Last fall, I built a target stand from a single 10 foot section of 1-1/2 inch diameter PVC, 4 T-connectors, and a couple thumb screws for less than $20 (more details here). The stand was intended to use a target backing 18 inches wide, which is generally large enough for most paper targets. However, I recently purchased a Birchwood Casey silhouette target that was printed on a 24-inch wide cardboard with holes cut out for inserting clay pigeons to make it a bit of a reactive target. However, that required some modification to my DIY target stand to make it wider. None of the pieces are glued together--it just relies on friction to hold the parts together. So, changing the width only requires changing out the cross-piece. And it allows you to twist the feet to different angles to compensate better for wind.
Unfortunately, Home Depot does not sell short sections of PVC at the 1-1/2 inch diameter I needed. It did, however, have 2-foot (24-inch) long sections of ABS tubing of the correct diameter. Since the T-sections add some additional width to the stand, I had to shorten the ABS tubing to 20.5 inches to give me an overall width that would accept the uprights for a 24-inch wide target. The final product is shown below:
My son and I were able to get out and try the target out, and it worked pretty well. The target held the clays snug; there was no risk of them falling out of their own accord.
Except for a few .22 LR hits that only left a small hole, it was pretty apparent when you hit one of the clays. (See below, showing a mixture of clays that were hit and some that we had not yet shot). Larger .30 and .38 caliber bullets would completely blow out the center of the pigeons if a center hit was made, as you can see below.
Conveniently, the number of holes matches up to the number of clays in a single stack in a box of clays.
No comments:
Post a Comment