Cheap reactive targets

aarondhgraham said:

Water bottles filled with kitty litter, wrapped in orange tape.

Toss a few downrange and roll them out of sight.

Aarond

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That made me laugh but I don't even know why.

Upon retrospection, I guess it was either that or cry.

In the fall I winterize a fair amount of seasonal cottages and end up with hundreds of empty gallon antifreeze containers. I fill them with colored waier and put the cap back on. Lots of fun and not that hard to clean up shredded plastic. Local garage will have windshield washer jugs and antifreeze jugs to shoot if you ask I will bet.

Onions blow up really well with a good 22 hit, i think its the layers.
gourds, pumpkin, squash, beets, old beers, expired caned goods and condiments, most groceries will work but I cant condone shooting perfectly good food, most splatter better when they start to go south anyway
most big groceries stores throw away tons of produce a week, you might be able to take some bruised fruit off there hands if you play you cards right

golf balls are fun, so are tennis balls, soft balls, most any thing that rolls and wont deflate works, acorns are a bit hard to hit but easy to find

than theirs all ways spent cans and water bottles fill them back up with sand or water for maximum effect, metal 1 and 5 gallon cans can be entertaining also provided you have some thing with High velocity, or slugs that will take um down

If you have a good viritcal dirt backstop you can use cheap spray paint to make reactive targets by simply spraying spots on the dirt about the size of a saucer. There is no question if you hit it and a near miss is very obvious too. A .99 cent can of dollar store paint lasts me about two outings and there is nothing else to have to carry in or out and nothing to clean up.

ice cream containers 1/2 filled with water & vegtable coloring. Freeze them and by the time you get to the range they slip out easy and you've got reuseable ones to use again and leaves no mess around the range.

take a 2x6 and use a circular saw to cut a 1/4 inch deep line along the length.
Fill this cut with saltines. You should know the rest.
Take a 4x4 and drill a bunch of holes in the length of it. fill the holes with suckers. you can guess the rest.
You can use other sizes of wood if you need to. you could put them right on the ground or you could put them on a stand.
these work well at our range and suckers and saltines are cheap.

I like golf balls. I start a small hole with a drill and then screw in a cup hook. Then just hang it from a target bracket with some string or wire.

We always fill up milk, juice, whatever containers with water. They're all going to the recycling in the end, and as long as you don't use em all up, it's a little water storage in case of extended power outages (with filtration).

Pool chalk. Its less than $.10 per target and is a nice size. Hit it right and it vaporizes in a blue cloud.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-Gross-144...522?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item33744a54ca

After we finish planting our deer plots and dragging them level there are usually large dirt clods and rocks of all different sizes. 22's for dirt clods and small rocks, then whatever you have for the larger stuff, good practice after sighting in your deer rifle shoot a few rocks of various sizes at different distances. A case of clay targets is pretty cheap, shoot the whole target then shoot the pieces.

You can always make your own binary explosive i.e. tannerite. Ammonium nitrate from instant cold packs, and fine mesh aluminum powder from various online sources. Legal to mix and shoot at the range, just don't transport it or store it after its mixed and keep the quantity under 20lbs. I use roughly half pound targets, which comes out to a few bucks a target if you use cold packs, or a few cents a target if you can get ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

I'm about to get a bunch of small pumpkins for our traditional October Pumpkin Shoot. This year I'm going to fill several with grits and food coloring and suspend them so when we shoot them up the "brains" fall out.

armarsh said:

Pool chalk. Its less than $.10 per target and is a nice size. Hit it right and it vaporizes in a blue cloud.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-Gross-144...522?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item33744a54ca

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Looks cool, I'll have to try this out.

Duplicate post, tapatalk returned me to the post screen, so I thought it hadn't worked.

Lot of good ideas presented. I wish every one who brought this type of targets to the range would pick up the remnants and put it in the trash cans. I can't believe the crap that is left on the ranges. I think some shooters had Mamas that never taught them to pick up after themselves.

Cookies. The cheap 99 cent store duplex cremes and vanilla wafers explode nicely.

A concrete block, with orange spots for better visibility.

Sometimes a round from my Enfields knocks off a good chunk, and makes a smoky white cloud.
To explode it and have the ability to create many smaller targets, to also be sprayed orange, hit the block in the middle with a round such as 7.5 from a Swiss K-31 etc.

A friend destroyed this same "feral" concrete block from 120 yards last Friday with his K-31.

feral" concrete block

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Safety first. Always have a backup shooter. Feral cinder blocks, have been known to turn on ya, when wounded.

35mm film canisters (usually free at your local photo processing shop) filled with cheap (out of date?) flour and capped.

A cloud of smoke (a huge cloud of smoke with a powerful pistol or rifle) and a Hi-Yo Silver away…

Stop buy a construction site and see if they can give you some of there empty Dri wall spackle buckets. The lids off them work well also. Really though you can go through your recycle container and find all sorts of things to use as targets. Wine bottle corks are always fun to shoot with a 22.

empty pill bottles filled with flour
water balloons
black walnuts (around here people are happy to see me pick them up outta their yard)

IF you have a private range - we've been known to stop by the local household reclamation place. they usually have lots of partially empty cans of latex paint.

I fill milk-jugs with colored water. Pretty much a free target. And depening on what you hit it with, can be a fun explosion.

CZguy:
That's a good idea, and thank goodness he blew it to pieces with the K-31 before it detected our scent! Next time I'll keep several jhp rds. in the dreaded, fearsome SKS as back-up.

Actually, the self-propelled reactive targets I hope to be able to hunt someday (with guidance) will be feral pigs, relatives of the Taliban, but not many of their quadruped cousins are seen in west TN.
Just enter "pig hunt helicopter" in Youtube to watch some entertaining "armed reconnaissance" flights in TX etc.

I can't believe there is only one suggestion for clay pigeons...

Cheap, and don't get much more 'reactive'...

Squirrels