N/A Ballistic gel

Ballistic gel/Ballistic bodies. Why are they used ?do u use them ,if so for what .is it for fine tuning ur gun and technique. Just for fun? And when is 20% appropriate?? Why are the zombie parts just so expensive? What do u think ??
Real B-Gel is (or was ?) $$$$ their are video to DIY but then it is not guaranteed to be consistent through and through .
 
I have made my own ballistic gel and used it. It is cheap if you just buy the powder and dissolve it yourself in boiling water, then pour it into a pan of some sort to cool. It does not dissolve easily, however, so it is a bit of a pain to do. Mine was not perfectly clear either. It needs to be refrigerated or will start to come apart.

10% ballistic gel is kind of an industry standard way to test projectile performance. It is supposed to simulate penetration in an animal but with recognition that the animal is too variable for anything like this to be a great simulation. 10% ballistic gel is easier for the projectile to penetrate than animal muscles and much easier to penetrate than bones but it is probably harder to penetrate than lungs. 20% ballistic gel might simulate muscles better, I've seen nothing that compares them. I use wet paper (magazines these days, I used to use newspapers) to simulate muscle tissue based upon writings of Finn Aagard, a professional hunter and later in life writer for shooting shorts publications.

People use a variety of materials to get some idea of projectile performance before shooting an animal with it. I think that is a good thing to do and I do it (in wet paper and layers of mdf to simulate bone). But whatever you use it is important to keep in mind animal bodies are much too variable for any test media to be a great simulation.

For air rifles and other guns with under 1000 fps velocity it is important to remember that the temporary wound cavity may look cool but it is not damaged tissue and will just snap back in place undamaged in the animal. Much higher velocity pb rifle projectiles expand the animal tissue fast enough that the temporary wound channel is damaged tissue so the damage is greater consistent with what you see in gel. So ballistic gel wound channels (or clay channels) can be misleading for lower velocity guns like our airguns.
 
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