Dallas Safari Club is hosting the First Light 2010Convention from January 7th-10th at the Dallas Convention Center. Come and visit North Fork Bullets in location 411. We will have our full product line on display and be there to answer any questions you might have. 

Regards,

North Fork

Attached is a picture of a pronghorn antelope I took about 2 weeks
ago.  I shot him at 250yds in West Texas.  I was using a .270
Winchester with a 130 grain North Fork.  He ended up scoring 79 1/8"
B&C.  Thought y'all might like a picture of another North Fork kill.
 
Thanks,
Curtis Clader

Eastern Oregon Mule Deer taken by Ken Creel 

with a 6.5X284 with 120gr North Fork bullets at 193 yds.

Paul Henry with a succesful African Safari

I just returned from a wonderful safari with Roger Whittall Safaris on Humani in the Save River Conservancy in Zimbabwe on which I used North Fork bullets in Cal. 416 Rem. Mag. with excellent results.   I hunted plains game and was an observer on my brother’s Elephant / Buffalo hunt.  Also possible were Leopard and Lion.  Being allergic to becoming a greasy spot on the dirt, prior to the hunt I spent 10 months testing gun, scopes and bullets.  I tested all the better bullets.  Because they are machined instead of being stamped out, North Fork bullets were the most  CONSISTENT bullets.  They were the most accurate.  The Soft, Solid and Cup all shot to the same point of impact (making lovely little cloverleafs) with the same load.  They didn’t change POI from lot to lot. They shot to the same velocity with lower pressures observable on primers and primer pocket expansion.  The benefit is that one can spend much less time developing loads for the rifle, and more time tending to the myriad of other tasks required to go on safari.

My PH broke out in smiles when he saw my North Fork ammunition.  He had recently guided a 9 cow cull with a South African fellow, and part of the exercise was to evaluate bullets.  They tested five each of 9 different bullets on one carcass for penetration, and of course shot eight more Elephant.  The North Fork and (another lathe-turned flat meplat monolith manufactured in South Africa) out-performed everything else by a significant margin.  He held up the soft “this will be just the ticket if we get round to the Buffalo.  They don’t shed petals and swerve off into the guts.”  He held up the solid.  ”If your brother’s elephant takes one step after his shot, I want you to shoot and keep shooting as fast as you can until he’s down.  Shoot the heart-lungs, shoot the spine, shoot the main leg bones, shoot the hip, and failing that, shoot it anywhere you can.  These bullets penetrate like mad, just smash through bones and keep going straight”  And so it was.  My brother’s .500 N. E. was a perfectly placed frontal brain shot, but to our absolute shock and horror, the Elephant turned and ran.   Boo-Boom went his left and the PH’s shot into the heart-lung during the turn.  I was covering another bull, which quickly turned and was no longer a threat so I put a solid into my brothers retreating bull next to the base of the tail.  He stopped, swayed once, and down he went.  I think the Bull was pretty much done for, and wouldn’t have gone far even without my shot, but we were all gratified when he stopped and went down.  My bullet penetrated the hind-quarters, ran along the spine, got through the paunch, penetrated the liver, and was found in the heart-lung area.

We used the soft on the Kudu and Buffalo, both quartering one shot kills through the shoulder and heart-lung area, with the bullet bulging the skin on the off side.  Perfect.

Just finished load development for a .416 Rem. Mag. 700 out of the Custom shop. The gun was an orphan, and had been passed around from hand to hand because it had feeding problems. It shot well enough, but wouldn’t feed anything but round nose or spire point bullets. Turned out that the magazine box was standing up in front of the feed ramp slightly. A little judicious filing to fair the lips of the magazine box to match the feed ramp and the flat points fed like butter.
Loading, which I thought would be a long and tedious process turned out to be a snap, which I attribute to the uniformity from bullet to bullet and commonality of form from flat point to cup point to soft. I also load for benchrest, and like to measure. These bullets are all the same. It’s like picking up a box of Lapua 6 mm BR brass. You just can’t find any anomalies.
I tested just about everybody’s bullets, and the North Forks seemed to group the best individually. Settling on 76 gr. of Reloader 15 across the board for the 370 gr. soft, cup and flat gave nice 2350 fps. low pressure loads with a low velocity spread, round primers, and no noticeable primer pocket expansion. Oddly, i no the different North Forks all seem to shoot about the same velocity. The Federal Trophy 400 gr. Factory load was my “check load”, and the soft also clocked 2350, with flat-flat primers, and looser pockets.
Finally the days of preliminary load development are over. I’ve got 100 new R-P Brass (Huntingtons has a giant lot of .416 brass which seems better than average), and enough primers & powder out of the same lots to assemble my loads to take to Zimbabwe in September. But will it shoot? I wondered what it will take to get all the bullets to shoot together. I’ve been stomped to death when short on time before a trip and forced to just keep shooting that .470 that won’t regulate, or that light .375 that slaps you like a red-headed stepchild and then throws the softs and the solids to different parts of the world.
Shot in at 50 yards, one soft, one cup, and one flat cut a neat cloverleaf. 100 yards yields a horizontal string about 1 caliber tall and 1.25 ” wide, still dead on. 200 yards yields another horizontal string, 3″ wide and about .75″ deep printing 5″ low. The wind is fishtailing over either shoulder, I estimate at least half the horizontal spread is a weather report. I was elated. As Taylor said, confidence in equipment is critical for effective game shots. These bullets inspire calm collected shooting.
These North Forks are simply great bullets. Dug out of drought dried black clay they look like dirtier versions of the promo pictures. I’m hoping to see what they look like dug out of some animals.

Gary Glick

Dr. Kevin Robertson aka Doctari and his wife Catherine are offering photo/nature safaris in Kruger National Park.  A trip to Kruger National Park is a great addition to any safari to Africa and who better to show you around then Kevin and his professional photographer wife Catherine.

Enjoy!

North Fork bullets continue to perform well in independent testing. We sent our new .416 400 gr SS and CPS to Joseph D’Alessandro, editor of www.realguns.com, for a test he was conducting with a CZ 550 416 Rigby. Our 416 400gr SS ranked #1 in his test for soft points and our CPS came in a close second for solids. The soft point penetrated deeply, exhibited controlled expansion and high weight retention while our competitors fell apart under the harsh testing.  The CPS came in a close second to traditional solids even though it is an expanding solid. Too bad our flat point solid was not in the test. Read the whole review here www.realguns.com/archives/179.htm

I was invited to join some friends at an exotic game ranch near Hondo, Texas to help hunt down and put down a large (approx 1500 pounds) female hybrid water buffalo (Asian with some % cape buffalo as the skin is black and the horns have some characteristics of the cape buffalo). She had a broken horn with no trophy value and had attacked an ATV, a truck, a feeder, ground blinds, and had chased some hunters on foot. I eagerly accepted as this would be a perfect opportunity to use my Winchester 1895 .405 to field test the North Fork 300 grain Cup Point Solids that I had loaded to a velocity of 2250 fps. This has worked out to be a good velocity for my 1895 as the North Fork 300 grain SS, CPS and FPS all shoot to the same point of aim as do the factory Hornady .405 ammunition.

 When Ricky Krodle and I joined Joe Riekers, our friend and PH, at the ranch lodge, it was 5:00 PM of a sunny July Friday afternoon and the temperature was 105 degrees. We rested awhile and began hunting at 7:00 PM when the sun had begun to drop toward the horizon. It appeared the task would be easy, as we quickly located the ornery cow feeding with another buffalo and several other exotics. However, as we stalked through the sparse mesquite, the shifting light breeze caused some blackbuck does to spook and the buffalo saw us and trotted off into thicker brush before we could get a good shot. We then played hide and seek in the brush with the breeze and the buffalo until after 9:00 PM when it finally became too dark to hunt or shoot safely. Dusty, sweaty, and tired from hunting in the brush in 100 degree heat, we knocked off for the night and planned to resume our quest at daylight Saturday morning.

 We were back at it at 6:00 AM and aided by cooler temperatures, a reliable and steady southwest breeze in our faces and a thick screen of brush between us and the buffalo, we were able to stalk to within 60 yards of them where they were feeding in the open with a mixed group of smaller game.

We eased out of the mesquite as the cow and another buffalo stood 50 yards away and within five yards of the thick brush. I was to take the first shot and because we had lost her the night before in the brush and did not get a shot, it was prearranged that after my shot, Joe (.375 HH) and Ricky (.348 WCF) would immediately fire. With our rifles at the ready, we were all prepared to fire and were just waiting for the intervening animals to clear away. Joe had prodded us into a skirmish line and he was whispering instructions as each critter moved about into and out of the line of fire. As the last one made it to safety and the buffalo cow lined up to follow, I remembered a suggestion Joe had made on a previous hunt “To get on target quickly, line up with the front leg and raise the rifle, fire as the sights reach 1/3 of the way above the brisket line” (not an exact quote, but the essence of the advice). I did exactly this and squeezed the trigger on my 1895; I saw that the 300 grain NF CPS hit right where I was looking and as the rifle recoiled, saw the buffalo begin to drop forward as if the right front leg had been swept away from it. As I levered in another round, Ricky and Joe fired in rapid succession and the buffalo kept falling down on its right front and it hit the ground like a sack of potatoes; its head hit so hard that dust flew from the impact. DRT was obvious, but we fired another volley into the brisket for insurance, took pictures, and the real work of field dressing and hunting for expended bullets ensued.

 The post mortem was performed back at the game processing facility at the lodge and included the field inspection, searching for bullets during skinning and quartering and going over the gut pile with a metal detector to locate a final missing .375 bullet. It even continued on Sunday when my family was wrapping some of the meat. Most of the bullets were found with the exception of one shoot through. Though there was much to be learned from locating all the bullets and examining where they entered and finally came to rest, my focus was on my first shot. Here are the two North Fork bullets that were recovered - the shorter one was the first shot bone breaker and had been visibly compressed and mushroomed and had lost a few grains of weight down to 292 grains. The other bullet weighed 299 + grains and had mushroomed slightly.

My impression of the effect of my first shot with the .405 is based upon all the forensic information gathered and upon what I remember seeing.  As stated, the 300 grain NF CPS hit the upper right leg bone and powdered it completely in two. It then passed through the right side rib cage, the internals (lung and heart?) and the left side rib cage, leaving a two inch hole in each rib cage and associated flesh. The bullet was found lying flat under the offside skin and may have made such large holes due to turning sideways when it decimated the leg bone. It was in a line to have hit the heart (there was one bullet hole in the heart), but whether it did or not, it did enough damage to put down and kill the buffalo.

All things considered, and in spite of some folks opinions that a 300 grain bullet is too light for such animals, I would gladly use this same trusted rifle/ammo combination (.405 300 grain NF CPS or FPS at 2250 fps) again on such a critter. Naturally, I want to be hunting with friends that I trust to help handle matters should they get out of hand. Also, there is no doubt that a heavier .405 bullet would have greater sectional density, could penetrate better, and might be more suitable for such large, tough game.  I may work up such loads with heavier bullets, but DRT is still DRT and shot placement and premium bullets did make a difference.

The buffalo skull is now resting on a red ant bed by the road into the ranch where it will be apparent when the ants have it cleaned up and ready for display. I plan to pick it up when I return to Hondo to pick up my buffalo hamburger. 
_________________
CRS, NRA Patron Member, TSRA, DWWC

North Fork Premium Bonded Soft Points are a natural replacement for Trophy Bonded Bear Claws(tm). North Fork  Soft Points offer the same great terminal performance of the “original” Trophy Bonded Bear Claws(tm) with less fouling and at a lower cost.  North Fork Soft Points utilize a pure copper jacket with a solid rear shank and a lead bonded core. North Fork improvements include:

• Grooves in the rear shank to reduce fouling
• Pure copper and pure lead construction hold together better under impact then gilded/alloy metals
• Ogive shaped core hole eliminates fracture points found in other designs 

Step up to a North Fork and experience the confidence a superior bullet offers.