Bullet trap ideas for recycling lead

[Ricochet]

The jacketed factory bullet may not be going as fast at the muzzle as you think, either.

[JIMinPHX]

The jacketed factory bullet may not be going as fast at the muzzle as you think, either.

This is true. I was going off of chrony numbers from a different lot of Independence FMJ ammo. I should really chrony both loads the same day when they are side by side under the same conditions.

[JIMinPHX]

Another funny thing that I noticed was that the way the bullets opened up in the crumb rubber was pretty much identical to the way that they look when you recover them from an animal.

[PatMarlin]

Boy, talk about "progress" in jacket technology taking us a step backwards…. Sheesh!

Kinda like what digtal has done for our old analog cell phones...

[JIMinPHX]

I also had boolit trap Jr. (a 45 degree steel plate trap) along for the ride the other day. I threw a couple of .45acp hardball rounds at it to see what would happen. It held up well with no apparent damage. The jackets blew apart into a few large fragments. The cores blew apart into large, misshapen, somewhat flattened chunks. They did not shatter into powder like the cast boolits or the jacketed rifle bullet did. After the trap had been moved around quite a bit & there was ample opportunity for chunks to fall out on the ride home & from being moved around in my shop, I still recovered about 75% of what I sent downrange at it.

[JIMinPHX]

Well, in the last month or so, I’ve learned a lot about boolit traps. I think that I’ve about reached the point where I have what I need to do what I want to do, so I’m probably going to break off the R&D work here. I’m going to write up a condensed version of the info that I now have & post it back on the first page of this thread. That way, anyone who stumbles in here in the future has the bulk of what they need to know easily at their fingertips without wading through all those posts about windshield washer fluid & other unrelated things that just sort of popped up. I would like to thank everyone that contributed to this thread. Without you, I would not have made the progress that I did.

Thanks,
Jim

[JIMinPHX]

Hey,
I just found out that I can't edit the original opening post anymore. I had everything all written up that I wanted to put there. Ain’t that just a peach?

[JIMinPHX]

I guess that I'll post the condensed version here -

This is a condensed version of the 6 pages that developed over the course of about a month. It gives you a pretty good snapshot of what I learned from this little project. I would like to thank all those who contributed & made this thread what it is.

Two different types of traps were tested. One had a 40-45 degree steel plate backstop & the other had a box of crumb rubber for the backstop. Each has its advantages & disadvantages. Since I needed my trap to be portable, only traps weighing less than 75-pounds were tested. In some instances, I used modular components that each weighed less than 75-pounds to make up something bigger. Traps that are larger than what I tried may give better performance.

Metal Plate Traps

What it was made out of -
I tried a few slight variations on a beefed up version of the .22 rimfire traps that are available commercially for about $50. I used a piece of 3/8" A-36 hotroll plate for the backstop. This is a garden variety steel plate that any steel supplier should have available. It is similar in formulation to 1018 cold roll bar stock. The A-36 is a tad higher in carbon, manganese & silicon, but not that much.

What happened to various boolits that hit it -
The steel plate traps had a tendency to break up the boolits pretty badly. 12-13BNH pistol boolits traveling between 700-1300fps turned into powder when they hit the steel. .45 cal semiwadcutters left some slightly larger chunks behind, but even they were mostly reduced to powder. .45acr 230-grain hardball left behind much larger chunks that were pretty flat & very little powder. Their jackets were torn apart. When the cast boolits shattered, the fragments went in every direction, including a small percentage that came back out the front. Reducing the angle of the backstop plate from 45 to 40 degrees greatly reduced the back spatter. I did not test angles past 30 degrees. The difference between 30-40 degrees seemed negligible from visual observation. When the boolits shattered, the fragments mostly stayed within about an inch of the plate that they had hit. Metal side guards of more than 2” wide are not really needed. The decelerator chamber at the bottom of the trap caught most of the material when the backstop was at 40 degrees. Enclosing the rest of the target area with wood, or even cardboard contains almost all the rest of it.

What it will withstand -
The 3/8 plate showed no signs of damage from 13BNH 130-grain cast boolits at 1300fps, 150-grain @ 1250fps or 200-grain @800fps. Commercial 230-grain hardball also did not seem to cause damage. I know from something that I saw many years ago that a .308fmj hitting a piece of 3/4” 1018 at a 45 degree angle will take a big chunk out of the steel, so I didn’t try any hot rifle calibers on this trap.

How big & heavy are they?
A trap that is big enough to hold an 8-1/2 x 11” sheet of paper weighed 27 pounds. A trap that was big enough to hold a 10-1/2 x 12” standard pistol target weighed about 45 pounds. I used wood in the areas where steel wasn’t needed to keep the weight & cost down.

Crumb Rubber Box Traps
Apparently some other people, like 357Maximum here on the board have been shooting into crumb rubber with good results, so I decided to try that for myself.

What is Crumb Rubber?
Crumb rubber is a salesman’s buzzword for chopped up old car tires. It is also sometimes sold as “rubber mulch” or long lasting mulch. The mulch comes in landscape grade & playground grade. The playground grade has some ASTM rating for fall protection & this stuff is also guaranteed to be 99.9% wire free. It’s the most expensive variety of this stuff out there. Lowes by me sells it in 0.8 cubic foot bags for about $14. Lower grades in bulk can be had for as low as $0.17/lb. It is usually about 25-30 lbs./Cf. Other people have reported Walmart carrying it for less, but my local stores did not have it.

What happened to various boolits that hit it –
This is the real advantage of the crumb rubber trap. You can recover whole boolits in most cases. 12-13BNH boolits traveling from 700-2100fps stayed intact. The ones that didn’t hit the hard stop at the back of the box retained their shape very well. Even the ones that bounced off the back wall & put a 1/4” dent in the 2x4 back there were only mashed up about half way back. Other types of bullets, like soft point 30-30 hunting ammo expanded as they normally would in game animals if they didn’t hit bone. Retained weight was excellent. Only thin-jacketed fast-movers like .22mag hollow points & .223 V-max bullets broke up badly.

What will it withstand?
If you have a deep enough box of this stuff, you can hit it with just about anything. I’ll list a chart of various boolits & how deep they went on average so that you can get an idea of what you need for different calibers that you might want to use.



Caliber Weight Speed Average Depth
.22LR 30 gr 1300 13.5”
.22LR 40 gr 1150 12”
.22LR 40 gr 1050 10”
.22Mag 40 gr FMJ 1875 14-22”
.22Mag 30 gr HP 2300 10”
.22Mag 30 gr TNT 2200 12”
.223 40-gr V-max 3200 11.5”
.223 55-gr ball 2950 21”
.380 90FMJ 830 10”
.380 100 LRN 850 10”
.357 130 LRNFP 1300 19”
.357 150LSWC 1250 23”
.357 158 TC 675 11”
.45 200 LSWC 800 14.5
.44Mag 240LSWC 1000 23”
.44Mag 240 FP 1450 30.5”
.44Mag 180-grain FP 1800 30”
.30 cal 150RNFPGC 1300 23”
.30 cal 150RNFPGC 2000 25.5”
.30cal 150 gr Rem PSP 2390 20”

That last one didn’t go as deep as the slower cast boolits of the same diameter & weight because the PSP mushroomed & dumped it’s energy sooner. 140 of 150 grains were recovered in a single chunk. 150 grains were recovered in one chunk from a 170-grain PSP, but I didn’t get an accurate measurement of it’s depth.

How big is it & what does it weigh?
The crumb rubber box traps are a bit bigger than the steel traps are. My big trap was 90 pounds when ready to go. If I pulled the safety plate off the back, it was 75 pounds. That was as heavy as I was willing to call portable. It had 26” of depth with 2 layers of 2 x 4 & a 3/8” steel plate on the back as a safety stop. It had a big enough face for an 8-1/2 x 11” sheet of paper.

A similar box trap that was designed for general pistol use & had a face big enough to hold a 10-1/2 x 12” pistol target was 22” deep. It had a 1/8” steel plate backed by 2 x 4s for a safety stop. It weighed in at about 65 pounds. A 12” deep, by 2 foot wide trap with 1/8” steel + 3/8” OSB on the back for nonmagnum rimfires & light pistol loads weighed about the same.

A 12” cube with cardboard on two opposing ends that I used for a trap extension weighed about 27 pounds. I used this in front of the main trap to test the hot .44 Mag loads.

I framed these out with 2 x 2 & 2 x 4s. I used 3/8” or 7/16” OSB particle board for the panels. I assembled everything with drywall screws.

[Jack Straw]

Thanks for all the research and info... this has been quite an interesting read.

How did you cover the front opening of the crumb rubber box to keep the crumbs in? I'm sure it was somewhere in the 6 pages, but I must have missed it.

Jack

[JIMinPHX]

Thanks for all the research and info... this has been quite an interesting read.

How did you cover the front opening of the crumb rubber box to keep the crumbs in? I'm sure it was somewhere in the 6 pages, but I must have missed it.

Jack

Cardboard

[colbyjack]

so if one was making a basement trap for .22 and a stray .45 acp. should one use the 45* angle and plate steel trap? or should one be better off with a box trap made of wood with rubber mulch in it?

we need more pics just for the helll of it.. lol -chris

[JIMinPHX]

If you want the smallest trap possible, then you want the steel plate trap. If you want to recover whole bullets instead of lead powder, then you want the box trap.

For indoor use, you are probably better off with the box trap. Lead dust in the basement is probably not something that you want extra of.

[JIMinPHX]

The jacketed factory bullet may not be going as fast at the muzzle as you think, either.

Give the man a cigar!

I just chrony'd a few loads side by side & Ricochet's suspicions were right on the mark. I have made the appropriate corrections to the .380 data above.

[chinewalk]

[QUOTE=JIMinPHX;274559]I did a little more testing yesterday afternoon & found that hot .44's will need about a 3-foot deep crumb rubber trap.

Jim,

It looks like you are getting there with a good solution for all of us! I think I will try a box a little bigger and see what will hold up to the .500s using your design. It probably won't be portable, but in my case that will not be a problem.

You mentioned that instead of using the premium rubber mulch from Lowes that "lower grades in bulk can be had for as low as $0.17/lb". Can you provide some sources? Going bigger is really driving the price up on the rubber.

Ed

[JIMinPHX]

http://www.tirerecyclingcrumbrubbers...ber-crumb.html

These guys offer crumb rubber for $0.17/lb in bulk for all the sizes that they carry. Their minimum is $250 which translates to about 1,500 pounds or about 40 cubic feet. They also sell a “sample” for $150.

Bigger sizes are probably less likely to fall out of the boolit holes that you make in the cardboard. I haven't tried smaller sizes yet. Floodgate was saying that he had found some smaller cubes, but I didn't hear any feedback from him on how well they worked.

These guys at the web address above sell the machines to make the crumb rubber too.
Hey Pat Marlin, did you say that you wanted to get into selling this stuff?

[floodgate]

JIMinPHX:

Sorry, but with the rains and other stuff going on, I just haven't gotten back to the crumb rubber. The Wal-Mart 1/4"+/- cubed stuff was $5.39 for 0.8 cu ft., which went about 20 lbs. per bag (about $0.27/lb.) and each bag nicely fills a 5-gal plastic barrel. I'm now frantically drinking my way through a bunch of those 5-liter boxes of "bag-wine"; each box is about 3-3/4" deep x 10-1/2" high x 9-1/2" high (nice size for short-range targets), and I'll set them in 10-ream Xerox paper boxes, about four to a carton, two or more cartons end-to-end. Then lift each one out until I come to the last one with an entry hole and no exit hole, dump it and sift out the bullet. That is, when the "round tuit" I've ordered from Midway gets here - it's on backorder now). Gotta go drink up some more of that bag-wine...

floodgate

[mroliver77]

Our WalMart dont carry the stuff. They looked at me like I was speaking Russian when I asked. They have no mulch of any kind in the winter months. They are starting to put out spring items now. I will hit the landscape yards when it warms a little. I asked at an indoor range down by the city and they use rubber for their backstop. They use a big vacuum to lif it and the lead can be shoveled out. Sounds really good to me. I have a vacuum head designed to fit on a drum with a 3" suction hose. For a small 20 yard range in the barn this should work well.
J
J

[JIMinPHX]

Our WalMart dont carry the stuff. They looked at me like I was speaking Russian when I asked.

I got that response from my local Walmarts here in Phoenix too.

[njmj]

There are a couple ranges in my area that have steel traps. One is a three hundred yd. range where highpower rifles are comon. The plate is at a 22 1/2 degree angle and is uneffected by fmj ammo. Fifty cal/. fmj does dent it badly though. I don't know how thick the plate is but am guessing it is no thicker than 3/8". The shallower the angle the less small fragments and dust there will be. There should be some sort of deceleration chamber also. A piece of 8 or 10" pipe welded tangent to the opening in the back of the trap will act as a decelerator. A slot in the bottom will allow the spent bullets to drop into a bucket. Because of the slight angle of the plate, traps of this type require more space front to back so are better for outdoor ranges where room is more available. Traps for basements usually must be more compact so this design may not be suitable. For a really nice design look at Savage bullet traps. NJMJ

[bobthewelder]

Our local indoor range uses 1/4" on their carriers at 45* to the ground. I have replaced the hinges on many, but the plate only shows smears from all calibres of pistol bullets, not holes, or dents. I replaced the 1/2" swiss cheesed high power carrier with leaf springs at 45*. Smears and a broken weld which was actually ripping from the base material. These have held up through tons of high powered shots since before deer season. Leaf springs are hard! Just don't use steel cored surpluss ammo and your 3/8" plate should be fine.