[Lucky]

Has anyone ever shot a tire before? I imagine a rifle ought to go through, most tires, I guess. But the more I think about it the less likely it seems that a handgun could penetrate the tread of a tire. Maybe hitting between the treads of a bias ply, rather than a belted, might. But it would still be a tough target. I think it would be very interesting, what cartridges do to what tires, at what angles.

[ribbonstone]

Car tires?

handgun will go through the tread..makes a puckered type hole that is much smaller than you'd xpect, but even normal handgun rounds (like the 9mm) do go through.


OF course, it's better to just shoot the driver. Proablm with shooting the tire is that the tires that are easiest to get a bead on, are usually the ones that make the car vear into your path.

[isp2605]

Even a .22 Short from a Colt Jr will penetrate a tire thread.
Tires aren't as resistant as you might think.

[Doggieman]

here on the LA freeways we shoot at tires instead of honking

[starplayer]

hahahaha

[nhhillbilly]

We have shot tires and cars with handguns and rifles and shotguns. Handgun rounds will normally slowly deflate tires. Rifles or slugs will very quickly deflate the tire. I assume the speed of the round causes more damage but did not exam the tires after they were deflated.

[Grump]

Mounted, on the rim, under pressure, and carrying a load is one thing.

I shot a loose unmounted junk dumped trash tire from about 125 yards with a .22 LR rifle one day, straight at the tread. Decided to quit when I heard the slug zing over my head about 20 yards away.:eek:

[cosmonick]

Grump,

I had almost the same experience from about 20 yards when I was a kid. I haven't shot a tire since :)

Mo

[Seven High]

Has anyone done any testing with their handgun or rifle against windshields, side windows or doors? What will penetrate?

[Cosmoline]

Anything bigger than a .25 ACP will penetrate auto glass. Though a light loaded .38 S&W might not be too great either. There were stories about standard .38 Special loads deflecting off modern safety glass when it first came out on cars. IIRC, these were what led to the so-called "cop killer" handgun solids. But I think it's bunkum. Would be a good "Mythbusters" episode, though.

As far as car doors, that WAS on Mythbusters and as expected darn near everything went clear through the car. The doors are NOT an effective bullet stop. You can see a bit of this in a fantastic shootout scene in "Heat."

[Lucky]

Thanks all, I guess the answer is 'it depends'. I was actually imagining un-mounted old tires, but I didn't clarify that, my bad.

[Grump]

Oh, unmounted like the one I shot is, IMO, far more hazardous.

I've *heard* that when the old Provo Police Protective Ass'n range was upgraded in the late 1980s, they hand-selected the tires stacked up there to eliminate the steel-belted jobs, because even with the columns filled with sand, they would sometimes fling back just about any moderately-loaded pistol bullet.

Anyone have insights on that?

They also reportedly had to avoid certain truck tires that had a really big ring of steel in the bead, for the same reason. Or so I was told.

[Tacticaldude]

Howabout..Has Anybody shot a mounted(car) moving tires ? what works and what not?
I heard if the car is moving(I dont know what speed) and you shoot the windshield or side windows in a bad angle theres a tendency that the bullet deflects and not hit the intended target, please share any input/info. too..
Thanks

[velojym]

Err.. I'm not going to get into shooting at moving cars (as a general rule), but I'll note that a 170gr .30-30 bullet passed through a red heeler and the inner sidewall of a Big-O Big Foot AT (31"x15R) tire before lodging in the outer sidewall. It lost air out of the puckered hole in the sidewall, but didn't burst.
Of course, the dog soaked up a lot of the bullet's energy first.

For those concerned about the dog, it was a vicious feral pooch who'd just killed my Border Collie on my property.

[AndyC]

Howabout..Has Anybody shot a mounted(car) moving tires ? what works and what not?
I heard if the car is moving(I dont know what speed) and you shoot the windshield or side windows in a bad angle theres a tendency that the bullet deflects and not hit the intended target, please share any input/info. too..
Thanks
I shredded a few Iraqi vehicles with an AK and an M249 when forced to on a few occasions. I can't tell you where the bullets went after impact; we couldn't stop and examine the cars as it would have endangered our principals. What I can tell you is that the 5.56mm and 7.62mm rifle bullets will make swiss-cheese of a car's tyres and bodywork and they have no problem penetrating a windshield from almost any frontal angle.

Although I never had to shoot at a a vehicle side-on - most engagements involved vehicles charging hard from the rear - it's not hard to visualise that too acute an angle on glass will cause a bullet to deflect instead of penetrate. Some tests we did on concrete walls showed that a bullet fired at a very acute angle would travel almost parallel to its surface for quite a distance before hitting a cardboard target set up at the far end of the wall.

Handgun - no idea.

[Double Naught Spy]

I have been adding tires to a new backstop. The tires are for bulk and to give stability for increasing the height of the largely sand backstop. I used .22 lr fired from a rifle to drain water from unmounted tires. Penetration was no problem and the water drained nicely. Those tires are now filled with sand. Hopefully they will soon be fully covered with sand.

Sidewall penetration is easy. You can do it with a pen knife. Penetrating the tread is not as easy and can be more difficult when the tire is pressurised and spinning, mostly for shotgun shot and handgun ammo. Sidewalls are another matter. They are fairly easily penetrated, pressurized or not, spinning or not. I don't know about birdshot, but buckshot works fine at least at closer ranges (within 20 yards).

With that said, there will be a big difference between road tires and off road tires. 2 belted or 4 belted road tires are much compared to 16 belted jungle tires on the tread. Sidewalls still seem weak.

[blackhawk2000]

Just once. On accident. See me and my cousin were shooting his shootin car, just three more payments and it's his. Anyways, were shooting his shootin car, and right before I shot the tire, he says don't shoot my good tire. Well I must have nicked it with one pellet, cuz sure nuf it started leakin. I was using those Remington clay loads #8 shot. They only took the paint off the door. 00 buck shot right thru the door though.


True story.

[Doggieman]

Some tests we did on concrete walls showed that a bullet fired at a very acute angle would travel almost parallel to its surface for quite a distance before hitting a cardboard target set up at the far end of the wall.


say, could you go into this a little more? I've heard this before and it strikes me as very odd.

[Lucky]

"I'll note that a 170gr .30-30 bullet passed through a red heeler and the inner sidewall of a Big-O Big Foot AT (31"x15R) tire before lodging in the outer sidewall. It lost air out of the puckered hole in the sidewall, but didn't burst."

Lol, I was reading and thinking, "what is a red heeler? Is it s type of rim, a term for a fender, no that doesn't make sense, what is it?" lol.

The accounts are really interesting though, and I guess it does come down to tire construction a lot. Bias-ply off-road tires are supposed to have really think sidewalls so they don't get punctured, and some long-life car tires have really hard rubber, steel belts combined with strong nylon or kevlar reinforcement, and almost no void-space. So a bullet hitting the tread of one of those would have a fair amount of material to pass through. Frankly I didn't think any pistol bullets would have been able to penetrate, so I'm surprised. I read that rubber has a thickness efficient of 17% of steel armour. So if the rubber component is 2cm thick that's like steel 3.4mm thick, which is still a good amount of steel. Then you have the steel belting, too.

For the record I read that 7.62x51 fmj will penetrate about 8mm armour steel at 0 distance, for comparison.

So maybe this is something that could be requested of the 'Box of truth' guys? Or would that be irresponsible? Just my hunch is that pistol bullets shouldn't be able to go through a medium amount of rubber backed by nylon/kevlar and steel cable. And since it's a tire tread, if you hit off-center you're going to be penetrating at an angle, making things worse.

But people here HAVE penetrated, so I'm really curious.

[AndyC]

Some tests we did on concrete walls showed that a bullet fired at a very acute angle would travel almost parallel to its surface for quite a distance before hitting a cardboard target set up at the far end of the wall.


say, could you go into this a little more? I've heard this before and it strikes me as very odd.
I'm not sure how much more detailed I can be - I don't understand the physics of it myself. Essentially, if you fire a bullet at a fairly flat angle to a hard surface, the bullet doesn't fly away at the same angle as one would expect - it seems to "hug" the surface and travel parallel. I made a little pic in MS Paint to illustrate it, shooter firing from the left of the pic:

http://img310.imageshack.us/img310/1609/deflection1am.jpg

[Offwhite]

Never just a single tire but when I was 15 my father, godfather & I bought a car for about $200 & took it back to my godfathers place in Ohio (he was about 100,000 acres, plus he owns an island up in Canada - for fishing) and shot the hell out of it. We spent a good 4 or so hours & probably about 4 or so thousand rounds.

[psyopspec]

I heard from a source I consider reputable that if you're firing into a car through the windshield, aim a few inches high. If in the drivers seat of a car firing out through the windshield, aim a bit low of COM on the target.

[walking arsenal]

Anything bigger than a .25 ACP will penetrate auto glass.

Safety glass maybe, like the side windows and such. Windshields are a different thing, there you have layers and angles, screws everything up.

[Doggieman]

Essentially, if you fire a bullet at a fairly flat angle to a hard surface, the bullet doesn't fly away at the same angle as one would expect - it seems to "hug" the surface and travel parallel.


nice pic. that's crazy it seems like it would bounce off at the same angle -- you know "angle of incidence equals angle of reflection" and all. Is there a standard distance from the wall that the bullet go to even with varying angles? Is there an angle at which this no longer happens? Very interesting! This might mean that if you're in a hallway and some guy is peeking his head around the corner at the end it might be best to actually shoot the wall and let the bullet skim down the wall toward him.

[Dravur]

One of the reasons that a bullet will seem to hug a wall at a shallow angle is the projectile has very little elasticity. When it hits, it still wants to travel, and since it imparts no extra energy as a rubber ball would, it does not bounce at an angle equal to the incoming angle.

The same thing happens on a pool table except the energy is coming from the soft bumpers, rather than the projectile.

The other thing that MIGHT help this phenomenon along is the shape of the bullet itself. The shape would cause the nose of the bullet to deflect at a shallower angle than fired from. When the bullet stabilized again, the bullet would then be close to the path of the wall. If the bullet was made of a hard steel, round in shape, my guess would be it would deflect at a similar angle to the firing angle.

It would be interesting to see if the bullet was coming out at a very shallow angle or if it came close to being parallel. To test this, place multiple targets each 10 ft apart and try the test, measure the distance to the each hole and calculate the angle.

Try it with your hands. ball up your fist and bounce it off your palm of your other hand. Now try it with your hand open and fingers pointed. Its not exactly scientific, but does demonstrate this.

[Doggieman]

does anybody have any long hallways in their home or office?

[Nobody]

9mm 115 gr fmj at deflated tires at the local dump when I was a kid. These were just tires, no rims or anything. Bullets bounced off and came sailing right back by our heads. Never tried it again.

[p35]

I know of a guy who hit the rim on his truck tire with a .357 round while trying that- long story. Fragments came back and took out one of his eyes. Ouch.

[depicts]

My hometown had a race track where they ran Demolition derby's on Saturday nights. Sunday morning there would be a bunch of wrecks on the dirt roads outside the track.

I shot a lot of tires and cars, windshields, doors,trunks carborators, radiators, seats, back windows, glove box locks in those days

I've used everything from .22 pistols to .250 Savage and some shotguns too.

The most interesting thing I saw was that when I shot the sidewall of tires (and these were not steel belted radials in those days) the tires did not deflate or explode. But if we unscrewed the valve stem cap, the air would deflate out of the tire through the valve. Must have been a pressure thing.

[lbmii]

All I know is that old steel wheels that you find in junk heaps out in the woods are scientifically designed to send any bullet you fire at it right back at you. I know this for a fact. ;)

[panzermk2]

yes but they were on a BMP and it was a 120mm.
your results may vary

[Ol` Joe]

When I was a little younger, my dad used to take use to a state owned and policed range that was made up of tires piled on posts and filled with sand. They were set at 25 - 100 yds and I don`t remember any rifle or pistol load used (22lr - 308 win) haveing problems penetrating them. This of course was before steel belts.

[dev_null]

OK, but how do you cook 'em after you've shot 'em? :neener:

[Double Naught Spy]

Decided to try something different. I got in 4 damaged tires to use. They were not on rims, not spinning (obviously), and so not reality for shooting tires on moving vehicles.

At 50 yards, Federal frangible 5.56 (military training stuff that Ammoman sells) will penetrate non-inflated and stationary truck tires through the tread and where I could find secondary damage, powered through sidwalls with some ease. How frangible could go into through the tread of a belted tire and remain enough intact to pass through a rubber sidewall in a fairly normal penetration hole astounds me. Apparently, hitting the tread and belts may not be enough to cause frangible 5.56 to fragment.

[bruss01]

On the bullet ricochet thing hugging the wall...

I'm speculating here that maybe instead of a straight line, the bullet actually hits the wall several times.

No, I'm not crazy. Here's how I theorize it may work:

Anyone familiar with the Coriolis effect? It's what pitchers use to throw a curve ball. You put a spin on the ball so that as the ball travels forward, one side is moving forward faster (because the ball is spinning). The coriolis force makes the ball travel in a curved line instead of a straight line.

So, when a bullet hits a wall at a glancing angle, the wall rubs against one side of the bullet, and the bullet deforms and starts to tumble end over end just like the major league curve ball. The initial impact would send the bullet ricocheting away from the wall at the same angle as it hit, but the Coriolis effect causes it to veer back towards the wall like a curve ball. With the Coriolis effect substituting for gravity in this case, it becomes a lot like skipping a stone across the water, a series of little "hops" following the line of the wall. The initial impact will absorb most of the rounds energy so subsequent impacts may be so slight as to be hard to notice.

Anyway, that's my SWAG on the matter. At least it adheres plausibly to the laws of physics.

[R127]

We used to have a range in my neighborhood and people would shoot old tires, no rim and no pressure. The hangun bullets either would bounce off or get stuck in the tread. Even large caliber handguns. It could come in handy for making some improvised armor someday.

[MD_Willington]

Twice:
.303 FMJ (Canadian Military surplus SMLE and ammo.)
30-06 FMJ (surplus ammo, can't remember the rifle used.)

[KINGMAX]

:eek: :barf: My question is -- After you killed it - did you grill it ???

[Coronach]

Handgun rounds on tires will not cause them to deflate very quickly. I know one LEO who shot out tires and had no idea he hit until a few minutes later when the tires went flat. The holes are semi-self-sealing.

The whole Hollywood tire-shootout thing is, unsurprisingly, 100% Hollywood. Rifle rounds, especially multiple rifle rounds, will probably be completely different.

Mike

[MR.G]

A couple of guys came into our shop to rob us. One of the guys fired a few shots from a .22 with one round hitting the front tire of a jeep. Tire went flat. Another round went into my friends back and punctured his lung. The tire went flat before Bill collapsed.

[Dr.Who]

Yes,
I have shot various parts of cars. From time to time a group of fellow shooters aquired a vehicle that was need more in repair than it was worth. They would take it out to a friends farm and try all kinds of ammo on it to see what would happen...

One time they invited me along. The vehicle was a late 80's Chrysler Labarron. Now, think about all the times on TV you see someone duck behind an open car door in a gun fight for protection. You see a bullet hit on the door in direct line of the "ducker", yet he is not hit and returns fire. I tell you after that car shoot you realize that the only place a bullet will not penatrate is the engine block. It kind of ruined a few movies for me.... Ha Ha...

We shot in the the side of one door with the window down, it went through the door skin, broke the glass, the panel, the center arm rest, the other door panel, broke the glass, and out the door skin... The next shot went though everything (but not the broken glass) including the seat back accross. These shots were with a 30-06 shot approx. 60 feet away from the car.


We had no problem flatening the tires with a 22, 30/30, 30-06, and a .357. A 9mm, 45 Colt and 45 acp went through both doors. .38's had a bit of a problem. I took a 30/30 and shot through the left rear tire, wheel well, trunk floor well for spare tire, though the 60 PSI tire (that was something) and went into the rim logging the bullet into the rim.

We use shotguns with various shots down to slugs... Boy what a hole that makes. In make a great lock cylinder remover.

We shot the drivers door off the hinges. In doing so caused the steering column to drop. One shot actually hit and bent the staff. Have no idea which round it was. Shooting at the steel wheels was a problem for everything but 30-06, 30/30, or 357's. We were actually able to penitrate the steel wheels and break the cast iron drum. We shot through and broke the front strut, but not the shock shaft or the spring.

We also tried varios things on the windshield... Boy that is a tough piece of glass with the plastic layer.

One of the shooters had gotten some armor piercing rounds and tried them in the engine block from the front. The block stopped the bullet. I have forgotten what caliber it was.

During all the rounds we shot, the only bounce back was the shotgun pellets.

We even had some old paint cans filled with water and sealed. Boy, what a display that was with some hollow points and hydra shok bullets. It just peeled the cans open and water everywhere.

It sure give you a new respect of what a bullet can do....:what: