I've had an idea for a bullet trap rolling around in my head for a while. Figured if I'm going through all this trouble of scrounging lead to make boolits, why waste it all by shooting it into the ground. With a bullet trap I'll be able to recover and re use all my own lead that I practice with at home.
Last night I figured I'd give google sketchup a shot and see if I could get it to work. Not only did it work, it did the hard part of figuring out measurements and angles so I didn't have to. Made everything to scale too. Some of the measurements aren't exact, but pretty darn close. The bullets would enter through the slot in the rear and spin around in the spin chamber until they lose enough energy to fall out the hole in the bottom. I figured I could just put a 5 gallon bucket under the hole to catch the bullets as they drop out. The steep angle of the funnel on the bottom should push any back up that make it to the bottom and still have some energy left in them.
So I've included these pictures to get some opinions from all of you. Let me hear your thoughts on the results. Does it look like it would work? Seems to me that it would be feasible and I have a buddy that would build it for me. Figured the whole thing would be built on a small utility trailer frame to make it movable.
Front view
Side view
Top view
A couple 3D views. There are a few spots that didn't fill in on the spin chamber that you can see but other than that it turned out ok. Also I deleted the top so you could see inside it.