Air Arms Owners Club

the pellet trap i use in the garden for a bit of target practice & zero'ing the scope in has a metal plate on the back of it !!! the s410 carbine is more a less silent with a silencer fitted, i do not want to draw attention to myself, although i live in a small village we get a few people walking past the garden, what can i use to make it less noticeable.

tapps wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 19, 2020 6:41 am

the pellet trap i use in the garden for a bit of target practice & zero'ing the scope in has a metal plate on the back of it !!! the s410 carbine is more a less silent with a silencer fitted, i do not want to draw attention to myself, although i live in a small village we get a few people walking past the garden, what can i use to make it less noticeable.

A few off cuts of carpet, I use a few sheets of lead

There are lots of ways of killing the noise but most (carpet, rags, rigid foam, Plumbers Mait, putty, etc.) make lead recovery time-consuming or messy. I now shoot into a target holder hung in a sound-insulated box in my garage; I just happen to have a convenient 30m range through an open door. If you have a garden shed you might try to do something similar.

I started with a cheapish metal trumpet and as you say the metal deflector flap makes quite a ring. Luckily it was so rubbish that I shot through it pretty quickly!

A replacement in 3mm steel from Target Air is much quieter, and will last forever.

Also added Dynamat to it to deaden the sound - made quite a difference. Dynamat is a self adhesive aluminium covered bituminous sheeting.

It's not wather proof, but a cardboard box full of cardboard sheets makes a very quiet pellet trap. I have one that's about 10"X10" on the end and about 18-20" long. It's soaked up hundreds upon hundreds of pellets over the years and now is quite heavy. One of these days I'll open it up, dump the contents, sort out the paper and the lead will fall to the bottom of the container while I do so. (Note, proper filters will be used to diminish risk of ingestion of lead dust). I've got a couple others of different sizes, one being about 12"X 16" by 24" and has absorbed FAC level air rifle pellets and even caught (and retained) 22 LR, 7.65 mm Browning and 38 SPL projectiles. As the first layers get torn up by the pellets I pack the cavities with shredded paper from the office and tape a new sheet of cardboard over the front to attach targets to. This larger one is nice as it gives plenty of size for a full sized sheet of typing paper and makes sighting a new scope in a piece of cake as one can aim at the center with confidence that the pellet will be somewhere on paper and thus will be caught by the trap.