Recovery from bullet traps?

[LAKEMASTER]

At home is all the materials needed to make a SNAIL TRAP- Centrifugal BULLET TRAL-PIPE TRAP ect...

most of my booolits wont be exceeding 1600 fps so my question is,

how much of the lead can be recovered ?

[Scharfschuetze]

A lot.

During one of my assignments, I had access to an indoor range. Two of us mined the backstops and we recovered hundreds of pounds of lead.

You should be able to recover almost all of the lead that you shoot into your traps. Some of it will smear on the sides of the trap, but that won't be a lot. Smelting can be a bit messy from my experience as you'll be burning off a lot of lube and in my case it was a lot of jacket material from FMJ bullets. The lube left on the lead actually helps to flux the lead when you smelt so it's not bad, it just smokes a lot.

[LAKEMASTER]

this weekend ill be getting 2k lbs of lead ingots for $400= .20 cents a lb

i was wondering how many lifetimes worth of lead that will be, especially with the bullet trap

[dondiego]

Invite your friends over to use your bullet trap. My sand pile is a treasure trove!

[ole 5 hole group]

I would recommend you wear heavy leather gloves when recovering the lead if you have some copper jacketed stuff in there.

I was allowed to recover lead from an indoor range and we broke the lead up into carrying size chunks with a large "crowbar".

The chunks weighed between 60# and 80# each. Felt a little rough on the hands carrying them and with one chunk the copper jacket edges sliced a finger, which took 5 stiches to close. Free lead is always good but sometimes it's not inexpensive.;)

[lightman]

I'm not familiar with the snail trap, but the indoor range that I have used uses a piece of steel plate mounted behind the targets at a 45 degree angle with a bed of sand under it. We recover a very high % of lead but a lot of it is at the bottom of the plate fused together in big chunks. I guess this is good but it is rough to handle and requires a few tools to break it free.

[LAKEMASTER]

what i plan on doing, is making a snail trap that has a small 3" round steel target in the center. the target will swing and give me / us something to aim at. but i also want to add little brackets that allow me to put paper up for rifle shooting.

for all i know, maybe the 3" round target will be fun enough