Shooting in a Quarry

[Giant81]

We have an old stone quarry from somewhere around 80 years ago on our land. It's big enough I could put a handful of stages in it and run though them once in a while.

The advantages of it are that it's sides are high enough to allow a very nice natural berm, + it's protected from the wind. The down side is that it's a quarry, so I'm afraid the stone walls would be very bad to shoot at. Before I get into shooti it too much what are others thoughts?

My first thought was to possibly bulldoze or use the end loader to maybe pile dirt around the walls to 6-7ft and then shoot into the dirt as a berm.

My thought was to get a cheapo shed for a couple hundred bucks and use it to house my targets and other things. I'm in the process of building a bunch of pvc target holders, and trying to find where I can get some 4x8ft sheets of corrugated plastic to use as dividers. I figure the PVC and dividers can sit outside, and the targets I can just leave the furring strips on and stand up in the mini-shed to keep them out of the rain.

The other thought was the old dump on the land, but I kind of like the thought of the wind protection in the quarry.

[gunguru]

Oh lucky guy... a shooting range in the backward...

[Mark R]

My club has shot in a rock quarry for about 4-5 years now. We enforce the use of eye protection for everyone, spectators included. We get occasional blood from a ricochet/chip of stone flying back at us, but nothing major so far. I'm just glad we are moving in the near future. We run 3 stages in the main area...one left, one center, and one right...you can see in the picture. We can only shoot 2 squads at a time and only if those shoot left and right (opposite each other). We have another area where we set up 2 other stages allowing us to shoot 5 stages and 2 squads for a match.

Our range/rock quarry.

[Giant81]

oh deja vu, That's about what the walls I'd be shooting at look like, but I wouldn't need to setup quite so close and the wall wraps around about 300+ degrees so great wind and sound break.

[DoubleA]

I would think that if you were shooting from 50 yards from the wall that a round or rock chip would have a real hard time making it back to the shooter and even if something did make it, the velocity would be bled of to almost nothing. I'm talking 9mm, .40, and .45 without a steel core of course. Throw in some steel cores and all bets are off!