Backstop for shooting

Status
Not open for further replies.
An interesting education: If you own a 30 cal fire a box of tracers into your range at night - can be a real eye opener. I'll tell you this - trees aren't worth a darn, 1 in 10 rounds fired into a grove of trees will deflect up over the canopy +/- 30 degrees from the line of fire. 1 in 3 for rock walls, 1 in 2 for ground sloped 15%. The rounds are still carrying some steam after being deflected, too.
 
The dirt should be behind the railroad ties rather than in front....Safe backstops should be at a 90 degree angle or less.
Click to expand...

Absolutely disagree. The bullets deflect off wood, particularly slow moving large caliber bullets. And every club I've ever shot at, including the one I'm currently a member of, has a berm backstop that from the side, looks like an equalateral triangle.
 
Lead does not bounce straight back because it is soft and disapates energy. Anyone who has shot much steel knows this but it does glance off anything hard if it hits at an angle, just like a bank shot in pool. But don't take my word for it, buy some tracers and prove it to yourself. We used to use a mound of dirt as a back stop until late one evening when we fired some .308 tracers. We moved the range after that.
 
Dirt stops bullets,
BUT it takes A LOT of dirt

wood is bouncy, and while it will absorb round, it' will throw splinters and ricochets, so the Idea of using the ties as a retaining wall means you can build higher with less soil, at a more vertical angle and you have a better final stop, esp. at the top while also having soil to stop bounced bullets or splinters. Oh, and it's easier to mine you lead out.
 
A fresh loose pile of dirt will stop a bullet that hits at even a shallow angle. It is only after it gets rained on, settles and gets baked by the sun that it becomes a liability.
 
It also matters what type of dirt you use, sandy, top soil, or dirt with a lot of clay. Clay tends to dry out and harden, not so much with sandy soil or good top soil. Its also pretty easy to take your front loader and "fluff" your dirt pile if you use the right kind of soil.
 
Dirt backstops cut into a hillside usually need to be squaired up with a bulldozer periodically. A friend has one and has to keep the Bobcat on it to keep it from deteriorating into a slope. Good thing he has access to a Bobcat.
 
I don't see any backstop so far that could ever be considered safe. If you think that no one will shoot over the top of an eight or ten foot wall or berm look at the ceeling of an indoor range once. I've never seen one without bullet holes in it. You kill or injure someone your in for not only civil but criminal charges. Frank
 
Rori, there is a bit of 'adult' in this conversation
if you think that everybody has to shoot in a bullet proof tunnel, well...
that's the WHY you have your own RANGE, you DON'T have to shoot at a place where people are, for what ever reason, unable to perform the basic steps to use a firearm safely.
 
The three-sided box with dirt in it, invites ricochets. Railroad ties, front row, spaced six feet, railroad ties second row, filling to use is sandbags. No rocks, or chips. Look up how the military put up CONEX boxes on the bases in SouthEast Asia, i.e., U-Tapao RTNAF, and you will have a clue. Sandbags, no mattered how weathered, stopped bullets, indirect schrapnel, and softened an RPG blow, one time. when you use fill dirt, you don't exactly know if it has been sifted or not, I think.
 
I built my backstop out of railroad ties, two layers deep and covered the front with tire treads (truck throw-offs picked up from the highway). Stops everything I shoot at it.

Scott
 
I shoot into a rather small dirt berm with a box (two sides and a top) built into it. The box was built to prevent bullet fragments from steel target edges and brackets from flying away. So far no fragments have escaped the box. My berm is very small, but behind it is a significant wooded hillside and more than a mile of uninhabited forest. In 25 years of shooting into my small berm, no bullet has failed to hit it. I am, of course, pretty much the only shooter using it. The others that may occasionally shoot at my place (wife and a few very close friends) must not shoot any further away from the target that their skills allow. I am the judge of that.

Shooting_range.jpg
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all the info. Just found out today from the sheriff's office there are no restrictions in my county as far as having a home range on your own property other than being responsible for stray bullets, of course. I was kind of concerned about that, some counties have ordinances that you can't have a backstop within 500 feet of someone else's property and some even more restrictive than that.

I have five acres, and the direction I will be shooting in has no houses, only woods,and a giant hill, some 30 feet high past them, with chicken houses up on the plateau. If I make my backstop safe, I will not have any problems. I also intend to build a three sided shed to shoot from, sound proofed very well, to cut down on noise since there are houses in the vicinity. This is more a courtesy than a regulation.
 
Last edited:
Shadow, no I don't think everyone should shoot in a bullet proof tunnel!!!!!!!!!! I do think that the backstops I'm seeing in this thread up to the time I posted are very unsafe and need considerably more vertical backstop. Also a long enough impact area is necessary. The ones I was seeing allow no room for an accidental discharge more than 8" or so above the top of the backstop and that is nowhere near enough. If there isn't at least a 3 mile impact area directly behind the backstop it should never be shot at. Remember that boxes of 22's carry a warning that they can injure or kill at over a mile. I never shoot at public ranges but do shoot a LOT with a rock backstop approx 50 feet high and an impact area over 5 miles long. Anything that doesn't safeguard the innocent public is dangerous and neglegent and if I was on the jury I would have to find a person guilty of neglegent manslaughter. Problem is that doesn't bring back or heal the innocent. We as shooters bear the responsibility of safeguarding those that are not engaged in our pastime. Shoot safely or not at all. Frank
 
I think what Shadow was saying is that there are no absolutes in this life. No matter how safe you think something is, the unexpected can, and does, happen. Murphy's law and all that. From what I have seen in all the posts so far is that safety is in the eye of the beholder. I think one poster said he had been shooting into his backstop for 25 years without incident.

I have read stuff where one person says one thing, and a few posts later someone completely contradicts them. I have gotten a lot of good info from the posts and intend to build the safest shooting area I can. Will it be foolproof? Don't believe there is such a thing. But common sense and learning something of the quirkiness of bullets is very important.
 
Three clear miles behind the berm makes range construction almost impossible for most land owners east of the great plains. I understand the desire for such a buffer, but I haave never been to or seen a range with this margin of safety. Ever. Now, out west things are different.
 
My point is that there is no 100%, you shoot in a quarry...
guess what, I was almost killed by a ricochet by someone shooting 'safely'
they were shooting cans on the water, skipped the bullet, we were above and NOT in the direction they were shooting(pretty much behind to the side), it bounced off their "safe" backstop and I heard it as it whirred between mine and my friends head.

So, I put the RESPONSIBILITY on the shooter, if you want more angle on a berm, shoot from a rise, this means all PROPERLY shot rounds go in the dirt giving you rori's higher 'overhead',

BUT it also means you face that a horizontal or upward fired round lacks the extra berm heights, maybe put bounce plates (permanently mounted angled steel plate to defect high shots down.)

Except then you have to worry about hanging a few tons of metal overhead...
all of life is a trade off, just find the safest workable one for you.
 
Labhound:

What did you use to stack the railroad ties? How did you get the dirt in there that high as a dump truck isn't going to be able to dump dirt seven feet high.
 
Jake I have a Branson tractor with a front bucket. I also have a fork lift attachment for it. I planted my poles and then I used the fork lift attachment to lift and place the railroad ties and pinned each level together with 12" long pieces of rebar (I don't remember the exact diameter maybe 3/8"). I bolted every third level to the posts and attached the three sides together on the top with a flat piece of iron. I had the dump truck dump the dirt off to the side and I then used the front bucket to scoop and dump the dirt from all four sides of the backstop. Seven feet was as high as I could go with the timbers and still clear them with the bucket when dumping from the sides and back.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

K
  • Locked
dirt filled tires as backstop?
2
Replies
25
Views
19K
Deltaboy1984
Deltaboy1984
H
  • Locked
Backstop
Replies
3
Views
536
BhmBill
B
H
  • Locked
Building a Backstop
Replies
5
Views
1K
Shadow 7D
S
M
  • Locked
I need to build a backstop. What do you think of this idea?
2
Replies
30
Views
20K
mrb302
M
G
  • Locked
Tires for Backstop
Replies
12
Views
1K
bluetopper
bluetopper
Back
Top