As a side show to a recent gel project, I popped the block with a couple .41 Magnum rounds. I'd been curious as to what the 240gr Platinum Tip would do, although I had a sneaking suspicion, and I also fired a 175gr Silvertip as a control round.
The Platinum Tip round is fairly heavy-for-caliber and intended as a hunting round. It uses the reverse-taper jacket design, familiar from the Ranger-T and the old "Black Talon", where the jacket petals unfold into pointy 'claws' intended as a secondary wounding mechanism.
In this case, it performed like I thought it would. Winchester claims over 1200fps at the muzzle, which is a bunch for a 240gr bullet, and it expanded like a brochure catalog photo even through four layers of denim and carried through the entire 16" block of clear gel...before punching through the four layers of denim on the back side of the block and coming to rest, base forward, five inches into a second gel block.
This is probably a little too enthusiastic in the penetration department for a personal defense load and, even with the quad-Mag-Na-Ported barrel on the 57, recoil fell into the "brisk but manageable" category for sure.
The 175gr Silvertip was a pleasant surprise, though. It's loaded mildly, at least for a .41 Magnum, and intended for personal defense. It's rated at about the same velocity as the Platinum Tip, but only about three quarters the projectile weight. It's downright shootable from an N-frame.
The Silvertip projectile is an old design and not known for outstanding performance through 4LD, but if you put enough steam behind it and give it enough sectional density, it'll do okay. In this case it expanded violently enough to leave a trail of jacket fragments behind it before coming to rest in the denim on the far side of the block, which is nearly ideal performance in my layperson's opinion.
In this case, if I had to carry the .41 Magnum, I'd leave the hunting bullets for hunting and carry the antique self defense hollow points for self defense in the antique gun.
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