Bullet trap for recycling lead – need help please

[spurrit]

Guys,

Just remembered a little tidbit from my past. Dressage (the dancing horses) riders use rubber footing from ground up tennis shoes for arena footing. Someone might look into that, as it's sold in bulk.

[JIMinPHX]

JIMinPHX:

Jim. I have been looking around; got some samples of both the gardening mulch and the "playground" type, then ckecked Wal-Mart and they had two types in stock: one was just irregular shreds, from woodchip bedding size on down; the other was irregular little cubes about the size of peas or canned diced carrots - about 1/4" on a side, 0.8 cu. ft. for $8.95 and $7.95 respectively. The "cubed" stuff looks like it would be easiest to handle and sort through....
floodgate

Hey Floodgate,
Could I ask you a favor? I just tried 3 different Walmarts near me & none of them had any rubber mulch. Could you please take a box full of the stuff that you have & see how far a .22LR goes into it? That way I would have something to compare against what I saw with the material that I have & figure out which one works better.

Thanks,
Jim

[floodgate]

JIM:

I'll pick up a bag of it next time I'm in Ukiah, probably the middle of the week, and give it a try.

Doug

[spurrit]

For .22's, you may as well just use phone books.

[Coastie]

My present trap is made of two 1/4" steel plates placed together on a 45 degree angle into a sand trap - the target is placed on a carpet remnant tacked to the trap frame in front of the plates. Haven't noticed any return splatter since using the carpet flap on the front of the trap. This set up works pretty well with lead bullents (mostly cast from wheel weights) - handgun or rifle, but I plan to try some heavy rubber sheeting in front of the plates when the weather clears up some. Some friends used my range while I was at work and they decided to to test a 8mm with some military surplus ammo. I don't recommend this trap for that level of ammo as it is a bit tough on the plates. I used the two plates rather than a 1/2" single plate as they have lasted longer that the single 1/2" plate I first tried and by rotating them I have been able to get a fresh surface. My only real problem is that screening the sand does not give full recovery of the lead, so I have read with interest the posts on the shredded rubber in the recovery bin. I appreciate everyones posts.

[floodgate]

spurrit:

Jim wants to "calibrate" the cubed stuff I spotted against the shredded rubber mulch he has been trying. A .22 might interact with one of the chunks (about the same size as the bullet) and take off at an angle; or it might just burrow on through. We want to see how the various types of rubber mulch work to trap bullets without turning them to powder, the way the flat plates do.

floodgate

[spurrit]

Ah, musta missed that. I was just trying to save time/trouble/money.

I still want to build that baffle tunnel thingy, but I'd be too tempted to use it in my back yard here in town.

[PatMarlin]

Ya got to read the fine print

Waht will they think of next..

[JIMinPHX]

I still want to build that baffle tunnel thingy, but I'd be too tempted to use it in my back yard here in town.

That’s a temptation that I have to fight every day…now that we have Shannon's law here.

[spurrit]

You sure you don't want to delete that? I was talking about using it for load development and practice.

[chinewalk]

Does anyone else have any ideas or requests?

Jim,

I was wondering if you are planning to try other calibers.

I don't know if you want to risk tearing up your trap, but it would be interesting to see if the size of your current box would hold up to heavy .44 mags or the .500s.

Ed

[JIMinPHX]

You sure you don't want to delete that? I was talking about using it for load development and practice.

I was also talking about load development & practice. Shannon's Law prevents us from doing any shooting within city limits, even if we have a safe backstop & neighbors that don't mind the noise. The only exceptions are for air guns, blanks & justifiable self-defense.

[JIMinPHX]

Jim,

I was wondering if you are planning to try other calibers.

I don't know if you want to risk tearing up your trap, but it would be interesting to see if the size of your current box would hold up to heavy .44 mags or the .500s.

Ed

I don't have, or have access to a .500. I'll try a .44 the next time that I get out shooting. I'm interested to see what that does too.

[JIMinPHX]

it would be interesting to see if the size of your current box would hold up to heavy .44 mags.

Ed

I did a little more testing yesterday afternoon & found that hot .44's will need about a 3-foot deep crumb rubber trap.

I had tried 3 different .44s. The first was a 240-grain semi wadcutter Boolit at about 1,000fps. It went in about 23" deep. The next was a 240-grain at 1450fps. It went in 28-33 " deep. Finally I tried some 180-grainers @1800fps. They ended up about 30" deep.

In order to measure these depths, I had to increase the length of my trap from the 26" that I originally had. Since the original box trap was already 90 pounds, I did it by making a separate add-on box to go in front of it. The add-on was basically a 1-foot cube with cardboard on two opposing sides. The front cardboard held up well, but after a bunch of boolits went through the same area, the back side cardboard opened up a hole about 4" in diameter & the crumb rubber started to pour out when I removed the cube from the front of the main trap. Keeping the two sections of the trap up tight against each other helped while they were being used, but once I took it apart to take the stuff home, I had a little bit of cleaning up to do. For limited use, like a few shots, this would have been no problem. Otherwise, it could get a bit messy, but still be acceptable if portability needs to be maintained.

I tried a few other calibers too. A CCI .22Mag FMJ @1875fps goes from 14-22" deep. .Federal 22Mag hollow points @ 2300fps shatter pretty badly, with no piece retaining more than 1/3 of the original weight. They end up 10-12" deep. TNT HP's @ 2200fps break up worse than that.

A .223Rem FMJ @2950fps goes in about 21" & gets flattened out a little & bent sideways a bit. This was coming out of a 1:12 twist barrel which is a little slow for that slug, so the projectile may not have been properly stabilized. A faster twist may make that FMJ drill it's way in deeper. A 40-grain V-max @3200fps shattered badly. I found 2 of the 3 jacket heels about 11 or 12" deep. That’s all that was big enough to find. The heal fragments were 20% of the original jacket at best.

I also tried some .380s. I was surprised to find that my low power cast boolits over 3 grains of Bullseye ended up in the same place as factory FMJ ammo. They were all around 10" deep. This was done in a different crumb rubber box trap that was only 12" deep & had a back wall that was only made out of 1/8" plate backed by 3/8" OSB particle board. I had designed this one for .22s & was surprised to find that it held up to .380s so well.

[13Echo]

I keep thinking how to stop a lead bullet without shattering it or burying it deeply into sand, sawdust, or rubber and I keep coming back to a trap using Kevlar. How about facing a box packed tightly with shreded rubber with a couple of layers of ballistic Kevlar. Unless you are shooting high power rifles it should stop just about any lead bullet you care to try and most jacketed pistol bullets. The packed rubber ahould provide a bit of "give" with relatively little rebound to help absorb the bullets energy and the spent bullets should just drop to a box in front of the trap. Armor quality Kevlar 50" wide sells for about $35 to $50 per yard. A good box made of steel would weigh much more and probably cost about as much. However, I don't know how many hits Kevlar can take before it no longer works. Comments?

Jerry Liles

[JIMinPHX]

I’ve seen some guys at the gunshows selling kevlar vests. They often have a sample vest that has been “tested” along with the test projectile. That projectile is generally pretty smoshed up. The crumb rubber leaves the projectiles in pretty good shape, except for the fast moving varmint bullets. It’s really not that tough to separate boolits from crumb rubber. You just dump it into a big cardboard box & shake it around a little. They separate out pretty easily.

[PatMarlin]

I also tried some .380s. I was surprised to find that my low power cast boolits over 3 grains of Bullseye ended up in the same place as factory FMJ ammo. They were all around 10" deep. This was done in a different crumb rubber box trap that was only 12" deep & had a back wall that was only made out of 1/8" plate backed by 3/8" OSB particle board. I had designed this one for .22s & was surprised to find that it held up to .380s so well.

Hail the cast boolit..

[13Echo]

JIMinPHX,

I've no doubt gravity separation of lead from rubber is realtively easy, however, being fundamentally lazy, I'm trying to avoid sifting through a hundred pounds of rubber, sand, or oiled sawdust, especially if I can come up with a way to have the lead deposited in a nice, neat pile. Probably a pipe dream and, I suspect, even Kevlar will suffer some damage each time it stops a bullet till they finally slip through.

Jerry Liles

[JIMinPHX]

Hail the cast boolit..

Ya know…
I probably should have seen that coming, but I didn’t. I should have realized that since the cast boolits are not deforming much at these velocities, they should penetrate at least as well as hardball, but somehow that expectation escaped me. I realized that the Rem psp soft points stopped faster than the cast 30-30s that I tried because the psp expanded & the cast did not. But I did not think that a slower moving cast .380 boolit would penetrate as far as a faster .380 FMJ. Now that I think about it some more, the jacket is less dense than it’s core or the cast boolit. This gives the cast boolit greater total density & probably explains why the cast does more with less umph behind it. To boot, it does more with less powder & less pressure too. Boy, talk about "progress" in jacket technology taking us a step backwards…. Sheesh!

[Ricochet]

The jacketed factory bullet may not be going as fast at the muzzle as you think, either.