I am in  Colorado - accompanying my wife on a business trip. She goes to the store for food and comes back with a gun magazine for me. She had no idea what to get, and ended up getting one that had "best of" articles from Shooting Times and Guns & Ammo. Some of the articles are pretty old (60s and 70s). I will probably give this to my dad to bring back some memories for him.

Anyway - for some of the big game rounds they were shooting water soaked phone books that were bound tightly. The neat thing is you could see a wound channel. Its like a poor man's ballistics gel.

Sooo - hey - why not try that method out? If you need some phone books, call your local recyclers. When I drop off my cans they usually have - literally - a ton of them. And they sell you stuff cheap by the pound.

Good luck - have fun - and tell us how it works out!

PS speaking of ballistics gel - why have you never cooked up a batch??

Great idea.

I personally would feel awkward requesting something like this. Have you considered giving it a shot Mister44?

Shit, even I could pull this one off. First ten members to send me a phonebook with thier screen name on it- I'll make you famous!

Quoted: I personally would feel awkward requesting something like this. Have you considered giving it a shot Mister44?

lol - YOU dont want me to do this. I don't own anything to make such a test interesting.

BUT - if you donate me your firearms - hell yeah Ill do it.

Thanks for the suggestion.  Others have offered the same idea.

Shooting wet paper is slightly interesting, but with the difference in types of paper, wetness, how tight they are bound, etc, are all variables that will lead to differences in results.  There is no way to make all tests exactly the same.

This is a big advantage of ballistic gelatin.  If properly mixed and refrigerated, and then calibrated by shooting it with a BB at a specified velocity and measuring the penetration of the BB, it can be confirmed to be exactly the same consistency every time you use it.

But all that mixing, refrigerating, and calibrating is just too much trouble for a poor boy like me.  I am not a big money laboratory.

So, I substitute water.  Water always has the same consistency and allows comparison from one shoot to another.  And the experts have established that water will give a good approximation of penetration into ballistic gelatin at a 2 to 1 ratio.  That means penetration of 20 inches of water is just about equal to 10 inches of ballistic gelatin. Bullets will also almost always expand perfectly in water.

Water is fairly cheap ($.62 per gallon at Wallyworld) and easy to clean up.  So that's what I use.

But thanks for the suggestion.

I am aware that you need to do specific things to ballistics gel to keep it an accurate representation to human flesh. BUT it would be fun to make some up and try it anyway. You are not a science lab, like you said. While the methods wouldn't be 100%, they should still be interesting.

As for phone books, once you remove the covers the paper is all the same. If you go to your recyclers you can get 100 copies of the same book to make it consistent.

ANYWAY - great work either way. Just saw how they did it ol' school and thought you might want to try.

Quoted: I am aware that you need to do specific things to ballistics gel to keep it an accurate representation to human flesh. BUT it would be fun to make some up and try it anyway. You are not a science lab, like you said. While the methods wouldn't be 100%, they should still be interesting.

A lot of things are "fun" and "interesting".  Unfortunately, a good many of those things, including ballistic gel testing, are also "expensive".  Until O_P makes it big in television, it's asking a little much to expect him to get into that stuff.

I've seen comments from Brouhaha about the bucks he and Tatjana used to drop doing ballistics gel tests for the ammo forum, and it is not an insignificant amount of money.

I could do it...

I have a box of phone books sitting in the office break room.


What calibers do you guys want to test?
What bullet types?
What distances?


I've done it with my Mosin (7.62x54R) at 25,50,100yds it goes through 4 books easily.

When O_P is sitting pretty in the Oval Office he will have the resources to do this kind of testing all the time.


I can see the water box sitting in the rose garden in my mind's eye now.

Quoted: When O_P is sitting pretty in the Oval Office he will have the resources to do this kind of testing all the time. I can see the water box sitting in the rose garden in my mind's eye now.

Let's water the roses.

Quoted: Quoted: I am aware that you need to do specific things to ballistics gel to keep it an accurate representation to human flesh. BUT it would be fun to make some up and try it anyway. You are not a science lab, like you said. While the methods wouldn't be 100%, they should still be interesting. A lot of things are "fun" and "interesting".  Unfortunately, a good many of those things, including ballistic gel testing, are also "expensive".  Until O_P makes it big in television, it's asking a little much to expect him to get into that stuff. I've seen comments from Brouhaha about the bucks he and Tatjana used to drop doing ballistics gel tests for the ammo forum, and it is not an insignificant amount of money.

I thought it was basically just generic Gelatin. I am sure the FBI uses some sort of premixed special made stuff. But I bet if you looked around you could buy a bulk bag relatively cheap - and build a mold out of wood and line it with plastic bags.

BUT anyway - I am talking about phone books. When you buy from a recyclers you are talking probably a quarter a book or so. They sell by weight.