There are many excellent older cartridges with performance constrained by the metallurgy available for the firearms at the time they were designed. The fact that a single shot spreads out as it approaches its target statistically improves your chances of effectively eliminating the threat in your environment. Multiple Projectile ammunition provide a significant advantage in high stress shooting situations where control is limited or shooter experience may be in question. This offers significant improvements over other design concepts using soft lead balls and washers. The incorporation of nesting cones allows us to create large frontal diameters, improving terminal performance while increasing the number of projectiles a cartridge can hold. It offers users the benefit of multiple projectiles from a single cartridge through the careful machining of solid copper or brass bullets designed for controlled dispersion. Multiple Projectile Technology focuses on our belief that multiple wound trails are better than one (the FBI testifies to this in their Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness Training Manual. Through design and testing, we can move the expansion point and maintain the expansion diameter exactly where required providing the optimum terminal performance. Contrast this with a traditional jacketed bullet that expands and quickly mushrooms the nose back along the bullets shank once again reducing the diameter down to a less effective size. Lehigh Maximum Expansion bullets expand with razor sharp petals positioned AND maintained at the largest diameter to provide the greatest cutting surface.
The expansion process of Lehigh's Maximum Expansion technology is very different than that of a traditional lead jacketed bullet that expands when it comes in contact with a hard surface – we designed these bullets to expand where the expansion is needed and that is in the vital zone of your intended target. They do not expand on dry mediums like wood, drywall, bone, or sheet metal. These cavernous hollow points are designed to expand upon contact with a fluid-based medium through hydraulic energy. Our Maximum Expansion® Technology is used to produce projectiles that create the largest wound channels of any bullet you can buy. Given that the system pressure of each cartridge is fixed to some value determined by SAAMI, any increase in bullet weight or velocity will both increase the muzzle energy, but will also increase the chamber pressure. This technology utilizes the hyper velocity to transfer enormous energy based on mass-energy equivalence, E=1/2MVSq. The energy is there our goal is to utilize every bit of it and dumping it all on the surface in a non-vital area is not appropriate for a personal defense design. The design of the individual high mass/high energy petals overcome other designs that use powdered metal or plastic composite projectiles that disintegrate upon impact.
These petals, base, and core are all designed to penetrate no more than 18", transferring a huge amount of energy to the target in a very short timeframe. The pre-stressed jacket separates into petals sized for appropriate penetration based on the specific cartridge. The aluminum nose optimizes feeding and provides a barrier blind entry. The aluminum core initiates the expansion slightly after contact, pressing back into the pre-stressed jacket and activating a violent, incapacitating energy transfer. The CQ is a lightweight, hyper velocity design using an aluminum core and pre-stressed jacket.