Where do you buy your target

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jf3012

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With our dollar going down, looking into a new place to order clays. WF are getting expensive at 45% exchange rate.

Any other option then Lawry ?
 
We still plan to purchase the WF targets through Hummason Mfg. in Ancaster, Ontario. We haven't had a price lately, so I don't know yet what will happen to the price. I have heard from a reliable source that the cost of pitch has dropped significantly due to the cost of oil being lower. So, we are hopeful that the cost of targets will also drop enough to offset the drop in the value of the Canadian $.

There is a guy importing the "Euro target" from Italy, I believe. You have to order a sea container at a time. There has been mixed reviews on Trapshooters.com regarding these targets.
 
the spank said:
I don't know why so many are down on Lawry targets? They always treated our club well and if you do your part the targets break just fine.
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We switched to White Flyers, because they are delivered by the vendor, and we have no breakage issues. By the time we received the targets from Lawry, the breakage was significant, because they were not loaded properly in Ontario.
 
stubblejumper said:
We switched to White Flyers, because they are delivered by the vendor, and we have no breakage issues. By the time we received the targets from Lawry, the breakage was significant, because they were not loaded properly in Ontario.
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Did you have them shipped by Lawry themselves or a third party vendor? We once received a load that was smashed to bits because our illustrious treasurer could save the club $100 on shipping. Of course the instant the truck pulled up and we saw rows of pallets on an open flat deck lumber trailer I knew we were pooched! Lawry has their own fleet of 48' air ride conventional style cargo trailers and all the years they delivered we never had so much as one fouled up case!! The Lawry family is a great bunch of people and are great at helping small clubs in more remote areas to acquire targets and get shooting. I am guessing due to geography they do not do the volume of sales here in the west they do around the Great Lakes Basin. They do a tremendous volume around the Lower Great Lakes on both sides of the border, especially the US side.
 
We use Lawry exclusively at our club, had too many broken birds when we used White Flyer. Lawry delivers them to the club with their truck, and they adjust for potential breakage at no charge. The local suplier of White Flyer can offer them at the same price as Lawry, however after they are loaded and unloaded a number of times between the plant, suppliers warehouse and my club, we are looking at about 10-15% breakage, which in reality drives the cost up. I'll second Spank on this one, for us it's a no brainer.
 
Well we use about 2000 cases of Lawery targets a year and have for many many years
The amount of broken targets we have had over that time would fill a target box.
Were only about 2 hrs from lawerys but unless your club is cross country on dirt roads I can't see why there should be any difference on distance.

Are they hard to break? Well there has been a crap load of 25-50-75-100x100 straights shot.
 
As others have said Lawry has always been good to our club, shipping breakage has never been an issue,but we are only a half hour away.
We have used white flyers,but the machines don't like them as much and can be finicky.
 
A few years ago our club when through an internal pissing match over which brand to use. After several rounds of comparison and useless infighting they settled on Lawry's.

Two other clubs where I shoot occasionally throw White Flyer.

Shooters prefer White Flyers because they tend to fly truer and break easier.

Clubs prefer Lawry's because they are less expensive and more durable.

As long as everyone is shooting the same brand of target during a competition I don't think it matters. I can miss both equally well.
 
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the spank said:
Did you have them shipped by Lawry themselves or a third party vendor? We once received a load that was smashed to bits because our illustrious treasurer could save the club $100 on shipping. Of course the instant the truck pulled up and we saw rows of pallets on an open flat deck lumber trailer I knew we were pooched! Lawry has their own fleet of 48' air ride conventional style cargo trailers and all the years they delivered we never had so much as one fouled up case!! The Lawry family is a great bunch of people and are great at helping small clubs in more remote areas to acquire targets and get shooting. I am guessing due to geography they do not do the volume of sales here in the west they do around the Great Lakes Basin. They do a tremendous volume around the Lower Great Lakes on both sides of the border, especially the US side.
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I didn't arrange or unload the last order from Lawry, but I was told that the boxes were just piled on pallets and loaded into the tractor trailer without being secured. Some boxes fell over on our roads, and we had a great deal of breakage. When TA Ferguson delivered our last order of White Flyers, the pallet loads were plastic wrapped, and everything arrived in perfect condition.
 
I handle the buying for our club, AVSSC in Nova Scotia. We have been using Lawry's for over 10 years and zero issues. All the other clubs here that I know of use them too. We have our own shipper who is a club member truck them and never had any issues either. They do have to know they are dealing with fragile items. We get 26 skids in a load, I don't think they can get going too fast anyway with all that weight!
 
The pallets Ferguson delivers to us have always been wrapped and so they should be but be aware there is an extra cost attached to the price of the targets to have this done. Don't have the exact number but seem to recall it was about $0.50 per case. If you are taking a full trailer load of 26 pallets, that amounts to another $800 so if you use a round number of say $15 per case, you can afford to break a whole bunch of cases instead of paying to have the pallets wrapped.

We use WF exclusively at our club since we are mainly 5-stand and sporting clays. We did try Caldwell but breakage was about 30% so did not save any money going this route.

One thing to remember about a target breaking in the machine is that it is normally not just the cost of one broken target. You then need to clear the machine and usually there is debris left from the broken target so by the time you get back to a normal target you may have wasted another 4 or 5 targets.

I am interested what clubs pay for targets across Canada. The last WF delivery in Dec 2015 was $16.70 per case for rabbits and $15.95 for AA pink top and the Canadian dollar has dropped some more since then. This excludes taxes but includes delivery into BC.

One of our biggest costs is the waste that goes with sporting clays competitions. In the past we assumed waste of 30% to allow for "show me's", broken targets, etc but find that is not enough for an automatic machine in a competition;- it is likely about 40%, maybe more. If we happen to use a manual machine (Lincoln) with a club supplied trapper, waste goes down to about 10%.
 
I have noticed ALOT of breakage issues at the Lloydminster Gun Club. They run WF targets through Pat Traps for the trap ranges and the old original Western machines for the skeet field. I would put the breakage issues at hand though at about a 95% lack of maintenance and cleaning of the trap field machines and 99.9% on the skeet machines as opposed to the targets. I have never seen machines in such poor condition.
 
I wish you folks would start using live pigeons as in the olden golden days. The hawks and eagles will love you for it and they make great coyote bait.
 
the spank said:
I have noticed ALOT of breakage issues at the Lloydminster Gun Club. They run WF targets through Pat Traps for the trap ranges and the old original Western machines for the skeet field. I would put the breakage issues at hand though at about a 95% lack of maintenance and cleaning of the trap field machines and 99.9% on the skeet machines as opposed to the targets. I have never seen machines in such poor condition.
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Can't comment on the Western machines as we don't use them. Pat Traps are overly complex compared to something like a Promatic however if properly adjusted, Pat Traps just keep throwing targets reliably. Ours has not been disassembled and cleaned for a few years now and it works just fine. However you do need to ensure the limit switches are not intermittent and are adjusted properly. If properly adjusted, the Pat Trap is super reliable.
 
We use White Flyer. Only Promatic machines. We used to use lawrys but had to much breakage. We have also tried euros and they are very nice but price to results we stuck with white flyer.

We used to use fergusson but got sick of getting screwed around. Although the trap side of our club still orders from him. Now we buy all ours from Scott Masniuk at Dead A Pair in Winnepeg.

Call Dead a pair in winnepeg and talk to Scott you wont find anyone better to deal with we just got another 24 pallets from him. Other option if you want euro targets which are also very nice but more expensive speak to Collin Dixon at Shotshell in Valleyview.
 
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salter said:
The pallets Ferguson delivers to us have always been wrapped and so they should be but be aware there is an extra cost attached to the price of the targets to have this done. Don't have the exact number but seem to recall it was about $0.50 per case. If you are taking a full trailer load of 26 pallets, that amounts to another $800 so if you use a round number of say $15 per case, you can afford to break a whole bunch of cases instead of paying to have the pallets wrapped.

We use WF exclusively at our club since we are mainly 5-stand and sporting clays. We did try Caldwell but breakage was about 30% so did not save any money going this route.

One thing to remember about a target breaking in the machine is that it is normally not just the cost of one broken target. You then need to clear the machine and usually there is debris left from the broken target so by the time you get back to a normal target you may have wasted another 4 or 5 targets.

I am interested what clubs pay for targets across Canada. The last WF delivery in Dec 2015 was $16.70 per case for rabbits and $15.95 for AA pink top and the Canadian dollar has dropped some more since then. This excludes taxes but includes delivery into BC.

One of our biggest costs is the waste that goes with sporting clays competitions. In the past we assumed waste of 30% to allow for "show me's", broken targets, etc but find that is not enough for an automatic machine in a competition;- it is likely about 40%, maybe more. If we happen to use a manual machine (Lincoln) with a club supplied trapper, waste goes down to about 10%.
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Those prices definatly seem a bit high but depends on quantity your ordering.
 
Wow, I can't believe some of the breakage that you guys are seeing. We throw about 1,600 targets every Wednesday night and usually don't see any broken targets. Twice in the winter months we host an interclub and throw 5,000 or more targets and see perhaps 2 broken targets. In the warm weather, we host a number of registered ATA shoots and perhaps have a couple of broken targets all day. I've seen us throw upwards of 8,000 targets on a good day. Our main machine is a Pat and the other machine is a GMV Superstar. Both machines have been kept in top notch condition by a couple of our members. When we got our Pat trap, we retired a Canterbury machine ... now that machine broke a lot of targets. The lack of broken targets makes a huge difference to the bottom line and it also affects the scores.
 
depends also on were the targets are stored, heated or non heated storage, how often targets are ordered. Temperature and humidity variation can be a cause of broken birds. If a club is shooting everything it buys in less then a year, the breakage would be minimum.
 
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