Originally Posted by
Bigslug
If you're trying to catch it without nose damage. . .
We have a forensic trap at work that consists of a steel tube, closed on one end, and capped with a segmented "screen" on the other which holds a cardboard disc through which you shoot.
The "official" catch medium is shredded Kevlar fluff. Basically, the exact same fibers you'd make body armor out of but no longer in woven sheets, and it's packed in to the consistency of a really firm pillow. The material balls up around the projectile, cushioning and braking it with an ever-increasing diameter. Duty caliber pistol rounds typically and predictably stop after about 18-20 inches of the stuff. The tube has several hatches on the side which you can open for easy access to extract your bullets or replace your cardboard. Finding the hard lump with anything .380 or bigger at the middle of it is pretty easy, but the .22's and .25's take a little more serious effort of pinching your way through smaller handfulls.
My guess is that Dacron would be a cheap and effective substitute.
Pro tip: until we learned how deep the rounds tended to penetrate, we added several additional cardboard baffles at intervals spaced through the fluff. If you have a hole in Baffle 3 but not Baffle 4, you have a lot less fluff to dig through to find your bullet.
Water filled milk jugs work pretty well if your bullet is designed to expand, but I've found that hard alloy solids tend to take A LOT of them to bring to a halt. The fluff has the advantage of being reusable and non-destructive to the slug.