Menner
06-14-2014, 12:49 PM
With all the threads about availability of COWW we are all always on the hunt for lead and ways to collect Boolits for reuse. I have studied and read and experimented with different traps with the following requirements it must be portable (because I shoot at different ranges and places one being the club I belong to and they have set range benches)
not require tools to set up
and be fairly quick to setup
It must collect the Boolits more or less intact
I looked at angled steel trap but they produce a lot of fragmentation and would require some type of medium ie. sand, rubber mulch....... etc to catch the pieces making it difficult to sort out boolits and messy to setup and store
Snail traps are fine for a fixed setup but the weight makes them hard to transport
Well I had an idea one day while I was in Tractor Supply and decided to give it a shot. What caused me to think (and yes it hurt a little) was the rubber stall matts they sell. I figurd if I could stack them one behind the other they would do a great job of stopping a boolit so I purchased a matt about $40 and built a box out of some scape plywood and some 1 by pine
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went to the local metal yard and bought a piece of 1/8" steel as a back up (it needs to be bolted to the back of the trap originally use 4 screws and a 200gr 35 rem will unscrew it for you)
I got about 12 squares out of the large matt (best method I found for cutting the matt was a razor knife) first setup was to stack matt squares and shoot this worked well and collected my boolits intact and basically 100% recovery but I found that the matt material is not very self healing and would leave holes in the matt
107759
so I started looking for a tougher material and I had a coupe of old trailer tires laying around so I cut the side walls off and placed them between the matt squares and found that the tires are really tuff and self healing and this works REALLY WELL I am collecting almost 100% of my boolits and fully intact this is a 7mm boolit collected from the trap (it is a heat treated boolit the air cooled mushroom nicely)
107764
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The box is approx. 14" wide 18" tall and 28" deep will fit 2 targets that I print off ( I made them on open office program they are just 2" diamonds really easy to make and really nice for sight picture for load development)
The trap is not a virgin I have christened it last weekend when I put a new scope on my rifle and was sighting it in
107766
I do have a question for you guys does anybody know of a material that would be more self healing than the stall matts maybe something with wire running through it?
so what do you think?
Tony
not require tools to set up
and be fairly quick to setup
It must collect the Boolits more or less intact
I looked at angled steel trap but they produce a lot of fragmentation and would require some type of medium ie. sand, rubber mulch....... etc to catch the pieces making it difficult to sort out boolits and messy to setup and store
Snail traps are fine for a fixed setup but the weight makes them hard to transport
Well I had an idea one day while I was in Tractor Supply and decided to give it a shot. What caused me to think (and yes it hurt a little) was the rubber stall matts they sell. I figurd if I could stack them one behind the other they would do a great job of stopping a boolit so I purchased a matt about $40 and built a box out of some scape plywood and some 1 by pine
107756107757107758
went to the local metal yard and bought a piece of 1/8" steel as a back up (it needs to be bolted to the back of the trap originally use 4 screws and a 200gr 35 rem will unscrew it for you)
I got about 12 squares out of the large matt (best method I found for cutting the matt was a razor knife) first setup was to stack matt squares and shoot this worked well and collected my boolits intact and basically 100% recovery but I found that the matt material is not very self healing and would leave holes in the matt
107759
so I started looking for a tougher material and I had a coupe of old trailer tires laying around so I cut the side walls off and placed them between the matt squares and found that the tires are really tuff and self healing and this works REALLY WELL I am collecting almost 100% of my boolits and fully intact this is a 7mm boolit collected from the trap (it is a heat treated boolit the air cooled mushroom nicely)
107764
107760107761107765
The box is approx. 14" wide 18" tall and 28" deep will fit 2 targets that I print off ( I made them on open office program they are just 2" diamonds really easy to make and really nice for sight picture for load development)
The trap is not a virgin I have christened it last weekend when I put a new scope on my rifle and was sighting it in
107766
I do have a question for you guys does anybody know of a material that would be more self healing than the stall matts maybe something with wire running through it?
so what do you think?
Tony