CB
posted this
15 April 2012
It good to see everybody pitching in with suggestions to help. Here's my two cents worth.
I have had my own shooting range in three different places and by far the best in my opining is to follow Ken's suggestion and make a dirt berm. This is no small project to get one with much height and if the land is as flat as you say may produce a hole or the removal of a lot of topsoil. Do you need a pond? May be just as cheap to have someone bring in a truckload or two. If you go this way do it in when the ground is frozen because those 12 yard dump trucks make deep ruts in soil that your pickup thinks is rock solid.
Of course if you are the only one shooting and you don't need a running pig set up or such, a 24 diameter chunk of hardwood will will catch a lot well aimed bullets. Tree removal people have these to give away.
Wood isn't so good for recovering lead because they all pile up in a few places (unless you constantly rotate the chunk) and splatter into dust and of course you have to wait for the chunk to rot to recover. Burning isn't so good because something chemical? happens to the melted out lead and it won't cast or even run out the bottom of your furnace -- at least that happened when I burned a 300 pound chunk of rock maple with a lot of lead in it.
Don't expect to find a culvert pipe thick enough to do the trick. They are amazingly thin for their diameter and made of soft steel. You might make this work for 22 rimfire. A big thick walled steel pipe salvaged from a plant of some kind might work if you could locate such a thing.
Gary's idea of raising the shooting position is thinking outside the box which we need more of but runs into the realities of trigonometry. To get even a 30 degree angle of incidence at 100 yards, which isn't enough, would require 173 feet of height - although the view would be good.
You will get spoiled with your own range but as mentioned, it is nice to BS with other shooters once in a while.
Good luck.
John
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