Unusual Targets

Some of the targets we use for outdoor shooting are:

- Large wine and liquor bottles filled with water
- empty propane tanks
- Beer bottles
- Expired canned food
- Old laptops and hard drives
- empty spray cans

More recently we found some old unused railroad ties that are made of hardened steel. They are great for plinking and can handle up to 7.62x39 steel core ammo with no damage.
 
Large wine and liquor bottles filled with water
- Beer bottles
- Old laptops and hard drives
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..... Um .......er ....... I would think ...... wouldn't there be a lot of broken glass to pick up? ....... assuming of course ...... that you, you know .......pick up after yerself? You do..... do that, right?????? ;)
 
I like using clays for my pistols and 22s. Need to try them at long range with my rifle...
A box of 90 is about $7, i tape them on a paper plate and they are a great training exercise for rapid target acquisition and switching between targets (hang multiple plates 12 inches apart).
 
Blocks of ice. Just freeze gallon plastic jugs, or 1/2 gallon cardboard milk containers. Cut the container off, and shoot away making little ice chunks out of bigger ones. No clean up necessary when you remove the ice from the container first. The target material just melts away.
When my son was 10 or 12 he liked to shoot at old stuffed animals I found cheap at garage sales. His favorite was a purple dinosaur of PBS fame! Shooting It to bits with my Hakim he said he "Hakimed" him.:D
 
Once a year a friend who sold and tuned pianos for a living would have an old piano that was junk due usually to a cracked frame.

Lot's of fun to destroy a piano, lot's of work to clean up the mess it left which of course we did, leaving the area cleaner than when we started.

Peeps are fun too. I walked in to my grandsons bedroom a while back to find him yelling at his Easter basket.

What in the world are you doing kiddo?

I'm giving a shout out to my Peeps!
 
I go on African safaris in my back yard using a BB gun and a box of animal crackers. :D

The range I shoot at prohibits anything other than paper targets (and clays on the rifle backstop). I make do by hunting smileys.

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Pumpkins are fun to shoot (not to mention you now have a use for that rotting Jack O' Lantern after Halloween).

Where I work, we used to get several cases of tool catalogs every year. Since one was more than enough, I'd take the spares to use as targets. You'd really be surprised what will and won't go through a case of catalogs (they will stop a .44 Magnum, but not a .41 Magnum).

I've also done a fair amount of shooting at used oil filters in the junk pile on my Grandfather's farm.

Finally, a couple of my great uncles used to put rat poison in their corn crib certain times of the year. They would then open the doors and, when the rats came staggering out use them for target practice with their .22's.
 
It was a total pain to clean up but as an IT guy destroying this old Dell was therapeutic. I felt like Michael Bolton using a baseball bat on the old printer in Office Space :) ~ 340 rounds of 9mm from an Uzi smg.

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An old Jeep Grand Cherokee the Floyd County Sherrifs Dept left out at the range. Had fun shooting the mirrors off with my then-new M1A.
 
Well, yeah, CARS! I rented time on a MG42 at Knob Creek once. It was on the infantry tripod, so the pattern was pretty tight. The owner said that most people were targeting the wheel on the car that was set on a large wire spool.
I replied 'you Kentucky boys don't know s**t about shooting cars. That car still has it's windshield and rearview mirror intact'. 100 rounds (10 seconds) later, I fixed that.
And 2lbs of tannerite, set on the backrest of an 87 Toyota pickup, will blow the windows out and unpeel the welded seams.
 
I can tell you what not to use as a target.
Just a kid and had a 22 rifle. Went to the dumps to shoot up anything and everything.
Shot an old wore out tire and almost took the bullet flying back at me.
It wizzed by my head. I was only ten feet from the tire.
Dumb, but learned real quick to shoot at stuff that will allow the bullet to
penetrate.
 
STEINER said:
I can tell you what not to use as a target.
Just a kid and had a 22 rifle. Went to the dumps to shoot up anything and everything.
Shot an old wore out tire and almost took the bullet flying back at me.
It wizzed by my head. I was only ten feet from the tire.
Dumb, but learned real quick to shoot at stuff that will allow the bullet to
penetrate.
Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing that. It may help someone from shooting there eye out this Christmas :)
I can see where the dump would make a excellent target range though if upwind.
We used to have alot of fun shooting rats & bats on a cattle & grain farm. They would line up for is just after sunset and just before sunrise.
In the daytime someone would go in barn and give the silo top a slight crank to make the pigeons fly out for skeet practice. It was good for 6 or 7 cranks with 3 or 4 birds flying out each time.
 
well when I was younger my older brother and I both worked at the same grocery store. we got in an entire pallet of crumpled cans of tomato soup and couldn't do anything with. so my brother and I took a couple boxes to the local range and blasted away for a few hours... whoever used the range next must have thought they wandered into a crime scene because the next time we went out there they had a sign that said "no soup".
 
Cans of cheap foam shaving cream make a nice white explosion!!!
I heard a story of some guys that went out and caught a prairie dog and spray painted its back red, then let it go back home down in its tunnels. A couple days later they go back to the field, set up a couple hundred yards away in the beds of their trucks and had a large sum of money laying by for the guy that can locate and drop the painted prairie dog....
 
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