Want to catch a bullet..

[jdsingleshot]

I want to examine a cast WW bullet that has been shot, but have not been able to stop one. I tried a fairly dense pile of cloth, but my .25-20 87 gr went right through and through a 2x6 I had behind the cloth.

I tried shooting into a sand pile, but all I could find was flakes of lead. The bullet seemed to have disintegrated.

How can I stop a bullet without destroying it?

[Winger Ed.]

Lining up jugs of water is a favorite.

[GhostHawk]

Or a 55 gallon barrel of water or rubber mulch should also work.

[hornetguy]

I wonder how far a rifle bullet, say, a .308 will travel through water. I've wondered a bunch of times about shooting at about 30 degrees into a swimming pool.... I just wouldn't want to blast a hole through the gunite side of my pool....

[Gewehr-Guy]

I think the best back stop is snow. Hard too find right now. In the winter I push up a huge pile of snow too use as a back stop, and can recover my bullets for study. I saw a U-Tube video where a man made a bullet catcher out of a PVC pipe, and filled it with some kind of material, like Dacron or pillow stuffing.

[BNE]

I think the best back stop is snow. Hard too find right now. In the winter I push up a huge pile of snow too use as a back stop, and can recover my bullets for study. I saw a U-Tube video where a man made a bullet catcher out of a PVC pipe, and filled it with some kind of material, like Dacron or pillow stuffing.

I’ve read on this forum about people doing this…. For those of us in the south, that’s never been an option!
BNE

[Alferd Packer]

Load the bullet over 3 to 5 grains pistol powder, bullseye or 7 grains unique and then shoot into newspapers bundled flat and tied.

[hornetguy]

off topic.... I have a coffee mug that says "Alferd Packer, serving his fellow man..."
For those that have never been to Lake City.... googly is your friend....

[hornetguy]

speaking of googly.... I did that, and found that Mythbusters has studied a lot of different calibers fired into water.... apparently the slower, fatter rounds penetrated best, but that 6 to 8 feet will pretty much stop anything. Most higher velocity rounds require less than that.

[brasshog]

In the past I always used wet phone books but those seem to be getting hard to find these days

[Texas by God]

A gallon jug of frozen water will catch a handgun bullet unless it’s a magnum.
Line up two for your 25-20 just in case.


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[JSnover]

A barrel or a tub of water is the simplest way. I used a bucket filled with wet newspapers to recover .357 magnum jacketed bullets - let'em soak for a while so they get nice and pulpy.

[farmerjim]

1. Fire into the deep end of a swimming pool.
2. Get a 10 foot 4 inch pcv pipe and put a cap on it.
3. Stand it upright tied to a tree or something tall. (deer stand)
4. Fill it full of water.
5. Shoot into the water.
6. Dump water and retrieve bullet.

[Bigslug]

If you're trying to catch it without nose damage. . .

We have a forensic trap at work that consists of a steel tube, closed on one end, and capped with a segmented "screen" on the other which holds a cardboard disc through which you shoot.

The "official" catch medium is shredded Kevlar fluff. Basically, the exact same fibers you'd make body armor out of but no longer in woven sheets, and it's packed in to the consistency of a really firm pillow. The material balls up around the projectile, cushioning and braking it with an ever-increasing diameter. Duty caliber pistol rounds typically and predictably stop after about 18-20 inches of the stuff. The tube has several hatches on the side which you can open for easy access to extract your bullets or replace your cardboard. Finding the hard lump with anything .380 or bigger at the middle of it is pretty easy, but the .22's and .25's take a little more serious effort of pinching your way through smaller handfulls.

My guess is that Dacron would be a cheap and effective substitute.

Pro tip: until we learned how deep the rounds tended to penetrate, we added several additional cardboard baffles at intervals spaced through the fluff. If you have a hole in Baffle 3 but not Baffle 4, you have a lot less fluff to dig through to find your bullet.

Water filled milk jugs work pretty well if your bullet is designed to expand, but I've found that hard alloy solids tend to take A LOT of them to bring to a halt. The fluff has the advantage of being reusable and non-destructive to the slug.

[metricmonkeywrench]

This came up a bit ago, there was a feller around the turn of the century that did a bunch of testing on a bullets flight using fixed barrels. A key thing was to capture the bullet at the end of its flight for analysis. If memory is correct they used a wooden box about 2 ft square and 3-4ft long filled with packed oil saturated (but not dripping) sawdust and a fabric face.

[BLAHUT]

I want to examine a cast WW bullet that has been shot, but have not been able to stop one. I tried a fairly dense pile of cloth, but my .25-20 87 gr went right through and through a 2x6 I had behind the cloth.

I tried shooting into a sand pile, but all I could find was flakes of lead. The bullet seemed to have disintegrated.

How can I stop a bullet without destroying it?

Shoot it in to snow..

[huntinlever]

Off-topic some, but I've always been curious about ballistic gelatin. DIY? How would this do as a bullet trap?

[Bigslug]

Off-topic some, but I've always been curious about ballistic gelatin. DIY? How would this do as a bullet trap?

Very expensive and perishable if not refrigerated. Good at stopping expanding handgun bullets in under two feet, but non-expanding solids, not so much. I had the opportunity to test the Lyman 358430 (195gr RN) in it during one of my early efforts at replicating the .38/200 load. At a mere 570 FPS, 18" of it was insufficient to the task.

[frkelly74]

I am currently in process of loading 45 ammo with bullets I recovered from a range that had deep snow cover all winter. Many full metal jacket bullets showed no damage other than rifling marks. They have been tumbled in my wet polisher and look like new factory ammo when done.

[ascast]

wet saw dust or oil soaked, fine dist NOT chainsaw but saw mill-bandsaw type size