Bullet Bio: Remington AccuTip

A little known fact is that the Remington AccuTip bullet is actually made for Remington by Hornady. In fact, the Remington AccuTip bullet is nothing more than a Hornady SST bullet with a greenish tip instead of a red tip. Now, while this might surprise some of you, it should not detract from your opinion of this bullet. The AccuTip/SST is an excellent big game bullet known for high energy transfer and extensive tissue destruction. 

The AccuTips made for Remington by Hornady are so good that, when Remington tests ammunition before its shipped out to dealers, they require any and every load using AccuTip bullets to shoot three, five-shot groups at 100 yards—and they all must measure less than 0.8". This is partly why Remington considers AccuTip loads to be Premium ammunition and, up until 2016, it has been priced as such. The good news is AccuTip ammo will be less expensive in the future.

Even though the AccuTip is just a green tipped Hornady SST, there are some AccuTips that Hornady makes specifically for Remington. And, through painstaking terminal performance testing, Remington has matched all the AccuTips they load to cartridges to ensure consistent performance. From most cartridges, AccuTips will penetrate about as deep as Remington Core-Lokts but they will not expand as wide and only dump about 65 percent of their energy in the first eight inches. However, they usually shoot flatter and with more precision, making them great long-range options.

One of my favorite factory loads is topped off with the AccuTip. Hunting in Texas while testing the new at the time Remington R25, all the hunters in our party but me had selected the .308 Winchester. I’d had good luck at home with the 95-grain AccuTip out of the .243 Winchester and that’s the cartridge and load I chose for the hunt. A few of the hunters told me I was foolish if I thought I was going to shoot across the Texas prairie with a .243. The ten-point I shot at 180 yards ran about 50 steps and piled up. The doe at 310 yards took a single AccuTip through the heart and collapsed.

If you’re a member of the hoard of hunters who have fallen in love with the .300 AAC Blackout cartridge, you should already be familiar with the Remington Accutip. In 10 percent ordnance gelatin it will penetrate about 19 inches, expand to around 0.55 inch in diameter, while retaining about 84 percent of its weight. Its also very accurate and unquestionably one of the best deer loads for the Blackout.

It shouldn’t bother you at all that Remington AccuTip bullets are actually Hornady SST bullets. Think of them as Chevrolet and GMC; they're exactly the same, but different.