Just finished/tested my prototype indoor bullet trap
 

My wife and I plan to join a good friend and his wife this winter in a fun shoot .22 league at a local indoor range. Both my wife and I suck at bullseye type shooting with a pistol so we need to practice quite a bit over the next couple months so as not to embarrass ourselves too badly. I just finished a nice outside IDPA range, but it is winter now and bullseye type practice (especially for my wife) would be much nicer inside my heated shop. ;)

I had some free 1/2" x 16" tall x 24" long steel plates available at work so after searching other available bullet trap designs I came up with this one. It works so nice, that I may look into building some to sell out of lighter material.

It consists of gradually sloping side plates that terminate with a 1/2" slot that is then attached to a 4 1/2" diameter slotted tube mounted at an offset. The bullets hit the side plates and are directed into a tangent entry into the round tube where they spin around losing energy then they simply fall into a coffee can at the bottom of the tube. If I start producing them, I will use a larger tube and reduce the angle even more to keep bullet fragmentation to an absolute minimum which will further reduce lead dust.

I presently have this thing cobbed up on an old sawhorse in my auto repair/paint booth room and have been running the exhaust fan to remove lead dust, but I may eventually attach a shop vac to it with a hose and set the shop vac outside with the hose ported thru the garage door which result in less heat loss than my present set-up which requires a open window to allow cold make-up air in to feed my large paintbooth exhaust fan system.

I have put a couple hundred rounds thru it this weekend with no issues. It presently looks like @ss, but it works great. I shot a few 9mm rounds into it also, but it's main purpose is for the wife and I to practice with the Ruger target .22.

Designing/Building


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Initial testing


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That's EXACTLY what I want to build for myself (but bigger, my pistol league goes out to 25 yards).

How thick is the steel plate? Have you attempted to determine the largest caliber you can use?

Cool. I need one of those for the garage!

I had one when I was a kid. My dad and I would shoot our .22 in the back yard. Today I would imagine they would call a SWAT team. :(

damn, tim! you do not do anything halfass, do you? that is awesome.

are you worried about lead dust/fragments coating everything inside of a structure? i had a mini version of that for my pellet rifle, and that would leave a sheen around.

I looked at a house in Utah and the basement was dark and wide open floor space about 50 X 30 'and all of the walls were thickly insulated with the foam sheeting even the 2 windows had a cover made for them.
After finding a light bulb I got the room lit up.
To find the end wall that was cut open about 3 feet off the ground and open behind it , had a huge piece of thick steel sloping inwards from the ceiling top and ending behind the wall with about 18" of sand filling the bottom, behind the wall .
It turns out the PO had made up this basement shooting gallery and i would guess that he did quite a bit of shooting here , the steel plate was about 1 inch thick and the wall opening was about 8 feet across and about 6 feet high the steel was anchored at the top and bottom was anchored to the wall behind the wall that was cut out.
Pretty cool

Good idea to use up all that old Dot Matrix Printer paper too!

Well it is kind of halfass looking.

I am not worried about the lead dust as my large paintbooth fan is about 4' from the trap and I had a window open upstream of it. The smoke/dust gets sucked out by the fan..... On top of that, it is in my paintshop/auto repair area which is usually fairly dirty. :D I will probably rig a shop vac to it eventually and will place the shop vac outside. I could rig a water/oil emulsion pump to it to coat the interior walls to further reduce dusting if it becomes a problem.

I hate OSHA, EPA, etc, but I know that I need to exhaust the lead dust and would not recommend anyone cobb something like this up unless they address the lead dust for long term health reasons. I am plenty good with my exhaust fan.... at some point I will see how a shop vac does..... Easy enough to test using smoke in front of and around the unit.



Legion, I don't know for sure what caliber it can handle, but I am confident that the 1/2" steel side plates are over kill for .22 thru non magnum centerfire pistols. It worked fine with my 9mm, but I will strictly use it for .22 as I have a dirt berm range built up outside for when I want to practice IDPA with the 9mm.

The 1/2" plates are such a shallow angle that I think they would be fine for even centerfire rifles, but the 1/4" walled back tube might not be sufficent even though the rounds are direct at it at a pretty shallow angle.

I would add some sand bags around it just to grab some mistakes!

Nice Tim!!! Also will be a great starting place to get the daughters BF's to man up and learn to shoot a gun! hahaha ( and of course if their pict are hanging where the target is that's a suttle hint )

Thats very cool !

Great concept, I may have to try one of those.

I was involved in building a range where I work. The design is exactly like yours, on a much larger scale. 25 lanes. The collection tube is horizontal with an auger to remove the debris.
The chamber is fashined so that the rounds actually spin around inside without escaping. I would guess the impact of a .22 on that plate absorbs the vast majority of the energy. Here they are shooting 9mm and 40 cal so much more energy to disperse.
Great job on yours. Should be fun.

Is it generally legal to fire a gun in your basement?

I have seen those snail traps on-line. Something like $12,000 for their smallest one which has a 24" x 24" opening. Of course they also have self contained water spray and air filtration. I can't tell how many times the bullet goes around in my tube, but they definitely go around as you can see from my initial 6 round test fire pic I posted of the tube looking from above.

i would be worried about the flat leading edges of the trap, anything that hits that, might ricochet in a bad way, outside the trap.
I'de put those behind sandbags, just to be safe.

NY State has a law on the books about no shooting within 100' of a dwelling. So even in the country - all that shooting of the front porch at beer cans is illegal.

I wonder about inside of a dwelling...

I actually was thinking of building a rectangle frame of 6" x 6" lumber and attaching it to just cover the leading edges plus adding a slight buffer for errant shots. A 6 x 6 would slow an occasional errant shot down enough to avoid much damage. Behind the trap I might end up with a few sheets of plywood/scrap metal/carpet if I end up wanting to let others shoot in my shop. A hole or two in my sheet metal pole barn interior wall would not be the end of the world, but I would want to slow em down enough to keep them from going outside. All that said, my 16" x 16" opening is plenty for decent .22 target pistol shooters at my 40' max range where it presently sits. I have been mainly shooting at 25'.

You're concerned about lead dust inside your building but not outside? What do your neighbors think? Do you care?

"I hate OSHA, EPA, etc,...."

That's apparent, but can you be a little more responsible with the lead dust you're creating?

Sherwood

Sherwood.... Have you not seen pictures of Tims place? The neighbors are MILES away.... I doubt they notice any difference...

About the lumber frame, just make sure it's really soft wood, as a kid i once tagged myself one in the forehead with a lead break barrel airgun that way: plinking around at random objects about 6 meters away, when one ricoche'ed off some hard wood... it didn't do any real damage, but i sure felt it...
never mind if i would have gotten it in my eye...

Wow Sherwood. Just Wow. Tim has guns. Tim likes to shoot guns. Tim has a legal right to own guns. Tim is more responsible than most people you are likely to ever meet. Get over it.

Wait....you're worried about the lead dust from the occasionally fired 22 caliber pistol that emits from the friction/fragmentation of a fractional ounce bullet striking the trap, a infinitesimally small portion of which goes airborne then exits the pole building via the stack of an exhaust fan acres away from the nearest neighbor????


AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! seriously you made my day.:D:D:D:D

And we can assume someone is going to be melting the leftovers into something perhaps bigger than .22?
Jim

Yep..... The beauty of this type of very gradual angled type trap is that very little fragmentation/dusting occurs vs most other types of traps. I am able to capture pretty much all of the lead. When I shoot outside I do not get to re-use any of the lead...... hmmm on second thought maybe I should shoot more outdoors just to p!ss off the tree hugging environuts. ;)

Oh yeah.... Sherwoodly, my neighbor appreciates the fact that I shoot.... especially when I shoot furry helpless varmints in her yard. The next neighbor 1/2 mile away shoots alot himself and the next closest neighbor 1 mile away shoots often and hunts bambi every year on my and my other neighbor's property. Oddly enough, crops still grow on the surrounding property, fish and frogs still live in our pond, our dog and cats are all still healthy and none of us have ever had any form of cancer. On top of all that, for some odd reason we don't seem to be suffering from global warming.... huh ;)

PS Sherwoodforesthugger, my paint exhaust fan output is filtered. I wonder if I could get better flow if I removed the filters. Same goes for a Shop-Vac. ;)

Just scored at Walmart today with 6 more hard to find "cheap" Federal 550 value packs which my Mark II happens to love. Just need a couple more lucky trips to Walmart for some more Golden Bullets (my Glock .22 conversion likes these) and maybe another 12 boxes of Federal and I should be good to go with a bunch of nightly practice. :)

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After a few months of constant calls to local Walmarts I am good to go with 9mm practice ammo for the winter and have about 1300 empty cases to start reloading when the primer shortage eases up.

Nicely done sir. Unfortunately I'd probably manage to miss that nice trap.

Tim,
I'm not against your right to use firearms to hunt, but lead has a potential range far beyond that of your target pistols. The prey that doesn't get brought down by hunter's bullets and pellets will eventually die, then their carcass will be eaten by whatever is in the food chain. Eagles, condors, hawks, vultures, owls, wolves, coyotes and other animals of prey end up ingesting the tainted morsels, and so on. Same effect as mercury, pesticides and industrial chemicals in our seafood.

Tree hugger? How about responsible hunting and rational thinking?

There are alternatives to lead bullets.
Alternatives to Lead Bullets

... and a refresher on seafood:
Common Questions About Contaminants in Fish - Seafood Selector - Environmental Defense Fund

Sherwood

Sherwood have you ever bought a solid copper bullet? Not cheap for target practice....

Save the good stuff for hunting. It's sorta like shooting film instead of digital. When you have so many exposures at hand, you tend to be more careful about using them up. For example, Ansel Adams hiked around the Sierras with not so many 8x10 film holders; didn't have that many to waste compared with a full 12 or 36 exp. on each roll of film.

Sherwood

So use lead for target practice... and catch it and melt it down for reuse? Like Tim is doing? Most hunters do use something a little more than just lead... Its not accurate enough....

Tim,
Excellent work! Save the brass for me and Tab Tanner (if you don't reload).

Art,

I think my wife has bought a progressive reloading press for me for x-mas and I intend to reload all of my 9mm brass because most of the serious IDPA competitors are using 147 gr bullets vs the common store bought 115 gr stuff. When loaded properly, the 147 gr stuff just makes legal power factor for the class, but has less recoil for getting back on target faster.

Once I have shot up all my store bought 115 gr inventory, I should have a little over 4000 once fired cases to reload. Unfortunately I have to use plated bullets in the Glock (unless I go with an aftermarket barrel) which are a bit pricier. I will end up with close to the same money reloading as the store bought stuff, but it will be the lighter recoiling loads neccessary for competition.

I don't "hunt" although I do blast my fair share of furry catfood stealing varmints. I am not worried the slightest bit about where my lead ends up so long as it does not end up in me in high levels from inhaling a high concentration of lead dust in a confined space without some sort of exhaust system.

industry puts more lead into our world than a bunch of jethros shooting into the hillsides. but i see a lead ban spreading from the hills of california to the rest of the country soon enough.

tim, i wonder if you could shoot one .22 bullet into the trap, and weigh the fragment? just curious.

Very nice work... as usual!

I had one in my pocket today to show a co-worker. It was a Federal value pack 36 grain hollow point (about 1260 FPS muzzle IIRC). It now weighs 1.4 grams on our crappy digital scale which is about 22 grains. I will check some more later if I think of it. I am guessing solid bullets will retain more of their weight than hollowpoints. More gradual angles and possibly a spray mist would also help.

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I quickly dumped three ten rounds strings into this target this morning prior to heading out the door for work this morning (yeah I suck which is precisely why I need this trap to practice with). I noticed a slight amount of splatter traces when I looked at the target (have not noticed this before). My guess is that I have some small pieces of lead sticking to the lead-in portion of the tube at the back..... will check it out tonight.

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Nice work on the trap.

Sweet target, where did you get it?

Bill

Guy at work gave me a few choice targets..... I have a few other better ones along those lines that I probably should not post pictures of. ;):D

(hint.. Google Image search "Obama urinal target")

Not here, but some of us do it anyway.

You'd be amazed just how large a caliber weapon you can fire in your home and not have anyone call the cops....LOL

You just won the douche of the minute award.

Congrats!!!