Saw a nice homemade backstop yesterday..

Went to church picnic yesterday at a church member's house. I noticed he had a nice 200 yard shootin lane behind the garage.

He addressed a common problem I find in making my shooting lanes - the farthest shot was a little downhill, so he had to raise the target about 7 feet off the ground. Of course, that means any misses are going, well, God knows where.

He built a platform. It was 6 tall posts - 3 on the left, 3 on the right. On the front four posts he built a small platform high enough to change and mark targets. It's about 6 feet off the ground, so he built a chicken ladder to get on it.

On the back four posts, he layed small de-branched logs in them, carefully rolling them around as he stacked them to make sure there was a tight fit. He continued the stack of logs up over the desired target hieght at least 3 feet. The stack of logs acts as a backstop, and they're stack about 4' deep. He says he just redid the logs this year due to rot, after two years. He shoots mostly 308 and 30-06, and I saw no signs of bullets penetrating the backside of the logs.

Now, lemme see if I whip up a drawing in Microsoft Paint, forgive the Mickeymousish-appearance:

Good call Daniel, that's exactly the case.

Oh and just so you know Ranger, Kevlar breaks down rapidly. It's widely known that kevlar should not be used for personal protection more than a year at a time.

As I said - he changes the logs periodically. I think it's a good idea myself, and I'm going to do it in my shooting lanes. It's certainly better than the alternative - nothing. Natural barriers are not always an option, and they're environmentally unethical for a regularly used range, if you want to be technical about it.