by Charlie Jacoby
In a world where leaving lead fragments in your gralloch can earn you a frontseat in the falconers’ hall of hate, it’s time to swap out your old lead bullets for modern lead-free alternatives. But which materials actually kill deer? Well, RWS decided to have a go with tin.
Presumably, RWS boffins found that tin is a bit rubbish at normal speeds, so they bumped up the mph. And then they found something unexpected. Not only does the new Evo Green kill deer as well as a .308 lead bullet, it delivers similar ballistic performance to a .30-06 – a significant upgrade.
The new Evo Green from RWs is designed to upgrade your .308 to a .30-06. It’s a hot round, made of tin and designed for shorter barrels. RWS is targeting the new short barrel + silencer market that is becoming more popular.
Here is Hannes Dikhoff from RWS to talk through its plus points:
The wound channel is not the widest I have seen from a .308, but all of the 30 deer we shot with the round during a week of red hind stalking fell over. And with all of them, the bullet went right through the animal.
Shorter barrels create a loss of velocity. This round has 930 m/s muzzle velocity, which exceeds the .30-06 by around 40 m/s. It’s a 9-gramme bullet, which is light for a .308. Tin is 25% less dense than lead. Because it travels fast and because of its material, it breaks up easily. It’s a dual-core fragmentation bullet in jacketed lead-free construction.
The RWS graph shows its superior performance against their ordinary lead rounds on roe and wild boar, with the lines only matching at red stags, and traditional, heavier lead rounds exceeding the performance of the new bullet when you get to game the size of bears.
Kick? Nope. Didn’t notice it. And I am a habitual cissie-pad wearer.
It creates a relatively small but adequate wound channel and it is designed to exit. That means finding a blood trail is a lot easier.
Now – does all this mean that my barrel burns out every few hundred shots? No idea – I only got to use it for a week. But RWS assures me it doesn’t. And even if it does, maybe its worth it for the upgrade.
Want to see the RWS Short Rifle Evo Green in action? We take it on a hind cull in Scotland:
Here’s our film about the original RWS Evo Green launch: