I’m always on the hunt for interesting things to shoot.
Killing animals really doesn’t appeal to me much, and punching holes in paper (while fun) lacks a certain panache in addition to forcing you to walk up on the target to see how you shot. Granted, having a nice little cluster of holes to hang on your mom’s fridge is pretty wonderful, but sometimes you want something a little more… reactive. And for the record, my mom has likened me bringing in good targets for her fridge to a cat dragging a recently eviscerated rodent up to the front door and leaving it in your shoes.
Exactly like this.
Enter steel shooting.
The concept has been around for a while. The advantages are that you get instant feedback from good distance on your hits and after the initial expense, your equipment is more-or-less reusable. More recently, steel shooting has taken a prominent place in timed / speed shooting competitions, as those events are less about getting your holes very (very) close together, and more about just getting rounds on target as fast as you can. And if your steel target is about the same size as a (say) Coast Guard qualification target’s 5-ring, then every “ping” means a good hit. Sounds like a plan.
Let’s kick the research.
The first instinct when considering shooting at metal is to say “won’t it ricochet back?” Not so, sir, not so. First of all, bullets are made mostly of soft lead, with enough copper to hold it together in flight. Not very hard. Secondly, it is moving very, very fast. Whenever it impacts a flat object at a right angle, one of the two things will happen: 1) the bullet will stay together and its insane kinetic energy will punch through whatever it hits, or 2) the bullet will fail to penetrate the target and “splash” on impact, sending low-velocity lead fragments at right angles away from its original trajectory.
The key to getting category (2) impacts is to use heavy, hardened steel that will resist penetration and cratering. The internet told me that 3/8″ or 1/2″ AR400-500 or Brinel 500 steel is the way to go. I have no idea what those are; don’t ask. There are places out there who sell good steel targets for this use. Here are some links.
One thing that should be apparrent from these places is that “real” steel targets are expensive, especially if you get ones that fall down and spring back up or move around or do your taxes for you. Anyway. So if buying a legit plate rack was out of my price range, what’s a guy to do? Easy. Make it yourself!
The key to DIY projects with very particular material components is (I’ve found) to go to a supplier who is small enough that they’ll take your call, but big enough that your project would be trivial for them. I found “Bunker Manufacturing” in Sault Ste Marie who use 1/2″ AR400 hardened steel for snow plows on big trucks. They also had a 7-inch wide strip left over from a project that was functionally scrap for them. At my bequest (and a few bucks), they plasma-torched five squares for me, and put a couple holes in them for hanging.
They were not pretty, but pretty wasn’t the goal. The guy I talked to at Bunker offered to have it CNC machined for me, but when I told him that I was just going to be throwing high-velocity lead at it, we had a good laugh and agreed that a simple torching would be sufficient. This ain’t fine art, people. As far as coming up with a way to hang them from… whatever, my original idea was to put a couple of stainless steel snap hooks through the holes, but the half-inch steel made that impractical, as did the >$5 cost per hook. The best thing that Fireman McGarry and I were able to come up with was a solution involving loops of steel cable and little hammer-down clamps. No word yet on how they’ll stand up to gunfire. Also, at the suggestion of a hardware store proprietor, I obtained a few electrical conduit hangers with cross bolts that seem to fit well enough. Cheap, but of questionable durability.
And now, for something to hang them from. From which to hang them. Them hang for which from.
*ahem*
And now that I had the plates, I needed some sort of hanging system. There we go. With the assistance of the aforementioned Alex McGarry, we constructed a frame out of 2×4s and three threaded rods (two pictured) in a ladder configuration. A series of nuts and washers made the whole thing easily collapsable for transport, as well as offering the means to configure my five target plates however I like.
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| This is the product of going to the range a half-hour before sunset on a very cold day. | |
Okay, so let’s talk some science. The things that will wreck steel targets are kinetic energy over a small impact area and excessively hard projectile composition.
Last things, first: the rounds. Most bullets will penetrate a half-inch of hardened steel, but only if they can stay together. Fortunately, they can’t (most of the time). Several commenters on forums that I read expressed chagrin at people who would bring M855 steel-core rounds to the range and turn their beautiful (and costly) steel plates into swiss cheese. Full-lead or soft-point (the copper jacket on the projectile doesn’t cover the tip) rounds are ideal.
KE
Kinetic Energy, or how “hard” the round hits the target, is also crucial to consider. Since KE is related to the mass of the bullet, times the square of its velocity (KE=mv^2), if you make the round move twice as fast, it will hit four times as hard. I hope that makes sense for you.
Some Numbers:
9mm Para: hits the target 25 yards away with 583(ish) joules of energy over a surface area of about 64mm^2.
.223 Remington (a small, fast-moving rifle round) hits the target with 936(ish) joules of energy, over a surface area of 24mm^2, but only at 200 yards away from the target. Bring it into 50 yards, and you’re hitting with 1490 joules over a much smaller area than the nine-mil, which is why everyone on the inter-nets seemed to caution against bringing small, fast rifle rounds in close. The generally agreed-upon principles seem to be these: 1) Don’t shoot hot rifle rounds inside of 50 yards, and 2) Don’t shoot within 10 yards, period, as “splash” can still happen.
My Report
It was cold out, so I didn’t shoot much. But what I did shoot gave me some interesting data. First off, I hit it a few times at 25 yards or so with some full-jacketed, 115gr 9mm, out of my venerable H&K USP Compact (now on its second firing pin!). As you can see in the picture below, the worst thing that happened to the plate was that it was stained by the lead splattering everywhere. No damage to the steel.
And then I shot it with the AR. At 50 yards. Nearly 1500 Joules of “ping,” which I believe is deemed “a whole lot” by whoever classifies such things. As you can see below, the effects were slightly more tangable.
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Conclusions
As you can see, the .223 hits did crater the plates a bit, but I won’t be shooting that rifle in at that distance very often, and the handgun rounds were only minorly inconvenient to the steel. And in both cases, the shooting was very, very fun. The “BANpGingggg” coupled with the swinging plate makes you think that the bullet actually did some work, above and beyond simply making a hole where before there was none.
In the above picture, you might also note that a round landed nearly in one of the hanging holes. It actually ended up punching the bolt clean through (I never found it) and making the plate swing over like an old-timey sign after the villain storms out and slams the door too hard. The simile worked in my head, I promise. At the end of the day, if the cable-hangs don’t offer anything better in the way of survivability, I swear I’ll just go to zip-ties. Here’s to becoming a better shot!