Sun, 26 Mar 2006

I did a welding project this weekend.
It was mostly Rob's idea, though. He's redeveloped an interest in pistol shooting, so he wanted to make a steel pistol target. I Google's around and found some descriptions of simple hanging targets. But that wasn't enough for him. It had to have one target to shoot at, and one target to reset it. Fine. When he showed up I had already cut two 4"x6" pieces of steel plate, about 0.25" thick. I had cut some schedule 80 1" steel to suspend the plates from. That's when Rob showed up and began demonstrating his concept.

At least he drew it out first. I didn't really follow all the details, but I figured I'd let him make it work. He started looking at what I had already finished, and eyed the chop saw.

The design called for a fancy mechanism, with lots of little arms and levers and stops. Basically you would shoot at the top target, which would fall backward after you hit it. Then you shoot at the bottom target, which would knock the top target back upright. Repeat. It sounded like it might work. I had some rebar that would probably work for the arms and levers. Here's a rare picture of Rob using safety gear, as he chops up the rebar.

Once Rob had all the pieces cut I assembled them with the mig welder. There were a couple errors along the way, but a chop saw and a welder can fix a lot of mistakes. To make it stiffer we built a simple frame out of some 1" EMT conduit I had around. Once nice thing about this project was that it got rid of some of the scrap metal pile. We finished up, and drove the target frame into the ground to test it. It seemed to work. You could hit the top target, and it would topple backward, then hit the bottom target, and the top target would reset. The only questions were: would it stand up to being shot at, and would the reset mechanism work when hit by bullets instead of hands? Read the next installment to find out...

posted at: 11:47 | permalink |