Federal Cartridge has just announced a redesign of its much-admired Trophy Bonded bullets in calibers from .270 to .338. The original Trophy Bonded Bear Claw had a pure lead core bonded inside a pure copper jacket, with a square base and what would now be called a “protected point.” In other words, not a spitzer.
This is fine for large bullets for dangerous game, where the action is in close and neither ballistic coefficient nor trajectory and flight characteristics matter at all. Shooters of smaller caliber rifles, however, want long-range performance; a square-base, flat-nose bullet just does not cut it when the action is 300 or 400 yards out.
Federal has given the smaller-caliber Bear Claws a boattail and two driving bands, and added a polymer spitzer tip. The result--the Trophy Tip--is a bullet that both looks high-performance in every respect and still retains the terminal characteristics of the original Bear Claw: high retained weight, perfect mushrooming and deep penetration.
Were C.W. Rowland and Harry Pope to come back today for a look around, they would find the internet baffling but our bullet designs eerily familiar. What’s next? How about a “revolutionary” flat-nosed bullet? I wouldn’t rule it out.
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