Homemade Bullet Trap Design

hunter64

hunter64

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With the high cost of lead going out of this world, I decided to design a bullet stop and try and recover some of that lead. I wanted it portable and not to heavy yet be able to stop up to a .44 Mag. handgun. Kind of hard to see but here it is.

Backstop7.jpg



I drew the side view of the bullet trap without the sides on it so you could see what happens to the bullet after it hits the back piece of steel. The bullet hits the steel and is directed down to the opening in the metal 6" pipe. It goes thru the opening and travels around the inside of the pipe and eventually hits the piece of steel that I have welded on the inside and hopefully stays in the pipe. The whole backstop sits on basically a sandbox so if some of the bullet fragments then it will get caught in the sand. At the end of the day, I remove the end cap from the pipe and dump out the bullets/fragments and reuse the lead again next time.

You could drill a hole on each side in the middle of the side frame and put a steel rod thru that I have welded metal targets (sheep/gophers/bird etc) so when the kids shoot it with there .22's etc the targets would spin. Remove the rod and you could now use normal paper targets. Do you think it will work?
 
If I were building this trap,instead of welding a plate on the front lip I would bend it inwards.If your end caps are sealed you could also half fill it with oil to furthur slow theprojectile and help prevent lead splashing out when it starts to pile up.
 
I have built several of this style of bullet trap. I would not put oil in the lower section due to the problem of cleanup later. They work fine if you put some fine, dry sand in the bottom though. The angle is the important part of the whole setup, with the inside "lip" of the pipe bent inward slightly, as suggested by shotgunjoe. Regards, Eagleye.
 
I would think you could get a much better performance/weight efficiency if you used a hardened steel plate in place of cold-rolled. Some 4340 would be a good place to start looking, though it would be a pain in the a$* to weld properly.

The plate should come into the pipe as a tangent, as woodchopper has indicated, rather than intersecting through a wall.

The welded lip is asking for trouble, as the repeated impacts, each loading directly on the weld joint, is certain to fail early. Much better to do as shotgunjoe suggested, bending the pipe so it simply directs the bullet around the loop again and again, snail-style, until it runs out of steam.
 
Savage (the rifle manufacturer) makes commercial "snail" traps. They are pretty much the same as what everyone has described above. They do have a cut-away photo of one on their site, well worth a look if you want to build one.
 
A better bullet trap is standing 4 cows side by side and shooting through all of them.
That way you have a perfect medium for bullet testing and you have din din waiting after you're done.:dancingbanana:
 
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