Today's Experiment: Coleslaw with a .45

A few weeks ago, I had read about exploits involving the Desert Eagle making fruit salad. Magnum Research has some videos you can download showing a .44 pulverizing pineapples and clobbering coconuts. Elsewhere online, a Deagle owner was boasting about his ability to massacre melons at distances of 100 yards.

Myself, having the hardware and not wanting to be left out of the fun, decided to duplicate similar results. Since the wanton destruction of yet-edible fruit seems rather wasteful to me, I decided to make use of one of the many old cabbages we had lying around our compost heap.

So, one day while cleaning out our root cellar of some rotten carrots, while en route to the compost heap, I stopped by the house to gather up my .44 Mark VII Desert Eagle, as well as my digital camera to capture the moment.
















For those interested in seeing the experiment in progress, you can click here to watch the video. Play with the slider some. If you look close enough, you will see that pieces of it are still falling down around the time I turn around to laugh.

Of course, video does not do justice to actually being there. Bits of cabbage flew everywhere, and as high as 20 to 30 feet.

Here's a still of the end result:















The cabbage was as big as my head. A single shot blew it in half, and plowed a noticeable channel through the center as thick as my thumb.

So, conclusion:

frozen cabbage + .44 magnum (240gr JHP American Eagle, rated muzzle velocity of 1180 fps, fired through a 6-inch barrel) = Instant Coleslaw

The moose that hang around the compost pile seemed to enjoy the treat. When I came back to the compost heap today to burn some trash, I looked for the remains of the cabbage. It was gone. Even the bits that were sprinkled all around the box I had set the target on were gone. But there were a lot of moose tracks around.



















Today's fun with firearms attempted a variation of the same theme, but this time using my H&K USP45, loaded with Federal 230gr JHP.

Before the experiment: same sort of cabbage, same staging ground...















...and interesting results, but nowhere near as impressive as the .44. Of course, we are dealing with a slightly lighter bullet, different design bullet, and about half the powder charge (and 72% of the muzzle velocity and only 50% of the energy--850fps and 370 ft/lbs, respectively).














I've uploaded that video on putfile.com as well. Click here to watch it. I actually hit the cabbage on the third shot in the video (I edited out the rest of the near misses. Yeah, I was having an off day, but in my own defense, I can say I hit near it each time), have to reposition it, then hit it with each successive shot until I empty the magazine.

You also see bits of the cabbage flinging everywhere, but they don't fly nearly as high as with the .44 magnum.

The end result:














Something similar, but requiring more shots to get there.

Next on the docket: the effects of .45 JHP +P Cor-Bon on a Frozen Cabbage.

Are we having fun yet?