First, this is the trap I use. My father made this one for me a loooong time ago. It's a little loud and I tend to shoot at night, so to minimize sound a bit, I just taped a sand bag on the back of it. It's now no louder than the pistol itself.
Anyway, on to the project. So a couple of 2x4's, dado'd for a 1/2 inch piece of OSB, done.
A little rough finish work, some flat black spray paint, done.
I went to Home Depot and bought (6) one-pound pieces of conduit putty. It was about $2/pound. So $12 is the cost of this project.
I started putting the putty in place. Yuck. It was cold too, so I used a heat gun to get the stuff to mold better.
After getting it molded in there, I realized that a lot of it was wasted in the corners and the putty would be a little thicker if I used up some of the wasted space. It also provided a better mounting point to put the target on.
NRA targets fit well. Putty is over 2" thick where it counts. I was actually concerned with how thick it was. False concern as you will soon see.
First shot, worried about the depth... and no need.
That's as far as the pellet penetrated into the putty. And what the pellet looked like, just for fun.
Before and after pellets - just for fun.
So, yes. The trap is perfectly silent. But the pistol is still the same SPL. So I'm not sure that this is really reducing total sound over my sheet metal trap with the sandbag on back.
And the other interesting issue I see is that the little paper circles the wad-cutter pellet makes, find themselves all over the floor. A lot messier than my sheet metal target.
Final thing to consider is that the putty in this thing WILL need to be replaced at some point... I would imagine. How soon probably depends upon how much lead is focused in one particular area and how many pellets you shoot.
For me, shooting 80+ pellets per evening, 6-7 days per week, most of them sorta centered ;-), I don't think it's going to have a lot of longevity for me. But it was still a fun project, and yes it is silent.
If you need a silent trap and you do a high-volume of well centered pellets, the box of rags w/carpet backing is probably a much better way to go. Otherwise this is a great and very compact solution (thickness of a 2x4).
Oz
