My New Air Rifle Shooting Range

[mishradk]

Hi People..
At last my Air Rifle range is ready.. Many of you don’t shoot 10 mtrs Air rifle .. but thought of sharing this experience with you all.
You people can not imagine how happy I am today..

Actually I tried to contact few people to supply me a stand and a target changer.. but I think the dealers were busy with some other things and had no time for me..
By nature I always wanted every thing immediately and always love homebrew things..

So this turned into an embedded system which gave me a chance to use my technical ability and produced a system to help me in shooting.

Project Details
This range has a sophisticated wireless target changer, pellet trap, creates very less noise and shows the picture of the target in a TV near the shooter

Time taken 70 Hours in 3 three week ends
Expenditure nearly $33

1. First I made the wooden box out of ply wood.

2. Made a pellet trap as shown in the figure. It collects all the pellets and puts in to a cup. At first the back plate was thin and was producing noise. But after experimenting a lot by putting wax, putty and many other thing realized that if the back plate is made thick the pellet will not be able to vibrate it .. then how the sound will get generated? This did the job.

3. Used my old radio controlled toy car, increased its range so that it can work from 10 meters.

4. Replaced its DC motor with my own circuit and a stepper motor. The stepper motor which I used turns 1.8 degree per pulse.

5. Used a Atmega Microcontroller to program the motor so that the rotation of the motor can be controller by the joy stick of the car remote.

6. Calculated how much distance the target card travels when the motor rotates 1.8 degree. Based on that programmed the microcontroller in such a way that on forward and backward movement of the joy stick will bring the next or previous card in front of the open area.

7. Attached a wireless cctv camera in front of the target and adjusted in such a way that best view is captured.

8. The receiver of the camera is connected to a small 5.5 inch b/w TV and which shows the target. Though the image is not the true image ( little oval) but more than enough to show the score.

9. Both the stepper motor and roller pair which is attached to the stepper motor was removed from a broken fax printer which I had brought by paying only Rs 30 from the Junk market of Bangalore ( a Sunday market near KR Market)

10. Almost every thing except the plywood and CCTV (Rx TX set )set was from home scraps. and starting from wood work to electronics .. i tried to manage myself.

Why I made this..
This place was used for washing cloths and my washing machine is placed there. A gate is there to secure my washing machine. So it did not allow me to put a normal target changer. Now I can use this as shooting range and can still keep my washing m/c there.

[mishradk]

some more pics
Regards
Deepak

[mishradk]

Please post your comments/ views so that i can make my range better.
Regards
Deepak

[kanwar76]

Gr888 Work Mishra,

Keep doin it..

-Inder

[Mack The Knife]

Well done, Deepak.

At present I can only think of one point and that is you ensure that the amount of light on the target centre is as per ISSF rules.

Don't throw away the used pellets. I will melt them and use them for making fishing weights.

Mack The Knife

P.S.: Have you had more target cards printed. What you have wont last too long and I would like to have that negative back after you have finished printing.

[Vikram]

Great job,Deepak.Your passion and interest are commendable.Here wishing you great shooting.

Best-Vikram

[mehulkamdar]

Very nice, Deepak.

As a suggestion, you could take photocopies of the targets at "fine" resolution on any good photocopier and that would be good enough for any practice shooting.

There used to be a website form which you could download the various ISSF and other targets but I cannot remember the URL right now. Age does weird thins to you...

Congratulations again,

Mehul

[Mark]

Here is one that is in German:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Air-rifle-target.jpg



Here is a page with a bunch of others, for when you get bored:

http://www.reloadbench.com/pdf.html

[mishradk]

Hi People,
Thank you for your encouragement and suggestions.

Mr Mack The Knife, I have taken extra care to see that it is as per the ISSF guide books. As per books the intensity of light on card should be 1500 lux and other places minimum 300 lux But as I don’t have a light meter, just following what you had suggested a long back. I have put a 100 Watt Philips bulb to provide light on card and one more 100 watt for surrounding. I think in the pic it looks bit dark .. I think my camera settings were not proper..

Thanks Mark for providing the target image..

Mr Mehul, I am in process of printing rolls of targets for my range.. Main problem is getting proper paper.. Else the pellets will not make proper punch.

Regards
Deepak

[mundaire]

Good work Deepak! Very innovative indeed!

Am sure if you productise this, you'd have quite a few interested buyers on the ISSF circuit...

Cheers!
Abhijeet

[Sujay]

Deepak,

I am impressed. This is a real high end stuff .

forward and backward movement of the joy stick will bring the next or previous card in front of the open area.

Worth a visit if and when I go to Bangalore .

[eljefe]

Great Job buddy,
Look what we shooters can churn out!
Have fun, and here's looking forward to reading about your scores at national and international levels
Best
Axx

[HSharief]

Deepak, its very impressive. I will second Abhijeet's suggestion that you should look into "bundling" this for other shooters who want to set this up in their back yard. I know Sujay would like to save a hour and a half to drive to the range in Hyderabad.

[mishradk]

Hi People..
Thank you for your encouragement again..

Honestly speaking the stuff which I did, technically is a very simple stuff.. ya it had a lot of monkey business involved as searching right kind of gears and rollers for the target pulling mechanism was bit tough job..



Abhijeet .. Making it a product.. dont know .. most of the things were removed from scraps.. so I have to look for the right kind of stuffs which are available in the market..

Let me carry out some more testing on its performance as I shoot….

Sujay .. do visit me when u visit to Bangalore..

But main thing is " At most of the ranges the manual target changers are installed.. so it is better to get used to that environment." Automated target changers are yet not installed in India.

People.. honestly speaking .. I will only be happy when I will have a shooting trainer developed by me. That too using Open source software… Free for all … I am working on it..

And people think .. getting trained by a software developed by himself.. and winning medals .. what other achievement some one needs in life?

Regards
Deepak

[Mack The Knife]

And people think .. getting trained by a software developed by himself.. and winning medals .. what other achievement some one needs in life?

Ruddy geek!

Mack The Knife