The rifle range at the club I belong to is used for everything from 22 plinking and smallbore rifle silhouette to high power sporting rifle and sighting in deer rifles. How many of you shoot at dedicated silhouette ranges and how many shoot at general type ranges and have to remove target stands and/or make other compromises? Just curious.

mav wrote:The rifle range at the club I belong to is used for everything from 22 plinking and smallbore rifle silhouette to high power sporting rifle and sighting in deer rifles. How many of you shoot at dedicated silhouette ranges and how many shoot at general type ranges and have to remove target stands and/or make other compromises? Just curious.

Our Silhouette range is dedicated for only .22 rifles, SB Silhouette and High power (service rifle) matches. Each bank of animals has dedcated, permanent, rails and berms and for the high power matches they have removable target holders they set up at the 100 yard line. All other shooting is done either at our dedicated Pistol range (pistols only) or general range for high power, pistol black powder, what ever. On the general range we have movable target holder/backers

Many gun clubs out west are large enough that they have dedicated ranges for all kinds of shooting. I wouldn't even know where to began counting the ranges at Ben Avery north of Phoenix. High power and small bore do share a range.

Zia (pvt club, just south of ABQ) has dedicated HP and SB ranges separated.

The SB range has "folding" rails that can be lowered to keep some high power plinker jerks from boring holes in the rails, so it takes about 15 minutes to "unlock" them and raise and bolt them into place .... a small inconvienience, but we can put 8 shooters on the line at any one time .... 2 railsets for each distance.

The Albuquerque Shooting Range park has a set of rails for hunter pistol (I think) at 25/50/75 and 100 yds) .... OK, but hard to really practice SB rifle at the wrong distances......

And of course Whittington, less than 3 hrs north of ABQ

=============================
Middle of firing line Google Earth GPS Coord's:

Zia: 35.014137N, 106.590112W
ABQ Range: 35.138774N, 106.838195W
Whittington: 36.795166N, 104.499136W

Tacoma Sportsmen's Club has a separate dedicated range for Silhouette (100m). Pe Ell and Paul Bunyon are dual-use.

jhmartin wrote:The SB range has "folding" rails that can be lowered to keep some high power plinker jerks from boring holes in the rails, so it takes about 15 minutes to "unlock" them and raise and bolt them into place .... a small inconvienience, but we can put 8 shooters on the line at any one time .... 2 railsets for each distance.

Can you tell me more about the folding rails or maybe even take a picture sometime and post/email it? At our range, it takes us a good hour for setup or takedown because we bring out rails, pipes that the rails sit on, etc., and I am trying to design a folding system that will make setup/takedown faster and less labor intensive. Thanks!

Amen on that request, always looking for a less intense set up time, especially for shared ranges.

Mary

Our range in Central Florida Rifle and Pistol Club is being shared with the smallbore three position shooters, and we have installed traps.

Check this setup:
http://www.cfrpc.com/Smallbore/smallbore_silhouette.htm

Patrick Brown, our clubs silhouette director did a great job setting it up.

Most of the time when we practice we just set up swingers in these traps.

Can you tell me more about the folding rails or maybe even take a picture sometime and post/email it? At our range, it takes us a good hour for setup or takedown because we bring out rails, pipes that the rails sit on, etc., and I am trying to design a folding system that will make setup/takedown faster and less labor intensive. Thanks!

Yes I will .... may take a few days as I'm not planning on going out until tomorrow, so maybe by Thurs.

If we hung swingers, they would be full of holes in a week. Our range is set so that you can go in 24/7. We've even had some a_____e take a shot from the 600yd pit back towards our storage containers and put holes in them ... you just wonder sometimes.....

Thank you very much. No hurry on it. I won't be discussing it with the board from our range for at least a few more weeks. I'd like to have a couple designs sketched out by then, though, and plan to take pictures of the rails at Pe Ell myself. Our range currently only has one level of rail and we can only put out 20 (4 banks) of each animal at a time. Since we shoot 60-shot matches, our matches take quite a long time due to having to set targets so often and even then we can only have about 8 shooters on the line at a time. I'm going to try to design three-level folding rails so we can have three banks of each animal for four shooters per animal. That should let us have sixteen shooters at a time on the line and not have to reset targets during a relay.

Jason, why not go to auto resettable targets instead? I know that most people like to see the targets fly off the stands but ours is game where the target setters make all the difference in the world if the match moves right along or not and a lot of times very difficult to find.

In Mexico where the sport started you would be hard pressed to find a SB range that does not have resettable targets, some with simple mechanisms with cables that have to be pulled and other more sophisticated with pneumatic set ups.

I think auto-resettables would complicate my "fold down out of the way" design plans so much to make them unworkable. We don't have a dedicated silhouette range, so we have to use the same range that the other members use for general rifle and pistol use. I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone in designing rails with three levels to have all 15 animals out at once and make the rails fold down out of the way when not in use to make setup and takedown for matches go much more quickly and take less people.

I just spent 5 hours rebuilding 2 berms and stands. I put up one swinger and I am sure that it will be blown to bits when I return. Dont people read signs? Our smallbore is a dedicated range. We do not have a cover yet or concrete but we are working on that.

Our range in Yuma has a dedicated silhouette range for all disciplines but it is open to the public 24-7 with no rangemaster or other supervision so you can imagine how badly it gets trashed. The only targets that get left out are the high power swingers but they are now also getting shot to pieces by the jerks with thier .50 BMG's. Our shipping container target storage boxes get riddled, the shade structure roof gets riddled, anything standing gets decimated by close range shotgun blasts. Our target stands are RR rails set in the ground and are pretty much indestructable. You fellows with controlled ranges and range officers are very lucky.

kevinp wrote:I just spent 5 hours rebuilding 2 berms and stands. I put up one swinger and I am sure that it will be blown to bits when I return. Dont people read signs? ........

One word NO... Every club suffers from this. An example is we spent over $150 on a group of target stands for the one range... in 3 days all but two of them were all shot up and unusable. I find it hard to believe that some people come to the range to shoot unprepared enough where that have to tape their targets on the support posts of the stands, but they do. We won't even go into the number that like to see how many shots their high power rifle will take to blow the stands into tooth picks. All I wish is we could catch the ones doing it. We are looking into remote cameras and recording devices hoping to catch some of these people in the act.

Like in everything there is that small group of people whose whole goal is to ruin it for everybody.

I too would like to see the plans for the foldable stands.