Bullet trap for recycling lead – need help please

[JIMinPHX]

With the price of lead going through the roof & wheel weights becoming hard to find, I decided that it was time for me to build a little bullet trap so that I can reuse my lead.

I’m toying around with a couple of different design ideas, but coming out of the gate, I decided to stay with a tried & true design. I basically copied the .22 rimfire traps that can be had commercially for about $50 & just made one out of heavier material. I used a piece of 3/8” A-36 steel plate at a 45 degree angle for the backstop. I took a couple of shots at it with a pellet rifle & the pellets ended up in the decelerator chamber, so I think that I have good geometry.

The next big question is how hard can I hit this thing without damaging the backstop. I’m going to try it out tomorrow. I’ll hit it with some 38s first & if that goes well, then I’ll move up to a .45acp. I’m a little shy about pointing a magnum at it, even with just 13BNH lead. Does anyone out there have any experience with a 3/8” soft steel plate backstop? Does anyone know how big of a slug I can throw at this thing & how fast before I bend it? Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jim

[jhrosier]

Jim,
Way back when, I shot NRA Hunters' Pistol Silhouette. We used 3/8" hot rolled steel for the targets. The .41 Mag and heavy .44 Mag loads would bend the targets. 41 Mag was the worst offender.. Now, these targets were oriented 90 degrees to the muzzle, so that probably aggravated the problem. High velocities will ruin your backstop in short order, but non-magnums should be OK. You might consider welding an "X" shaped truss of the same material to the backside of the impact area.
BTW, if you know someone in the local haghway dept., see if you can get some broken blade edges from a grader or other earth moving machine. They are said to be very hard and wear resistant.

Jack

[Lloyd Smale]

take a look at mine here http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=21235 it was made of simular material and takes constant hits from 500 linebaughs and ive shot .223 and .308 fmj at it many many times and it shows absoultely no wear. The day that pic was taken i emptied the lead barrel for the second time and it weighted 325 lbs so you can get some idea how much lead that its taken so far.

[floodgate]

JIMinPHX:

Keep us posted, and provide photos or sketches when you get it worked out. I have gotten some bismuth from STP here, to try out (straight or alloyed with 5-8% tin) as an alternative to the soon-to-be-banned lead here in PRK. But at $6-8 per lb., I definitely want to be able to recycle it. I plan to work with loads in the range of .22 CF Maynard to .44 Spl., at least to start with.

floodgate

[imashooter2]

Static steel plates made of the same material will dish after many shots and become unsafe. Those are hung near vertical though. Your 45 degree backstop should extend its life quite a bit. I'd stick with pistol rounds.

[JIMinPHX]

Thanks for the info guys.

Lloyd’s trap looks to have less angle than mine does. That’s one reason his will take hotter hits than mine will. Also, boiler plate is probably a bit tougher than the A-36 (hot roll) that I used. I’ve pointed a .308 at a piece of 3/4" 1018 at a 45 degree angle before. .308 ball ammo will take a nasty gauge out of it on the very first shot.

I’ve got 2 traps in the works right now. The first that I started building is the one that will probably become my main unit. It has a detachable decelerator chamber for easy emptying & a removable backstop plate for two reasons. The first reason is that the current 1/2" plate that I have is 40 pounds all by itself & removing it makes moving the trap much easier. The second reason is that I will be able to change the back stop if it gets messed up. It will accept up to a 1” thick back plate, or sandwich of back plates. I figure that if I get a thin piece of hard plate, I can put it in front of the thicker back up plate for hot rifle calibers. This one is not finished yet.

The one that I’m going to test today is bullet trap Jr. It’s a small one with a 3/8” back plate. The whole thing is little bigger than the piece of copy paper that I make my targets out of. I figured that if I am going to end up doing some destructive testing to find out what my max caliber is, I’d rather not loose too much material (plate) in the process. Bullet trap Jr. is shown below.

[JIMinPHX]

Bullet trap Sr. in progress below

[Ricochet]

A few years ago my little sweetie (pictured in the "Christmas Goodies" thread) shot at a friend's 3/8" steel pig silhouette with my .300 Weatherby magnum from about 50 yards. The 200 grain Speer Hot Core spitzer, loaded over 100 grains of WC860, drilled the neatest round hole you ever saw right through the pig.

[44man]

My 50 yd plate of 1/2" steel looks almost like yours. HEE, :mrgreen:, I need to dig up the woods and smelt the dirt to recover any lead. Boolits from heavy handguns just explode and cut a trench. I can pick up a few gas checks now and then. The plates are bolted to the frame with stainless aircraft bolts and I have sheared a few. I have not bent the plates though.
I think Lloyd has the best but I can't make one at home. It would take 20 tanks of oxygen.

[JIMinPHX]

Well, I did my first test this afternoon. I was a little short on time, so I just sent a couple of rounds downrange, but I learned a lot.

130 grain 13BNH .357 slugs at 675fps & also 1350fps did no damage to the backstop, but the remains of the bullets were just about powder. Results from .45 cal 200 grain commercial lead semi wad cutters at 800 fps were similar, but some of the remaining chunks were bigger.

Not that much of the bullet material ended up in the decelerator chamber. A lot of it simply fell on the ground. Some spattered back out through the back of the paper target, mostly within an inch of the top edge. I suspect that a piece of cardboard may have stopped it. In all, I sent 2170 grains downrange & recovered about 950, a little less than half.

The gray spatter in this picture is worth a thousand words.

[JIMinPHX]

I had a piece of paper under the open area behind the front legs. That caught a lot of gray dust & probably accounted for about 35% of my recovered material. Very little of the gray dust seemed to go through the paper. What little did go through was at the right & left edges. The next time that I use this thing, I'm going to cover up all the open areas with cardboard & also the top inch across the front opening. I think that should improve my recovery ratio quite a bit.

[JIMinPHX]

This side view (with wood removed) gives you a little bit better idea of how it's put together. The yellow line shows the angle of the bottom deflector plate & also where it ends.

[BOOM BOOM]

HI,
What would happen if you made the slope longer?
Less lead splatter/dust maybe?
I am going to do the bullet trap also, small portible, thinking of 2 layers of rubber mud fiaps attached to front & back of 2x4's at front as decelerators. Also would work to put targets on.
Tire wts. are getting hard to scroung. And on a school teachers pay I can not buy them & afford to shoot.

[JIMinPHX]

HI,
What would happen if you made the slope longer?
Less lead splatter/dust maybe?


I suspect that would be the case.

[JIMinPHX]

HI,
I am going to do the bullet trap also, small portible, thinking of 2 layers of rubber mud fiaps attached to front & back of 2x4's at front as decelerators.

I thought about building a decelerator box too. I was going to use crumb rubber, also known as rubber mulch. I did a little sniffing around. If you call it rubber mulch, you can pay as much as $0.75 per pound in 1 cubic foot (30 pound) bags. If you call it crumb rubber, the price can go down as low as $0.17/Lb in bulk quantities.

The biggest difference in grades seems to be the percentage of wire free material that is guaranteed. Landscape grade is usually 98% wire free. Play ground base is 99.9% wire free. At a 6" depth, the playground grade had a maximum safe fall height rating that is about twice that of wood/bark mulch. Nugget sizes can be had from wire mesh sizes up to over an inch.

I was just about ready to go out & buy a cubic foot of this stuff to play with, then I read an article that said this stuff kills plants because it leaches zinc into the soil. Since zinc is not the caster's friend, I decided to hold off on trying that material. Also, the stuff doesn't float, so I would need to come up with a good way to separate it from the salvage metal efficiently. I don't have that one figured out yet.

[357maximum]

Jim

I use rubber mulch in a 3sided 2X2 square steel box with one end having a 2ft wood
bullet paster board and also a wood top like a dog house.

as far as separating...I was thinking ofworking with salt water seperating baths before I took a new job....I have not had time to mess with is since august...but I will, and I think it will work. at some point the rubber should floatin the brine if I am remembering some old chem classes correctly,,,

[mtgrs737]

I built a bullet trap 25 years ago for my basement that worked fine. I would suggest that you decrease the slope of the steel back plate so that you get the bullet to slide down it rather than smash into it and break up. At the bottom of the slide the bullet needs to pass into a chamber that has a deflector plate set at an angle to stop the bullet or turn it into another deflector/stop plate and contain the lead shards and powder from getting out of the trap. You may lose a small amount of lead from the inpact on the first plate but the second impact and the one that stops the bullet should be in a confined area inside the trap. You can design a clean out door or device to retrieve the PB. Hand gun traps are simple to make, High velocity rife traps are more difficult.

[Lloyd Smale]

I can bet one thing looking at your desing. the bottom 2x4 isnt going to last long. The bullet fragments are going to tear it up. But they it would be easy to replace. As to the lead dust. In the one i make thats what you end up with for the most part especially if your using harder alloys. When i empty my drum its about 3/4s full of just lead dust.
This side view (with wood removed) gives you a little bit better idea of how it's put together. The yellow line shows the angle of the bottom deflector plate & also where it ends.

[JIMinPHX]

the bottom 2x4 isnt going to last long. The bullet fragments are going to tear it up. But they it would be easy to replace.

That's exactly what I figured.

It turns out to be correct. I had left that area open so that I could have a hole to empty out the catch bin. The damage to the wood was a little less than I had expected, but it is deteriorating. With a trap that small, it turns out that it is easier to just turn it upside down & empty it that way, so I'm going to weld up that opening.

This picture shows the wood that covered that opening.

[JIMinPHX]

as far as separating...I was thinking ofworking with salt water seperating baths


That's a good idea. I know from scuba diving that ocean water is 34/33 times heavier than lake water. I'll have to see if I can find out what the maximum % solubility of salt is in water & compare that density to rubber.

[JIMinPHX]

I would suggest that you decrease the slope of the steel back plate so that you get the bullet to slide down it rather than smash into it and break up.

That's on my list of things to try next. I was thinking of making some adjustable length legs for the back of my test trap so that I can vary the angle of the back plate until I get what I'm looking for. If you could let me know what angle you used, that would give me an idea of how much range of travel I should build into the adjustable legs.

Thanks,
Jim

[mtgrs737]

My trap has been gone for years now, but I think that it was over 45 degrees. I would make it extra long and concentrate on the stop chamber as that is where bullet is stopped.

[JIMinPHX]

357 Max's idea about using brine to separate crumb rubber from lead should work well. I did a little digging around & found that typical ocean water is 3.5% salt (4 oz salt per gallon) while the maximum % solubility of salt in water at 70 degrees F is about 26%. There is plenty of room to boost up the density of water with lots of salt.

This question still remains - will enough zinc leach out of the rubber to cause problems with recasting the recovered material?

[Lloyd Smale]

thats one problem ive even ran into with my trap that needs some more thought when i have time. I put plywood on the front of it to staple targets too and when you smelt the lead it has ALOT of wood in it and it makes it a real bugger and a mess to resmelt.

[imashooter2]

The problem you are going to run into with separating the rubber from the lead with water is that this lead will be very fine compared to WW. Once wet, it will not dry out easily and you will be forced to run every pot from a cold start just to be sure.

[13Echo]

Not to mention the salt left on the lead unless you carefully rinsed it after separating.

Jerry Liles

[JIMinPHX]

I found some rubber mulch last night. Lowe’s had it. It was $12 & change for a 0.8 cubic foot bag. This stuff is a little different from the black nuggets that the range builder guys seem to favor. The stuff that Lowe’s had is ground into flakes of varying size & it is colored to match redwood. The bag also says that it is recommended as a playground base. I think that this means that this stuff is the 99.9% wire free, highly processed variety. The black chunks may be the less expensive variety or it may have been chosen by the range guys because bigger chunks last longer. I don’t know.

I tried a float test with this stuff. It seems to be of varying density. I threw a handful into a little over a pint of water. At first most of it floated. After I stirred it around a little bit, about 95% sank. Adding an ounce of salt didn’t seem to do much. 2 ounces had some of the stuff on the bottom starting to stand up a little. 3 ounces had most of the material almost at neutral buoyancy in the water. 4 ounces had a fair amount floating. 5 ounces had most of it floating & with 6 ounces of salt in 20 ounces of water, nary a scrap was still on the bottom. This would be my recommended separation mix, 6 ounces of salt to 20 oz. of water or about 38 ounces (almost 2 1/2 pounds) per gallon.

I dumped most of the rest of the mulch into a 7 x 9 x 15” cardboard box, with a couple of cardboard separators in it. That will be my test set up to see how far boolits go through this stuff. I’ll check each cardboard separator for holes between shots to see how far each boolit went. I’ll keep trying hotter rounds until I hit the last separator or run out of ammo to test.

I don’t think that I’ll have problems with lead dust here. I don’t think that this box trap will break up the boolits. I also don’t see a problem with salt contaminating the recovered material. A fresh water rinse shortly after recovery should be enough to fix that.

I’ve also got my original steel trap, boolit trap Jr., set up with a nut hanging on the end of a string & a few hand drawn marks to show what angle the back plate is at. I want to try it at a bunch of different angles & see what angle I need to have so that the boolit gets into the decelerator chamber before it shatters. I’ll bring both the boolit box & boolit trap Jr. with me the next time I get out to my shooting area. It should be an educational day.

[buster]

I tried to build a trap with a hinged back stop out of a old fireplace insert but it did'nt work. Thought it would soften the impact, so I tried to slow it down before it hit with two flaps of 1/2 in. rubber,but that did'nt work either.I gave up and am using a 30 in. locust log. I hope to split and burn it to retreive the lead.

[JIMinPHX]

I just made a smaller version of the box trap & tried it with a pellet rifle. A 5mm pellet at 700fps went through the cardboard separators at 1" & 3" depth, but not the one at 5". The skirts of the pellets were bent a little, but the noses looked like new except for the points being dulled a little & the finish now having a sandy texture. I put them back in the gun & fired them again. The second time they did not pass the 3" marker. The skirts were more heavily bent on one side. I don't think that they were flying straight. I think that they were partially sideways when they hit the box & the larger broadside area is why they didn't penetrate as far.

[JIMinPHX]

I was able to separate the pellets from the media by dumping it into a large box & shaking it around. The pellets went right to the bottom. When I tipped the box & gave it another gentle shake, they rolled right out to the side. I don’t think that I’m going to need the brine.

[Scrounger]

I was able to separate the pellets from the media by dumping it into a large box & shaking it around. The pellets went right to the bottom. When I tipped the box & gave it another gentle shake, they rolled right out to the side. I don’t think that I’m going to need the brine.

Just like panning for gold...

Could you use the bigger chunks of rubber mulch and simply screen the lead out with half inch screen?

[JIMinPHX]

Just like panning for gold...




Exactly!

The only problem that I see with screening, might be that small chunks of rubber are going to break off as this stuff gets used. that's just what I expect to see though. I will not know what's actually going to happen until I try it.

[Scrounger]

Exactly!

The only problem that I see with screening, might be that small chunks of rubber are going to break off as this stuff gets used. that's just what I expect to see though. I will not know what's actually going to happen until I try it.

That is the point at which your salt water bath may become useful.

[Ricochet]

Buy the salt in those big bags meant for deicing and it'll be reasonably inexpensive.

[JIMinPHX]

Buy the salt in those big bags meant for deicing and it'll be reasonably inexpensive.

We don't have that here in Phoenix.
;-)

[Ricochet]

Well, you're just really missing something!

[fishhawk]

water softner salt...you do have water?

[JIMinPHX]

Well, you're just really missing something!

Actually, I see enough of it when I visit Rogersville. That is down in your neck of the woods, isn't it? There's some pretty country down off the Lee Highway & 25e.

Also, I've spent some time up around St. Paul, Chicago & Buffalo. The heavy snow in places like that is one thing that I don't miss.

[JIMinPHX]

water softner salt...you do have water?

Actually, Phoenix is in the Sonoran desert. Water is pretty scarce here too!

I was just joshin around about the lack of ice (& water) around here. I'm sure that I can find bulk rock salt or water softener if I go looking for it.

It is kind of strange though. If I go into an auto parts store here in town & ask for windshield washer fluid that doesn't freeze, a lot of the guys don't know what I'm talking about. Most of them don't seem to carry ice scrapers either. If I go north a few hours to Flagstaff, all that changes.

[floodgate]

JiminPHX:

"It is kind of strange though. If I go into an auto parts store here in town & ask for windshield washer fluid that doesn't freeze, a lot of the guys don't know what I'm talking about."

Which brings up something I have been puzzling over; though we get mild freezes here, and hard freezes at higher elevations, all of the washer fluids I see in the local home improvement stores and auto parts places is marked "Good down to 32*F (0*C)" or something similar. Has the older, freeze-proof stuff we used to be able to buy been taken off the market for some reason??? ("Nanny strikes again!"). One place did have an anti-freeze WW fluid additive, but they were very cagey about what it was, how much to add, and offered it sorta "under the counter". WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

floodgate

[Scrounger]

Yes, Floodgate. A fella in a gun shop (claimed to be a 'Forensic Chemist') was telling us that a good way to get rid of cats and birds without the neighbors knowing about it was to put out a bowl of the old type antifreeze. They drink it and they're history.

[floodgate]

Scrounger:

That is certainly true for the old radiator type antifreeze (ethylene glycol), but that also attacks paint and wax, and was NOT the additive used in windshield washer fluid, since that blows all over the finish; I thought that it was one of the alcohols, maybe methyl alcohol (which IS toxic, but not as nasty as glycol). I'm still a bit baffled.

Doug

[13Echo]

Antifreeze poisoning is a terrible way to die. The Ethylene glycol in the antifreeze tastes sweet. Once in the body it is converted to small crystals that clog vessels and the kidneys. Most animals die in agony with renal failure and seizures. I had a dog killed by some SOB that way. It wasn't pretty and it made me mad enough to want to feed some to whoever did it.

Jerry Liles

[Scrounger]

Jerry, I am just relating the story, I would never hurt a cat or dog. Any killing of animals has been limited to hunting.

[JIMinPHX]

The only place here in town where I've found the freeze proof windshield washer fluid is by the gas pumps at Fry's. Auto Zone, Pep Boys & Checker don't seem to carry it in this area. I don’t think that there’s anything cagey about buying it, it just costs more & since it doesn’t really freeze here in the valley anyway, they just don’t sell the expensive stuff because most people don’t need it. The last time that I went up through Flag, I made sure that I had some in the reservoir of the truck before I left. It was about 20 degrees once I got up over about 7,000 feet. Once up there the stuff is as common as dirt & can be had anywhere. It just ain’t easy to find here.

[Ricochet]

The labels I've seen on windshield washer fluid in the past have mentioned methanol and ammonia.

[brshooter]

I'm in Northern NY and looking at a gallon of windshield washer fluid, rated for -25 degrees F and contains Methyl Alcohol & contains a bittering agent. VOC content exceeds 35% so sale is prohibited in Texas,non-Type A areas in CA, certain counties in GA and Maricopa County, AZ. Picked up another gallon rated at -40 F, contains Methyl Alcohol and Propylene Glycol.

[floodgate]

brshooter:

That prolly explains it, as I AM in California (*sob!*).

floodgate

[PatMarlin]

I bought some windshield wiper fluid here in CA that was not supposed to freeze, and by the time we got up to Spokane it was frozen solid.. :roll:

[JIMinPHX]

Phoenix is part of Maricopa County, so I guess that explains a few things. I have no idea why they would ban it here.

[Scrounger]

Guys, in case you haven't noticed, liberals have moved into all the great retirement living places like Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Las Vegas, Prescott, et al. They move there because they are so different and immediately start turning them into the places they left.

[sundog]

Scounger, now THAT'S a rather astute observation that mostly cannot be argued with!

[mauser1959]

I do not know if this idea will help you or not, but we use rail Road plates ( the base plates that ribbon rail sits on) as reactive targets and have not put a hole in them yet ; and we have shot them with some pretty big bores. If put on a 45 or more degree angle I think that it would take a pretty strong rifle to shoot through them . I know that my 44 magnum loads do not shoot through the plates. And on top of that the plates are cheap ; read that free for the taking. Either weld them up to the size that you want or because they already have 4 holes in them you could bolt them into the size that you want. Those plates carry millions of tons of frieght and have no damage done to them , so it would be a heck of a bullet that would hurt them as long as they are on an angle. Though I am sure that a Armor piercing round would go through them.

[Ricochet]

My Dad always called those "fish plates."

[JIMinPHX]

Guys, in case you haven't noticed, liberals have moved into all the great retirement living places like Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Las Vegas, Prescott, et al. They move there because they are so different and immediately start turning them into the places they left.

Yes & that really fries my oysters.

[BOOM BOOM]

HI,
I was thinking that a 30 degree slope would be better than 45.
What degree slope did you use?

[spurrit]

That's on my list of things to try next. I was thinking of making some adjustable length legs for the back of my test trap so that I can vary the angle of the back plate until I get what I'm looking for. If you could let me know what angle you used, that would give me an idea of how much range of travel I should build into the adjustable legs.

Thanks,
Jim

Use all thread for the legs.

[JIMinPHX]

Well, I hope that everyone is starting off the new year well. I decided to start off by trying a few more trap tests.

I started off with a 15” long box full of rubber mulch. The first shot that I took at it was with a .45. A 200-grain LSWC at 800fps penetrated 14-1/2” & wound up facing backwards in the box. I then switched to a .357. a 158-gr TC at 675fps penetrated 9” & stayed facing forward. A 130-grain RNFP at 1350FPS came out the back of the 15” long box. The two recovered boolits looked like they had gently coasted to a stop on a mountain of cotton candy. Except for the engraved lands & grooves, I could see no damage.

Next I set up bullet trap Jr., my little 3/8” steel plate trap. I started it out at 30 degrees & had at it with the .45 shooting a 200-grain LSWC at 800fps. The boolit still broke up into small fragments as it had before, but almost all the material was in the trap area this time. Next I changed the backstop angle down to 35, then 40 degrees. Results looked the same. The cardboard that I had used to close up the holes on the sides & bottom was still in tact.

The next thing that I did left me with a little feeling of trepidation. I set up a 11” long box full of the rubber mulch in front of the steel trap at a 35 degree angle & let a 150-grain Remington PSP fly from a 30-30. I thought that for sure I would poke a hole in that poor little metal test trap. To my pleasant surprise, the steel withstood the challenge. I could tell the spot where it had hit the backstop because that was the one clean & shiny spot on the whole surface. Everything was cleaned off of it, the mill scale, the lead residue from previous shots, everything. The biggest piece of the jacket that I found in the trap looked like about 20-25% of it. The core was powder & was mixed with the other powder in the trap. A lot of the rubber mulch ended up in there too, probably about 2 cubic inches of it.

I recovered about 650 grains of material total from the steel trap. Considering that I had sent 3 x 200 + 1 x 150 = 750 grains downrange at it, that is a huge improvement over my recovery ratio from the last time that I used this thing. I’m over 85% recovery now & more than 90% of that was in the trap chamber where it belonged. I still haven’t welded up the two little openings on the ends of the trap chamber & I have a little gap there between the metal & the wood, so I think I’m still loosing a little lead there. I expect that the recovery ratio should be over 90% if I close this thing up properly on the bottom.

Separating out the rubber mulch from the powder was a pain. I ended up using the salt water trick. It worked well, but was a little messy. I only mixed up about a cup of it. When I later removed the cardboard strip from the top two inches of the trap, it had some spatter marks on the inside, but almost nothing had gone through it.

I had really planned on making this into a big welding project with a lot of high tech calculations to choose the right materials, make an efficient decelerator chamber & keep the weight down so that I would be able to move the big behemoth thing around. Now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I’m kind of liking the box full of rubber concept. The convenience of getting whole bullets back is just too much to ignore. That lead powder from the steel trap is kind of a mess to deal with. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll make up a wooden box full of rubber with a steel back plate just as a safety to stop the fast movers that sneak through the rubber. That will probably be my next step.

[PatMarlin]

Keep up the experiments. I would like to build one, but we have stumps and logs to shoot into. I'll reclaim it when the wood rots.. :mrgreen:

[JIMinPHX]

Well, I took another crack at this boolit trapping thing again. I built a wooden box that was a little over 2 feet long out of some 7/16” OSB board that was on sale at Home Depot for under $7 per sheet, some 2 x 4s & some 2 x 2s. I also put a piece of 3/8 plate on the back, just to be sure that everything was going to stay inside of it, even the 30-30s. I also brought along a little 11 inch long cardboard box to try with .22s.

The 11-inch long box of rubber mulch worked well with 40-grain PMC sidewinders that have a claimed speed of 1250. I found them all between 8 & 10.5” deep. A Stinger went right through. So did an Agulia Super Max.

Next I moved up to the big wooden box, which had the rubber mulch packed tightly. I hit it with 7 200-grain .45’s at 800fps, 3 130-grain .357s at 1250fps, 3 158-grain .357s at 675fps & a couple of 30-30PSPs. Most of the .45s sunk in 11.5-13” deep with 2 going 17-18”. The 158-grain TCs went in 11.5-12”. The 130-grain RNFP at 1250fps went in 17-19” & to my surprise, the 150-grain 30-30 with a factory claimed speed of 2390 only went in 20” deep. I think that the 170-grain 30-30 with a claimed speed of 2200 was somewhere near there too, but I missed finding it when I was unloading the trap & I didn’t actually see it until after I was putting the rubber mulch back inside. Nothing hit the back wall so I know that it didn’t go that far. I had a piece of cardboard in front of the back panel & the cardboard didn’t have a mark on it. The boolits were all completely whole, except for the two 30-30 PSPs which mushroomed as they normally do & look to have retained almost all of their weight. I haven’t actually weighed them yet. A few boolits have dents in them where it looks like another boolit hit them. I guess that I must have been shooting with better than average accuracy a few times.

I’m wondering if the fast moving 30-30s stopped where they did because they had traveled through 20 inches of stuff or because they were within several inches of a hard backstop & the rubber was packing up tight against the hard backstop. I think that next I will try to shorten the box a little & see if the fast movers stop sooner. Does anyone else have any ideas or requests?

[JIMinPHX]

Recovered from rubber mulch
(sorry about the condoms that are mixed in)

[JIMinPHX]

Recovered from steel plate trap

[357maximum]

Jim

Now you see why i chose the rubber.....whole bullet recovery.....I actually reloaded some 38spcl FMJ just to prove you could do it....looked kinda cool all pre-rifled and such...(I did run them through the lee push though first, just to be cautious).....maybe i will write csi and have them do an episode about the 12 groove right and left rifling...[smilie=1::roll:

I find 2 foot more than adequate, but i compress mine a bit with the slip on "doghouse" lid.

[JIMinPHX]

Max,
Thank you for tipping me off to that.

[JIMinPHX]

I just finished up a little more testing. The .30 cal mold that I had on backorder with Midway came in a few days ago & I finally got my first chance to take a crack at casting rifle boolits. The casting event had the usual little first time issues with needing to clean & lube the mold, but all in all, I got my first handful of boolits out of it with no unexpected trouble.

I tried the 150-grain .30 cal gas-checked RNFP 12-BNH slugs at velocities from about 1300-2000fps. The 1300fps slugs penetrated 23” into the crumb rubber & the slugs retained their shape pretty well. I was able to inspect the riffling’s engraving easily, which was one of my prime goals since I was using a microgroove barrel & I have been told stories about them tearing the riffling off of cast boolits. When I pushed these same pills at 2000fps, They ended up 24” deep in the crumb rubber & I found a dent 1/4" deep in the 2 x 4 that was an inch behind them. Apparently, they bounced back after denting the wood. The dent was bigger than the boolit, so I think that some rubber stayed in between them. Where two boolits hit the same spot, the dent was a little deeper. The front half of these boolits were pretty well smooshed up, but I could still inspect most of the rifling on the heals, which looked good even at this speed. The Remington PSPs that I had previously tried did not go as deep as the cast boolits did, even though they were traveling faster by nearly 400fps. I believe that the PSPs opened up sooner & therefore allowed their energy to be bled off faster.

I also tried some 150-grain .357 semi-wadcutters doing 1250fps, also at 12-13BNH. They went in about 22” & 1 of them broke in half. I think that it may have hit another boolit that was already in there. They maintained their shape pretty well. The bases were pretty well speckled with what looked like a bunch of small powder burn craters. I think that I am approaching the limit of what I can do without a gas check here.

I kicked up the speed of some 130-grain RNFPs to 1300 & found them mostly at 18” deep with 1 at 22”. The bases of these boolits had less speckling than the 150-s above. I am not sure if this is because H-110 burns hotter than Unique or if it is because the heavier boolit caused higher pressures.

I also tried some super max .22 Rimfires, which are the hottest thing that I have ever found in a .22. They went about 13-14” deep & opened up a little more than the Remington HPs that just sort of turned into a cylinder with rounded corners.

[colbyjack]

This side view (with wood removed) gives you a little bit better idea of how it's put together. The yellow line shows the angle of the bottom deflector plate & also where it ends.

looks good, got a question. if you or someone shoots that with a full metal jacket or harder lead bullet could it come back at ya? looks like maybe if it hit the steel travels down hits angle iron maybe it could be directed back at the shooter.

target looks good, just asking cause i know 2 guys thats been hit by bullets coming back. could you make it deeper and make a catch pan and fill it with sand so maybe if it did go way in or deep the sand trap pit would stop it. itd be easy to sift to catch the lead.

i made some spinner and some steel plates to simulate IPSC plates. i used A-36 and i case hardend mine for 18 hours and then rehardend it for 3 hours with ammonia and oil quenched it. my test pin on 1018 material showed .080" case depth. i had to give it a temper to bring it down a hair. and i ended up with like a RC 51/52 or convert to a 500 brinell hardness. it holds up to all the pistols FMJ or lead. rifle only at a long distance, tested a spinner at 30 yards with a .223 69gr SMK and it made a diviot. can be welded i guess but i dont like divots or any dents in metal targets.

just becarefull if shooting with rifles or high power, it may penatrate the steel.

-chris

[floodgate]

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. What type have you been using? (Photo???) I thought I'd get a metal locker box about 12" x 15" x 24"-30", cut a 10" x 12" section out of one end and screw a section of truck mudflap inside it with paper targets taped to the outside, pack it good & full and clamp down the lid. Maybe put it up on a wheeled frame to make it easy to handle at the range. I'll be shooting .38 Spl. and .44 Spl. at no more than 900 fps at 10-15 yds. to test the Bismuth/Tin alloy bullets for "leading", accuracy, etc.

I really appreciate your writeups on these experimental traps; it has saved me a lot of thinking and potential expense!

floodgate

[JIMinPHX]

looks good, got a question. if you or someone shoots that with a full metal jacket or harder lead bullet could it come back at ya? looks like maybe if it hit the steel travels down hits angle iron maybe it could be directed back at the shooter.

target looks good, just asking cause i know 2 guys thats been hit by bullets coming back. could you make it deeper and make a catch pan and fill it with sand so maybe if it did go way in or deep the sand trap pit would stop it. itd be easy to sift to catch the lead.

i made some spinner and some steel plates to simulate IPSC plates. i used A-36 and i case hardend mine for 18 hours and then rehardend it for 3 hours with ammonia and oil quenched it. my test pin on 1018 material showed .080" case depth. i had to give it a temper to bring it down a hair. and i ended up with like a RC 51/52 or convert to a 500 brinell hardness. it holds up to all the pistols FMJ or lead. rifle only at a long distance, tested a spinner at 30 yards with a .223 69gr SMK and it made a diviot. can be welded i guess but i dont like divots or any dents in metal targets.

just becarefull if shooting with rifles or high power, it may penatrate the steel.

-chris
When a cast boolit hits the plate at 45 degrees, it shatters & the fragments go in every direction. About 20% of the spatter seems to want to come back out the front in tiny fragments. By the time you get to 40 degrees, that number is down below 10%. I went down as far as 30 degrees, but didn’t see any real difference after 40.

The material that is recovered after contact with the steel plate is mostly dust/powder. You also get a few chunks mixed in if the original slug was big & slow, like a .45. Cast or jacketed, they all seem to shatter on impact with the steel. This material would not be easy to separate from sand. It was a pain to separate from crumb rubber, even after I got that stuff to float.

This trap is just made from a piece of virgin 3/8” A-36 with no heat treat. I’ve hit it with a 130-grain 13BNH cast slug at 1250fps & a 200-grain cast slug at 800fps so far with no damage. I also hit it with one jacketed 150-grain soft point bullet from a 30-30 that had been slowed down by going through a small box of crumb rubber first. I don’t know the actual velocity that it hit with. I would estimate it to be around 1,000-1,500fps, but that’s just a guess. That bullet did not bounce back. It shattered like all the others, but knocked the mill scale off the steel where it hit. I found jacket fragments in the decelerator chamber with the other lead. It left the same few small shrapnel marks coming out through the top of the paper target, mostly in the top inch.

When the slug hits a backplate, almost all the shrapnel seems to want to stay within an inch of the plate. After it hits a second surface at a 90 degree angle, like the 3” steel sides, it deflects & seems to then want to stay within an inch of that plane. I probably could have gotten away with side plates that were half as wide as the ones that I used. I probably should have added 1” strips of metal under the side plates to catch the spatter that falls. I'm guessing that a 1” catch rim across the top of the trap would probably bring the ratio of recovered material up from 90% to about 97ish%.

It’s been my experience that BB’s will bounce back at you from a .22 trap that I had years ago, but pellets would not. I suppose that jacketed bullets might bounce back if the velocity was low enough to be below the threshold of elastic deformation of the jacket, but that’s pretty slow. An included angle of more than 90 degrees between the two backstop plates might make a bounce back more likely, but I didn’t try that.

So far, I haven’t exceeded the capacity of this backstop with anything that I have shot at it. I know from past experience that .308 ball ammo hitting a piece of 3/4" 1018 at a 45 degree angle will take a nasty chunk out of the plate & the bullet fragments will behave much like what I have described above. I’m not planning on hitting this little thing with any ball ammo from a high power rifle of any description.

The crumb rubber traps that I have been experimenting with have been showing promise for recovering boolits whole & also for stopping faster moving rifle rounds. See my last few posts here on this thread for more info on that.

[colbyjack]

sounds like a good trap. looks good too. -chris

[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. What type have you been using? (Photo???) I thought I'd get a metal locker box about 12" x 15" x 24"-30", cut a 10" x 12" section out of one end and screw a section of truck mudflap inside it with paper targets taped to the outside, pack it good & full and clamp down the lid. Maybe put it up on a wheeled frame to make it easy to handle at the range. I'll be shooting .38 Spl. and .44 Spl. at no more than 900 fps at 10-15 yds. to test the Bismuth/Tin alloy bullets for "leading", accuracy, etc.

I really appreciate your writeups on these experimental traps; it has saved me a lot of thinking and potential expense!

floodgate


I’ve been using the stuff that looks like big chips of redwood. Now that I know I can get the little cubed stuff for less, I will probably try using that next. It was what I really wanted in the first place.

I started out just using a cardboard box full of the stuff & that worked OK until too many shots went to the same area, then the cardboard gave way. I’m now using a 26” long wooden box with 2 layers of 2 x 4 & a 3/8” steel plate for a just in case backstop. So far, the only thing to hit the back wall was a 30-cal 150-grain slug doing 2,000fps. It just put a dent in the first layer of 2 x 4. I’ve been using cardboard on the front face where the targets go. That’s been working out OK. This wood chip looking stuff really doesn’t seem to want to run out of a small hole in the cardboard the way that something like sand would. Right now, my box is about 10 x 14 x 26”. It weighs about 90 pounds stuffed with rubber. It’s 15 pounds less if I pull the plate off the back, which I do when moving it.

It sounds like your intended setup should work well. You might want to put a few layers of wood inside the back wall before you fill it, just in case.

This is the material that I used:

[JIMinPHX]

The current wood box

[JIMinPHX]

The back of the wood box with 3/8 plate in easy removal slot

[PatMarlin]

looks good, got a question. if you or someone shoots that with a full metal jacket or harder lead bullet could it come back at ya? looks like maybe if it hit the steel travels down hits angle iron maybe it could be directed back at the shooter.

target looks good, just asking cause i know 2 guys thats been hit by bullets coming back. could you make it deeper and make a catch pan and fill it with sand so maybe if it did go way in or deep the sand trap pit would stop it. itd be easy to sift to catch the lead.

i made some spinner and some steel plates to simulate IPSC plates. i used A-36 and i case hardend mine for 18 hours and then rehardend it for 3 hours with ammonia and oil quenched it. my test pin on 1018 material showed .080" case depth. i had to give it a temper to bring it down a hair. and i ended up with like a RC 51/52 or convert to a 500 brinell hardness. it holds up to all the pistols FMJ or lead. rifle only at a long distance, tested a spinner at 30 yards with a .223 69gr SMK and it made a diviot. can be welded i guess but i dont like divots or any dents in metal targets.

just becarefull if shooting with rifles or high power, it may penatrate the steel.

-chris

You have any pics of your targets Chris?

[PatMarlin]

I’ve been using the stuff that looks like big chips of redwood. Now that I know I can get the little cubed stuff for less, I will probably try using that next. It was what I really wanted in the first place.

I started out just using a cardboard box full of the stuff & that worked OK until too many shots went to the same area, then the cardboard gave way. I’m now using a 26” long wooden box with 2 layers of 2 x 4 & a 3/8” steel plate for a just in case backstop. So far, the only thing to hit the back wall was a 30-cal 150-grain slug doing 2,000fps. It just put a dent in the first layer of 2 x 4. I’ve been using cardboard on the front face where the targets go. That’s been working out OK. This wood chip looking stuff really doesn’t seem to want to run out of a small hole in the cardboard the way that something like sand would. Right now, my box is about 10 x 14 x 26”. It weighs about 90 pounds stuffed with rubber. It’s 15 pounds less if I pull the plate off the back, which I do when moving it.

It sounds like your intended setup should work well. You might want to put a few layers of wood inside the back wall before you fill it, just in case.

This is the material that I used:


Gosh darn I've got loads and loads of that stuff around my mill.

I know... how bout' "PatMarlins World Famous California Trap Filler" or PMWFCTF.

?.......:mrgreen:

[JIMinPHX]

Pat,

It LOOKS LIKE big chips of redwood...not actually big chips of redwood.

Sorry about that.

[PatMarlin]

What kind of chips are they?

[JIMinPHX]

They're rubber mulch from Lowe's.

[JIMinPHX]

The stuff is made from ground up car tires.

[JIMinPHX]

Ya got to read the fine print

[AZ Pete]

Jim, that has to be the best (most practical) idea for a bullet trap that I have seen. With the growing difficulty of getting wheel weights..for free.. I think that there is one of your designed traps in my future. I will have to be careful not to let one of the guys I shoot with use the trap though...he has shot the legs of my target stand 3 of 5 times I have let him shoot at it, and it's 16'' wide.

Thanks for sharing the results of your experiment.

[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.. :coffee:

[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.. :Fire:

[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.. :Fire:

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.

[JIMinPHX]

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

This is true. I was going off of chrony numbers from a different lot of Independence FMJ ammo. I should really chrony both loads the same day when they are side by side under the same conditions.

[JIMinPHX]

Another funny thing that I noticed was that the way the bullets opened up in the crumb rubber was pretty much identical to the way that they look when you recover them from an animal.

[PatMarlin]

Boy, talk about "progress" in jacket technology taking us a step backwards…. Sheesh!

Kinda like what digtal has done for our old analog cell phones... :roll:

[JIMinPHX]

I also had boolit trap Jr. (a 45 degree steel plate trap) along for the ride the other day. I threw a couple of .45acp hardball rounds at it to see what would happen. It held up well with no apparent damage. The jackets blew apart into a few large fragments. The cores blew apart into large, misshapen, somewhat flattened chunks. They did not shatter into powder like the cast boolits or the jacketed rifle bullet did. After the trap had been moved around quite a bit & there was ample opportunity for chunks to fall out on the ride home & from being moved around in my shop, I still recovered about 75% of what I sent downrange at it.

[JIMinPHX]

Well, in the last month or so, I’ve learned a lot about boolit traps. I think that I’ve about reached the point where I have what I need to do what I want to do, so I’m probably going to break off the R&D work here. I’m going to write up a condensed version of the info that I now have & post it back on the first page of this thread. That way, anyone who stumbles in here in the future has the bulk of what they need to know easily at their fingertips without wading through all those posts about windshield washer fluid & other unrelated things that just sort of popped up. I would like to thank everyone that contributed to this thread. Without you, I would not have made the progress that I did.

Thanks,
Jim

[JIMinPHX]

Hey,
I just found out that I can't edit the original opening post anymore. I had everything all written up that I wanted to put there. Ain’t that just a peach?

[JIMinPHX]

I guess that I'll post the condensed version here -

This is a condensed version of the 6 pages that developed over the course of about a month. It gives you a pretty good snapshot of what I learned from this little project. I would like to thank all those who contributed & made this thread what it is.

Two different types of traps were tested. One had a 40-45 degree steel plate backstop & the other had a box of crumb rubber for the backstop. Each has its advantages & disadvantages. Since I needed my trap to be portable, only traps weighing less than 75-pounds were tested. In some instances, I used modular components that each weighed less than 75-pounds to make up something bigger. Traps that are larger than what I tried may give better performance.

Metal Plate Traps

What it was made out of -
I tried a few slight variations on a beefed up version of the .22 rimfire traps that are available commercially for about $50. I used a piece of 3/8" A-36 hotroll plate for the backstop. This is a garden variety steel plate that any steel supplier should have available. It is similar in formulation to 1018 cold roll bar stock. The A-36 is a tad higher in carbon, manganese & silicon, but not that much.

What happened to various boolits that hit it -
The steel plate traps had a tendency to break up the boolits pretty badly. 12-13BNH pistol boolits traveling between 700-1300fps turned into powder when they hit the steel. .45 cal semiwadcutters left some slightly larger chunks behind, but even they were mostly reduced to powder. .45acr 230-grain hardball left behind much larger chunks that were pretty flat & very little powder. Their jackets were torn apart. When the cast boolits shattered, the fragments went in every direction, including a small percentage that came back out the front. Reducing the angle of the backstop plate from 45 to 40 degrees greatly reduced the back spatter. I did not test angles past 30 degrees. The difference between 30-40 degrees seemed negligible from visual observation. When the boolits shattered, the fragments mostly stayed within about an inch of the plate that they had hit. Metal side guards of more than 2” wide are not really needed. The decelerator chamber at the bottom of the trap caught most of the material when the backstop was at 40 degrees. Enclosing the rest of the target area with wood, or even cardboard contains almost all the rest of it.

What it will withstand -
The 3/8 plate showed no signs of damage from 13BNH 130-grain cast boolits at 1300fps, 150-grain @ 1250fps or 200-grain @800fps. Commercial 230-grain hardball also did not seem to cause damage. I know from something that I saw many years ago that a .308fmj hitting a piece of 3/4” 1018 at a 45 degree angle will take a big chunk out of the steel, so I didn’t try any hot rifle calibers on this trap.

How big & heavy are they?
A trap that is big enough to hold an 8-1/2 x 11” sheet of paper weighed 27 pounds. A trap that was big enough to hold a 10-1/2 x 12” standard pistol target weighed about 45 pounds. I used wood in the areas where steel wasn’t needed to keep the weight & cost down.

Crumb Rubber Box Traps
Apparently some other people, like 357Maximum here on the board have been shooting into crumb rubber with good results, so I decided to try that for myself.

What is Crumb Rubber?
Crumb rubber is a salesman’s buzzword for chopped up old car tires. It is also sometimes sold as “rubber mulch” or long lasting mulch. The mulch comes in landscape grade & playground grade. The playground grade has some ASTM rating for fall protection & this stuff is also guaranteed to be 99.9% wire free. It’s the most expensive variety of this stuff out there. Lowes by me sells it in 0.8 cubic foot bags for about $14. Lower grades in bulk can be had for as low as $0.17/lb. It is usually about 25-30 lbs./Cf. Other people have reported Walmart carrying it for less, but my local stores did not have it.

What happened to various boolits that hit it –
This is the real advantage of the crumb rubber trap. You can recover whole boolits in most cases. 12-13BNH boolits traveling from 700-2100fps stayed intact. The ones that didn’t hit the hard stop at the back of the box retained their shape very well. Even the ones that bounced off the back wall & put a 1/4” dent in the 2x4 back there were only mashed up about half way back. Other types of bullets, like soft point 30-30 hunting ammo expanded as they normally would in game animals if they didn’t hit bone. Retained weight was excellent. Only thin-jacketed fast-movers like .22mag hollow points & .223 V-max bullets broke up badly.

What will it withstand?
If you have a deep enough box of this stuff, you can hit it with just about anything. I’ll list a chart of various boolits & how deep they went on average so that you can get an idea of what you need for different calibers that you might want to use.



Caliber Weight Speed Average Depth
.22LR 30 gr 1300 13.5”
.22LR 40 gr 1150 12”
.22LR 40 gr 1050 10”
.22Mag 40 gr FMJ 1875 14-22”
.22Mag 30 gr HP 2300 10”
.22Mag 30 gr TNT 2200 12”
.223 40-gr V-max 3200 11.5”
.223 55-gr ball 2950 21”
.380 90FMJ 830 10”
.380 100 LRN 850 10”
.357 130 LRNFP 1300 19”
.357 150LSWC 1250 23”
.357 158 TC 675 11”
.45 200 LSWC 800 14.5
.44Mag 240LSWC 1000 23”
.44Mag 240 FP 1450 30.5”
.44Mag 180-grain FP 1800 30”
.30 cal 150RNFPGC 1300 23”
.30 cal 150RNFPGC 2000 25.5”
.30cal 150 gr Rem PSP 2390 20”

That last one didn’t go as deep as the slower cast boolits of the same diameter & weight because the PSP mushroomed & dumped it’s energy sooner. 140 of 150 grains were recovered in a single chunk. 150 grains were recovered in one chunk from a 170-grain PSP, but I didn’t get an accurate measurement of it’s depth.

How big is it & what does it weigh?
The crumb rubber box traps are a bit bigger than the steel traps are. My big trap was 90 pounds when ready to go. If I pulled the safety plate off the back, it was 75 pounds. That was as heavy as I was willing to call portable. It had 26” of depth with 2 layers of 2 x 4 & a 3/8” steel plate on the back as a safety stop. It had a big enough face for an 8-1/2 x 11” sheet of paper.

A similar box trap that was designed for general pistol use & had a face big enough to hold a 10-1/2 x 12” pistol target was 22” deep. It had a 1/8” steel plate backed by 2 x 4s for a safety stop. It weighed in at about 65 pounds. A 12” deep, by 2 foot wide trap with 1/8” steel + 3/8” OSB on the back for nonmagnum rimfires & light pistol loads weighed about the same.

A 12” cube with cardboard on two opposing ends that I used for a trap extension weighed about 27 pounds. I used this in front of the main trap to test the hot .44 Mag loads.

I framed these out with 2 x 2 & 2 x 4s. I used 3/8” or 7/16” OSB particle board for the panels. I assembled everything with drywall screws.

[Jack Straw]

Thanks for all the research and info... this has been quite an interesting read.

How did you cover the front opening of the crumb rubber box to keep the crumbs in? I'm sure it was somewhere in the 6 pages, but I must have missed it.

Jack

[JIMinPHX]

Thanks for all the research and info... this has been quite an interesting read.

How did you cover the front opening of the crumb rubber box to keep the crumbs in? I'm sure it was somewhere in the 6 pages, but I must have missed it.

Jack

Cardboard

[colbyjack]

so if one was making a basement trap for .22 and a stray .45 acp. should one use the 45* angle and plate steel trap? or should one be better off with a box trap made of wood with rubber mulch in it?

we need more pics just for the helll of it.. lol -chris

[JIMinPHX]

If you want the smallest trap possible, then you want the steel plate trap. If you want to recover whole bullets instead of lead powder, then you want the box trap.

For indoor use, you are probably better off with the box trap. Lead dust in the basement is probably not something that you want extra of.

[JIMinPHX]

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

Give the man a cigar!

I just chrony'd a few loads side by side & Ricochet's suspicions were right on the mark. I have made the appropriate corrections to the .380 data above.

[chinewalk]

[QUOTE=JIMinPHX;274559]I did a little more testing yesterday afternoon & found that hot .44's will need about a 3-foot deep crumb rubber trap.

Jim,

It looks like you are getting there with a good solution for all of us! I think I will try a box a little bigger and see what will hold up to the .500s using your design. It probably won't be portable, but in my case that will not be a problem.

You mentioned that instead of using the premium rubber mulch from Lowes that "lower grades in bulk can be had for as low as $0.17/lb". Can you provide some sources? Going bigger is really driving the price up on the rubber.

Ed

[JIMinPHX]

http://www.tirerecyclingcrumbrubbershredder.com/rubber-crumb.html

These guys offer crumb rubber for $0.17/lb in bulk for all the sizes that they carry. Their minimum is $250 which translates to about 1,500 pounds or about 40 cubic feet. They also sell a “sample” for $150.

Bigger sizes are probably less likely to fall out of the boolit holes that you make in the cardboard. I haven't tried smaller sizes yet. Floodgate was saying that he had found some smaller cubes, but I didn't hear any feedback from him on how well they worked.

These guys at the web address above sell the machines to make the crumb rubber too.
Hey Pat Marlin, did you say that you wanted to get into selling this stuff?

[floodgate]

JIMinPHX:

Sorry, but with the rains and other stuff going on, I just haven't gotten back to the crumb rubber. The Wal-Mart 1/4"+/- cubed stuff was $5.39 for 0.8 cu ft., which went about 20 lbs. per bag (about $0.27/lb.) and each bag nicely fills a 5-gal plastic barrel. I'm now frantically drinking my way through a bunch of those 5-liter boxes of "bag-wine"; each box is about 3-3/4" deep x 10-1/2" high x 9-1/2" high (nice size for short-range targets), and I'll set them in 10-ream Xerox paper boxes, about four to a carton, two or more cartons end-to-end. Then lift each one out until I come to the last one with an entry hole and no exit hole, dump it and sift out the bullet. That is, when the "round tuit" I've ordered from Midway gets here - it's on backorder now). Gotta go drink up some more of that bag-wine...

floodgate

[mroliver77]

Our WalMart dont carry the stuff. They looked at me like I was speaking Russian when I asked. They have no mulch of any kind in the winter months. They are starting to put out spring items now. I will hit the landscape yards when it warms a little. I asked at an indoor range down by the city and they use rubber for their backstop. They use a big vacuum to lif it and the lead can be shoveled out. Sounds really good to me. I have a vacuum head designed to fit on a drum with a 3" suction hose. For a small 20 yard range in the barn this should work well.
J
J

[JIMinPHX]

Our WalMart dont carry the stuff. They looked at me like I was speaking Russian when I asked.

I got that response from my local Walmarts here in Phoenix too.

[njmj]

There are a couple ranges in my area that have steel traps. One is a three hundred yd. range where highpower rifles are comon. The plate is at a 22 1/2 degree angle and is uneffected by fmj ammo. Fifty cal/. fmj does dent it badly though. I don't know how thick the plate is but am guessing it is no thicker than 3/8". The shallower the angle the less small fragments and dust there will be. There should be some sort of deceleration chamber also. A piece of 8 or 10" pipe welded tangent to the opening in the back of the trap will act as a decelerator. A slot in the bottom will allow the spent bullets to drop into a bucket. Because of the slight angle of the plate, traps of this type require more space front to back so are better for outdoor ranges where room is more available. Traps for basements usually must be more compact so this design may not be suitable. For a really nice design look at Savage bullet traps. NJMJ

[bobthewelder]

Our local indoor range uses 1/4" on their carriers at 45* to the ground. I have replaced the hinges on many, but the plate only shows smears from all calibres of pistol bullets, not holes, or dents. I replaced the 1/2" swiss cheesed high power carrier with leaf springs at 45*. Smears and a broken weld which was actually ripping from the base material. These have held up through tons of high powered shots since before deer season. Leaf springs are hard! Just don't use steel cored surpluss ammo and your 3/8" plate should be fine.

[chrisx1]

How about using a truck mud flap or some conveyer belting for the entry side instead of cardboard? Might stay together longer?

Also, have you done any long term testing on the rubber chip design? What happens after hundreds of rounds are shot into a box? Will the lead settle to the bottom of the trap as more rounds come in?

[JIMinPHX]

I haven’t tried mudflaps or belting. They probably would last longer. The real low power gallery loads that I sometimes use might bounce back at the shooter though. That’s why I stuck with cardboard. I can get a few hundred rounds through a sheet of it before it needs to be replaced. 30 seconds with a staple gun takes care of it. The mudflap/belting idea might be real good for the back side of my extension box that I’ve been using in front of my main trap for high power rifle rounds.

After the box traps get a bunch of use, especially with larger calibers, tunnels tend to form in the rubber mulch & the boolits go in deeper because they travel further before hitting the first layer of resistance to their motion. This is especially true if you are shooting very small groups. This is why I put a hard stop at the back of my traps.

After the tunnels form, new boolits sometimes hit old boolits that are already in there & boolits start getting mashed up & can even break in half. I’ve only had a few get mashed up. I’ve only had one break in half so far. I think that each time I use it, I get a few more small rubber chips & a few less big rubber chips. I have not seen the boolits drop to the bottom yet. I have not fired more than about 75 or 100 rounds before recovering my boolits & fluffing things back up in the process. So far, I’ve only been using these things for load development & test shots. By the time I’m 100 rounds into it, my test ammo is spent & my wife is tired of shooting her little pocket auto. I haven't given any of the traps a real serious workout yet.

I’ve got too many of these things now & I’m thinking about getting rid of all but 1 or 2 of them since I’m done with my tests. I may put a post over in the swapping & selling area pretty soon.

[floodgate]

JIMin PHX:

I finally got some time (and we have swilled down enough "box wine") to get a bit further on my "wine box / crumb rubber boolit trap" project.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v317/floodgate/P1010001-1.jpg



Here, you see (from left to right on bench) an empty 5-liter wine box, with inner Mylar wine bag removed; tape and rubber bands; box with top opened and pouring spout aperture taped over with duct tape; upright box nearly full of 1/4"+/- rubber crumb; and 5-gal. bucket with 20 lbs. of crumb. In front is a copy paper carton with two filled boxes, the folding top panels held closed with a large-size rubber band. The boxes measure (outside) 4" x 9" x 10-3/4" and hold 6 lbs each of the crumb rubber; and four boxes fit into the carton with 2" to spare for a couple of sheets of plywood and a 9" x 11" sheet of 1/4" plate. I'll tape a small-bore target to the end opposite the plate and check the system's stopping and capture capability with several standard velocity Reminton 40-gr. .22 LRs from my Savage 24. (Just lift out the individual boxes until I find the one with holes in the front but none in back; that way I only have to pour out the crumb rubber from that one wine box to fish out the fired slugs. Holes can be taped over and the wine boxes re-shuffled to extend the life of the system.) Stay tuned.

Floodgate

[JIMinPHX]

Thanks for getting that together Floodgate. I’ll look forward to comparing your penetration data to mine.

[Tumtatty]

I Just shot 40+ rds of 9mm (both cast and jacketed) into my mulch fillled boolit trap!

Success!!! :drinks:

Thanks for the awesome idea and the details about how to consruct this box.


My box is only 2' deep. The both types of bullets went nearly 20" before stopping completely. The cast boolits penetrated deeper than the jacketed ones on the whole.

I was only about 5-10' from the box when I was shooting.

[JIMinPHX]

I'm glad to hear that worked out for you. It's kind of cool to get your boolits back in good condition, isn't it?

I've found that my cast boolits penetrate further than soft points or hollow points of the same weight & caliber at the same speed, but that FMJs are about on par. My 13BNH cast boolits don't start to mushroom very much until they are over 2000fps. By the time they hit 2400FPS, I get pretty fully developed mushrooms. The factory soft points also mushroom normally in the crumb rubber with very high weight retention.

Just out of curiosity, does your box trap have anything on the back of it for a safety stop, like a piece of thin plate or stack of 2 x 4s? the first one that I build was just a cardboard box, but after several shots went in the same spot, they started to go through the back. My last few generations of the box traps have all had hard stops on the back of them.

[JIMinPHX]

Hey Floodgate, did you ever get a chance to test the penetration depth of .22’s in your smaller pieces of crumb rubber? Inquiring minds what to know. :-)

[Sherlok]

Well to add my 2 cents, my very first attempt with an indoor .22 lr bullet trap 40 years ago was a hot roll plate at a 45 degree angle into sand. The bullets simply slid down the plate and out the back into the next room. After much experimentation I've found that the plate needs to be at least 3/8" hardened T-1 steel at an angle of about 30 degrees off of vertical. That's for a .22 lr. although it seems to hold OK up to limited 9mm Luger use.

Side plates will wear and need to be replaceable. I've since added a lead dust remover using a bathroom vent fan into a filter box.

Good Luck, Sherlok

[floodgate]

Jim:

"Hey Floodgate, did you ever get a chance to test the penetration depth of .22’s in your smaller pieces of crumb rubber? Inquiring minds what to know."

[Copy/Paste from the Makarov thread:]

Got a chunk of cold-rolled 1/4" steel plate as a backstop for my "crumb" trap; adequate at least for .22 LR's, and .38 and .44 Spls. at moderate velocities, after penetrating 16" of tire crumbs. But we've been busy getting the garden ready for planting. "Food before fun!"

floodgate

[JIMinPHX]

Well to add my 2 cents, my very first attempt with an indoor .22 lr bullet trap 40 years ago was a hot roll plate at a 45 degree angle into sand. The bullets simply slid down the plate and out the back into the next room. After much experimentation I've found that the plate needs to be at least 3/8" hardened T-1 steel at an angle of about 30 degrees off of vertical. That's for a .22 lr.

That conflicts with what I’ve seen elsewhere. The commercially available .22 rimfire traps are only about 3/16” thick steel on the back plate & the rest is a bunch thinner. The material in them appears to be garden-variety hot roll. Also, I don’t recognize T-1 off the top of my head. Is that an alloy? It sounds like it might be a heat treat spec. or something.

[Sherlok]

T1 is actually hardened tool steel. Not cheap, but we use it at our club's outdoor range for sillouhoutte targets. It will not deform.

Yes, I'm sure that my 3/8" plate is over-kill for .22s. But if you're dealing with an indoor range, you just can't risk loosing one in the house.

Regards,
Sherlok

[JIMinPHX]

OK, I did some digging & found the specks on T1. It’s a trademarked name for a quenched & tempered version of alloy 514 that’s currently owned by Mittal. It was originally developed by USS. It’s a high strength steel (100+ ksi) but it has higher than usual susceptibility to concentration point fractures. The same guys that sell this kind of stuff (like Chapel Steel) also sell ballistic plate grades like Mil A-46100. Since they don’t list the T-1 in the ballistic section, I would expect that they don’t consider it a good choice for that use. I don’t see why this particular material would be a good choice for a backstop. Do you know why it was chosen at your range? I’m not trying to break your chops here. I’m genuinely curious about this. I may be just missing something. Also, how did you guys attach it? Is it bolted through holes in the plate? Is it welded?

[Sherlok]

You got me there.

We started using it at our range because one of our members had a machine shop, had pleanty of it, and the means to cut and weld it for us. Now that he passed on, I'm not sure what we are doing now at the club. All I know is that he recommended it to me at that thickness, it is available locally and works.

I've been playing with my indoor range for going about 40 years. I've seen other plate after repeated shots (even .22s) at the same general area eventually bend over time. I'm sure there are other materials out there that would be fine and maybe more effecient. And if I were going into production on these things, you can bet I would do a lot more research.

My point (at least to myself) was that if you have an indoor range trap designed for .22 long rifles, you will be tempted (and will) fire something through it much larger occasionally. So it better be able to handle it. T1 plate is expensive, but you need only to buy it once.

Just my experience.

Regards, Sherlok

[colbyjack]

ive made some targets at work out of cheap steel and they hold up. i used 1018 case hardened it. ..040" case depth then tempered it back to a RC 52/54 around a 500-550 brinell hardness. i can nail it close all day with a .45 acp or 9mm and they hold up perfect. i made one bout the same and use a .223 and .22-250 on them at 100 yards and no problems. T-1 or S-7 shoot any tool steel would be overkill. 4140 thru hardned would be best but just cheap old mild steel with some case on it would hold up fine in a trap. -chris

[floodgate]

JIMinPHX, et al.:

Finally got the corners chipped off my "tuit", set up the wine-box crumb rubber trap, and had at it with a dozen rounds of standard velocity Remington solid-point .22 LR's, at 20 ft. from the 20" top barrel of my Savage Model 24 .22/20 ga. All went through the first 4" deep box and stopped in the second - so penetration into the 1/4" +/- crumbles (plus one layer target paper and four layers of corrugated cardboard) is between 4" and 8". Trading precise penetration figures for convenience, I dumped the second box into a 30" aluminum water heater splash tray, and "panned for lead":

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v317/floodgate/P1010002_5.jpg.

The .22 slugs came out with noses pushed back into a rounded lump, and some collapse of the hollow bases, but as the rifling marks are still clean-cut I don't think there was any tumbling to speak of:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v317/floodgate/P1010003_2.jpg

I am satisfied that this "modular" approach will be useful for my purpose, which is primarily to recover expensive bismuth/tin alloy, and only secondarily to check bullet performance and deformation.

Next time my "tuit" rounds out, I will set to making up and casting with some 1:16 tin/bismuth, using all "virgin" metal, pot, dipper and mould. The latter will be one of a pair of Lee 0.495" round balls, as due to the way they are final formed over a carbide sphere, they should be much more uniform than their bored moulds - comparison will be with pure lead in the other mould from some 0.200" lead swaging wire I have. Then maybe I'll break out my early (serial 5050!) .50 T/C Hawken and see how they shoot.

stay tuned (but don't hold your breath!)

Doug

[JIMinPHX]

My standard velocity .22s went in about 10” & didn’t deform as much as yours did. I’d say that your material is the more efficient stopper. You can probably make the whole trap smaller with your crumbs. My larger chunks will probably go for a longer time before they start to fall out of the holes in the front of the trap though. Interesting. Thank you for posting your results Floodgate.

[JIMinPHX]

By the way, if you tape the holes up, you can keep using the same cardboard for a very long time.

[floodgate]

Jim:

I did, and rearranged the boxes for the next go-round. May try some .44 Spls. from my 5-shot S&W M&P.

Doug

[Sherlok]

Good Grief!

[WAHO]

If u want to recycle lead this is what I use

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?p=314825&highlight=WAHO#post314825

[JIMinPHX]

My spare traps are up for trade -

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=29648

[Milltown353]

I read through all of this and I had an idea (Maybe good or Bad) about how to make lead recovery easier.

Now what would happen if you had a rubber mulch type catch. work on the calculation on far your particular bullet would travel before it stopped (I'm going under the assumption that the same loaded bullets out of the same gun will land within a few inches of each other).

Now here is the interesting part, you take and set-up a regular catch that would normally just turn the bullets into powder. Have that set-up in the back and when shooting lead bullets out of a particular gun, just have a few inches less then needed for when it stopped. So say you shot a .45acp load and it would land between 16-20'' in the rubber mulch, from there you only set-up 14-15'' of rubber mulch. In theory the bullet would exit out of the back of the rubber mulch, then just bounce off of the plate in the back and fall down into a catch. The bullet should stay fairly intact because of the low velocity at which it would hit the plate.

Has that idea already been thought of? Failed? If it wouldn't work can somebody explain to my why it wouldn't work?

If it worked you could build slots that could be taken in and out depending what you were shooting and how far it would penetrate.

It probably wouldn't be very portable, but I don't know.

[Saint]

I just posted in the special projects section a silent trap that i made using a 5 gallon bucket and 5 pounds of ballistic putty(duct seal). This is only a pellet trap but I am sure it could be used for regular firearms if enough putty was used. The only problem would be that a firearm projectile would go in really deep so the putty would have to be removed in order to retrieve the lead unless the bullet deformed enough on impact to kep it close to the surface. I would like to see someone tryit but sadly i have nowhere close to my home where i can set it up.

[JIMinPHX]

One of the trap sections that I made has cardboard on the front & the back. It was designed as an extension & it was intended to have the boolits come out the back side of it, then go into another trap. When the boolits come out the back, they bring a bunch of crumb rubber with them & they open up a pretty big hole in the cardboard. They would make a mess if you tried to have a little catch bin back there.

If you were to make the trap a little shorter than the expected stopping point of a particular boolit & then have a plate sitting there waiting to stop it, that does work. I fired some .38s into a 12” deep trap with a plate backup. When I removed the plate, all my boolits were right there on top waiting for me. They were about 3/4 of the way squished out flat.

[Tumtatty]

HI Jim,

As I reported earlier, my box stops pistol rounds just fine. The endgame for me has always been rifle boolits.

However I can't seem to get my box to stop them effectively!!!


The box is 24"
It has 3 bags of rubber mulch squeezed inside it
I installed 2 layers of steel which = a little under 1/4"

Today I fired:
6.5 X 55 Swede Mauser (170gr boolit with 14gr 2400)
8mm K98 Mauser (223 gr boolit with 19 gr 2400)

They tore the steel to pieces at 50yrds. Any ideas how I could make this box work? It weighs around 80 pounds as is.

I'm thinking that if I could get a large diameter PVC pipe of 4 or 5 feet and fill it with mulch and a steel backend that I might have some success.

I like shooting at 50yrds and would like to stay at this distance. At that range my boolits already drop 6" from point of aim so I'd rather not reduce the loads any further.


Any help would be appreciated.

Here are some pics:

http://www.gracekernersville.org/ebay/boxfront.jpg
http://www.gracekernersville.org/ebay/boxrear.jpg
http://www.gracekernersville.org/ebay/steel.jpg
http://www.gracekernersville.org/ebay/lead.jpg

[pps]

The rubber mulch has been a great idea. 1 1/2 bags ($12 worth) in a leftover filing box for 15 inches deep and a little duck tape. An old 1/4" thick steel base was leaned against the back of the box nearly vertical.

16 shots of Zero 158gr SJHP at 1200 fps from 10 yards were fired, 4 were recovered between the back of the box and the plate (9 were between 14 and 15 inches, expansion was variable and 13 of 16 were recovered with the remaining three going to wherever it is that all the missing socks go when they escape the dryer.

After duck tap repair, 8 shots of 185gr Beartooth LBT style boolits at 1204 fps fired at 10 yards, 5 recovered after hitting the plate. Enough energy was bled off that the plate was not dented and the lightest bullet recovered was 173gr.

Lastly 70 Hornady swaged 158gr LHP were fired at 850 fps, 10 yards (plate was removed) 4 were found in the berm behind the box, the remaining 56 recovered were between 10 and 13 inches from the front. The other ten bullets might still be in the mulch or in the berm.

86% recovery from 12 dollars of re-usable material isn't bad. No lead dust and boolits mostly in tact, and no dirt to dig through for crap laden lead. Weight is 35# and another 5# for the optional plate. Whoever came up with the rubber mulch idea deserves a beer:drinks:

BTW: sifting through the material only took approx 5 min with the shop vac. The plastic seems light enough to go easily while the boolits drop to the bottom of the box. I'd bet that there might be a few boolits in the mulch left over that I dumped from the vac into the box, but they should be there for the next range session.

[Redneck]

Hello this is my first post, I've been lurking for quite some time.
I tried this idea, my box is 15x12 inchs and 30 inches long, I have a little over two and a half bags of rubber mulch in it and it will stop anything. I have fired 9mm, 38special, 250 gr 45 colt, 175 grain lee .323, and 7.62x54r and 8mm mauser steel core ammo into it.
Here are a few that I have recovered.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y95/redneckssfj/bulletsfromtrap.jpg

[Ricochet]

You could load most of those back up and shoot 'em again.

[JIMinPHX]

I was a little lazy this morning & I didn’t want to drag my 90# box trap out into the desert in this 100+ Phoenix heat, so I just grabbed my little steel 45 degree trap instead. I was testing out some cast .223 loads at around 2,000fps. The ones that were 13BNH made some little dimples where they hit the A-36 plate steel. The 23BNH ones made bigger dimples. Also, the material that I was able to recover out of the steel trap was mostly dull gray powder, some of which had sintered back together in the corners of the trap. I only recovered about 25% of what I sent down range. The rest must have just disappeared as dust. I had a lot of small holes poking back through my target from the rear.

To sum it up, A-36 steel at a 45 degree angle does not like lead boolits over about 1500fps or jacketed boolits over about 1000fps, regardless of how thick the steel is. I’m going back to the box trap next time, even if it is a bit heavy to lug around.

[JIMinPHX]

HI Jim,

As I reported earlier, my box stops pistol rounds just fine. The endgame for me has always been rifle boolits.

However I can't seem to get my box to stop them effectively!!!


The box is 24"
It has 3 bags of rubber mulch squeezed inside it
I installed 2 layers of steel which = a little under 1/4"

Today I fired:
6.5 X 55 Swede Mauser (170gr boolit with 14gr 2400)
8mm K98 Mauser (223 gr boolit with 19 gr 2400)

They tore the steel to pieces at 50yrds. Any ideas how I could make this box work? It weighs around 80 pounds as is.



I just saw this post now for the first time. Sorry that I didn't get back to you sooner. For rifle rounds, you're going to need about 3 feet of rubber mulch depth. 2 feet ain't gunna cut it unless you back it up with some real steel.

You might try stapling your cardboard on the front of your trap rather than on the back side of the 2 x 4 frame. That would give you another 3.5” of rubber depth & would be at least a small step in the right direction. You may end up having to build a small extension box like I did. My extension box was basically a 1 foot cube with cardboard on the front & back sides. I put it in front of the main trap to slow down the fast movers. A plain cardboard box full of rubber mulch in front of the trap may be enough to make it work. Either of these two options are for limited use only. The cardboard on the back side of the extension doesn’t last that long. Your idea of a PVC tube sound promising too.

[Meatco1]

Wouldn't filling a box with plain sand do just as well, besides being easier to sift?

Richard

[yondering]

I built one of these rubber mulch box traps, and started wondering about other materials as well. Sand might run out of the bullet holes pretty quick, but what about beauty bark? Same basic shape as the shredded rubber mulch, cheaper, and it floats, so you could separate the lead out by dumping it in water. Probably would require a longer box though.

[StanDahl]

I built one of these boxes this week and tried it out yesterday. I made it approx. 18" x 20" and 33" deep. The dimensions were made to fit an 18x18 piece of 3/8” steel plate that I got for the back. I made a slot for a 1/2 thick plywood false back at 24" to reduce the weight that I would have to haul around if I was just shooting pistols. Some of the 358430 (195gr) 38 specials went about 22", but none touched the wood.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/StanDahl/100_1516a.jpg
False back

I don't recommend building a box trap in this way, but I recently got a dado blade and I'm looking for any excuse to use it - note the way the panels slide into dado slots in the 2x3's. This design isn't very strong if you try to lift it from the top.

I was afraid I’d hit the box at long range with some of my 45-70 “plinker” loads, so I screwed a target frame to the front for sighters. I was too lazy to wrestle the trap off of the dolly, but I was shooting straight enough not to blow out a tire. I usually have this range to myself, so next time I’ll just drive it out to the 100yd line. I've thought of including some sort of slots for a removable axle so I don't need to haul the dolly along with it, just an axle and tires.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/StanDahl/Photo_073108_004a.jpg

What I had to know was what would happen if I fired a Trapdoor 45-70 with a 525 gr 457125 into it with 65 gr of Goex behind it. I pulled out the false back, added two more bags of mulch, and let loose from 100yds. These heavyweights were stopped just a few inches from the steel plate. I didn’t have enough mulch to fill it all the way, and two of the plinker 400gr bullets hit the target high enough to skim off the inside of the lid and plow through the wood above the steel plate. Fortunately, the damage was minimal. I'll be re-doing the back of the lid and raising the metal plate a few inches for next time.

This is a great idea! I’m not only saving lead, but now I can have some idea of how well bullets are engraving, how the gas check and lube performs, and what happens to the bases after they’re fired (the 457125’s were somewhat uneven despite a Walters wad). My trap is very heavy, but I don’t think I’ll need the steel plate in the future, wood will work fine ($60 wasted, but no regrets). Cutting the whole thing back to 24" and leaving the steel plate might be a better idea. It would take up less space and be easier to move around.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v405/StanDahl/100_0137.jpg
Lyman 457125, Lee 90268HB, Lyman 358430, RCBS 38-150KT, .22

Note big fat Trapdoor land engraving on 457125, all the way to the nose!

This is the "redwood" mulch exactly like in the packages shown a few pages back, there isn't much if any rubber residue on the bullets, it's very easy to separate.

[jameslovesjammie]

Stan,

Your package of bullets expired! You better send them to me. I'll make sure they're re-used properly.

James

p.s. I like your trap! I think I'm going to have to make one now!

[303Guy]

Finally got the corners chipped off my "tuit", A round "tuit"! Hooh hoo! I should get me one of those!:bigsmyl2:

[PatMarlin]

Great trap- outstanding Stan!!

Recycling is the key to our sport. Is that a used Tofu tray your boolits are sitting in? ..:mrgreen:

[geargnasher]

I'm glad to see this thread is back from the dead! This was about the best homade bullet trap info the internet had to offer, and that's how I ended up finding this site late last year (the beginning of my "ruination"!).

Thanks to all for taking the time to post all the research and pictures, you guys saved me a couple hundred bucks in experimenting at least!

Gear

ps If I ever get a round "tuit" I'll get some pics of my traps up here, too :drinks:

[Mk42gunner]

Now is the time to buy rubber mulch; the local Walmart has it on clearance for $4.00/ bag. I just have to find the time to build the box.


Robert

[Jim_Fleming]

Well guys I learned something today that I didn't like about my boolit trap...

It's my fault completely, let's get that disclaimer out of the way...

I put a small shelf/table on the front of it... Then I added a really nice steel swinger that is as lively as all get out when properly struck, etc.... uh-huh... I see the gray heads out there nodding... They know what I don't like...

Every time the steel swinger does it's job, and it does it damn well, (while we're at it!) the lead does NOT enter the trap at all! It spatters in a 360 degree area that's exactly perpendicular to the face of the steel swingers... [smilie=b: [smilie=b: [smilie=b:

I guess I'll just have to go with lighter targets, (oil and water bottles, etc) that'll swing and bounce very nicely, but allowing the boolits to enter their proper home as should be... UGH! [smilie=b:

Written with a grin, guys... Written with a grin! :groner:

I absolutely wasn't thinking about splatter and losing lead, etc...

[PatMarlin]

No matter- easy to fix. Just shoot more!

[ghh3rd]

Saw this post active again, and had a thought, why not deflect boolit into water trough/chamber. Water seems to stop boolits real well, with minimun damage. Course, you'd have to make sure the boolit trap was full of water before using :-)

Sure wish I lived in the country...

[JIMinPHX]

Sure wish I lived in the country...

I see that you are in Tampa. Where can you shoot around there? Are there any good ranges? Is there public land that is open to shooting? Can you just go out into the swamp & shoot there (watching for gators, of course)?

[ghh3rd]

I see that you are in Tampa. Where can you shoot around there? Are there any good ranges? Is there public land that is open to shooting? Can you just go out into the swamp & shoot there (watching for gators, of course)?

The only place that I can shoot around here is at a range, unless I owned some property "out in the coutry". We do have a some good ranges in the Tampa area, mostly indoors, but a some outdoors. The outdoor range that I've been frequenting is the Wyoming Antelope Club. http://www.antelopeclub.org/

I started hunting at the end of last year (actually was 27* in the tree stand one morning!), walking through much swamp land but didn't see any gators or snakes. Around here, there are gators in about every body of water, on golf courses, residential areas, everywhere. My snake boots are on their way for warm weather treks through the swamps.

Regarding hunting, from what I understand there is no public land in Florida. All of it is private or state owned. If you don't have private land to hunt on, you hunt on the state Wildlife Management areas.

[JIMinPHX]

So then, only a few ranges are open to the public down there. In that case, how much land do you you need to have in order to be able to shoot on your own private land? Is 1 acre enough? 10?

[JesseCJC]

been reading up on the mulch traps but I am concerned with ricochet coming back should something exceed 2 feet and strike some sort of steel plate backing. Could it be possible to have a hinge on the rear "just in case" plate and be ok or is ricochet not a concern to come back if your box is say 2 feet deep using small pisol(9/10/45acp) and the occasional .223

[JIMinPHX]

if something goes through 2 feet of crumb rubber & then hits a steel plate, it is NOT going to be able to come back through 2 feet of crumb rubber & get back out the front of the trap. I haven't seen any bounce backs go more than an inch forward.

[MGM]

I would absolutely concur with Jim's comment. No chance of any bullet coming back through 2' of rubber, and I have a tough time believing that your bullet would hit the steel plate if it went through that much rubber.

[GaryN]

I just filled a bucket full of sand with a slab of rubber under the lid. Works pretty good except in the winter. The plastic bucket gets real brittle in the cold and then it breaks instead of letting you punch holes in it.

[rongaudier]

This is not a bullet trap, but a form of back stop. I shoot at steel all the time at ranges as close as 7 yards. I do get hit by frags once in awhile, but most of the fragments seem to radiate perpendicular to the strike point of the bullet. My idea is to have 3/8 ar500 plate braced against a wall. most of the frags will fall on the floor and can be swept up. Seems like it would work.


190143

[Littlewolf]

four sided cone with plates at 30deg the thickness is doubled. the point of he cone should have a 4" sched 40 pipe welded so the curve matches the right side plate. the angle of the plates will cause the bullet to slide to the pipe which will cause all the lead/alloy to roll into powder to ie 7.5 shot size, jackets will be in flake form. calibers such as 30-06 at 100yards should use 3/4" plate which can be mild steel.
this design is borrowed from the four boolit traps in the basement range of my local legion building which is rated for rimfire only due to noise through the floor of the legion's bar, these cones are only 1/8" plate and have been there at least 40yrs.