still tend to collapse-in on themselves when passing through sheet metal barriers.)

 

A side effect of the proprietary 50 grain TSX projectile’s ability to expand and retain its petals after passing through auto safety glass is that the velocity expansion threshold of the new projectile has risen compared to the original TSX design (from approximately 1900 FPS to approximately 2300 FPS). This is where the increased velocity of the 5.56mm load (compared to a standard 223 Remington load) proves beneficial.

 

 The new design of the proprietary 50 grain TSX, combined with the increased velocity of the 5.56mm load (along with the relatively shorter length of the 50 grain projectile) allows this load to be adequately stabilized from a wide variety of barrel twist rates and produce extremely consistent terminal ballistic properties from a wide variety of barrel lengths. The pic below shows that the Black Hills 5.56mm 50 grain TSX load fired from a 10.5” barrel produces nearly the same results in bare ballistic gelatin as the load does when fired from a 20” barrel.

 

Black Hills loaded this ammo with Lake City brass that has gone through factory annealing, allowing for and lengthened brass life. Thanks to this annealing process, the neck section of the brass may seem to be discolored until the case is cleaned.

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