New Walls

[Jack Suber]

Thats the stuff! It works great!!!

That is the stuff I don't really care for...when the wind comes around.

Our range has very high berms so the wind hasn't been a problem for us. Now, out in the open, it would be a different story. The cool thing about it is that it is light, so it you needed to remove it overnight, no big deal. We also used staples to put it up.

[Ronnie Casper]

Thats the stuff! It works great!!!

That is the stuff I don't really care for...when the wind comes around.

Flexmoney is right, the wind can really raise havoc with the walls if not properly fastened. We screw our wall sections together top and bottom using 3" drywall screws and stake the bottoms in each corner to the ground using 12" spikes. We then drive 6' t-posts into the ground and fasten the walls sections to the t-posts with tywraps. Adding wall sections on the corners or at 90 degrees in the appropriate locations strenghens the walls also. We were surprised that the snow fence walls would also blow over, apparently there is still enough surface area. We now construct the snow fence walls the same way as our coroplast walls.

Ronnie

Edited January 30, 2007 by Ronnie Casper

[basman]

Thanks for the info. That shoud work great at our indoor range.

[Ronnie Casper]

Thanks for the info. That shoud work great at our indoor range.

Pine Tree Pistol Club uses the Coroplast indoors, that's where we got the idea. They have bases that hold a 2x4 upright and then they screw the sheets to the 2x4s. They also hang them fom the ceiling with S hooks on wires. Here's some links with pics.

http://www.pinetreepistolclub.org/?p=gallery

http://www.wisconsinshooters.com/coppermin...ls.php?album=20

Ronnie

Edited January 30, 2007 by Ronnie Casper

[Bear23]

I like that wall.

It's very windy here in southern New Mexico. We've tried the plastic corrugated stuff. I like it, but it doesn't hold up in our winds.

I'll make some of these this weekend

[gino_aki]

I've been thinking a long time about a "modular" wall system using PVC pipe and I finally got around to experimenting to see what I could come up with. Your version is very similar to my first attempt although I'm not limited to what can be taken apart and put in a vehicle.

Pics show what I have come up with so far....

This is two sections attached to form a corner

This is how the sections are attached at the bottom

and at the top. The corner angle can be acute

or obtuse.

The PVC piping I'm using are the 1 1/4" and 1" sizes. Height of the panel sections ended up being 81 1/2 inches tall when I maximized use of the 10 foot sections of pipe I got from Home Depot. The beauty of PVC is that you can make the panels any height you want. The metal base stands are pieces of hurricane strapping to which a 20" piece of 1" pipe is welded, or two in the case of the section joint. The neat thing is that 1" pipe whether steel or PVC fits perfectly into the 1 1/4" PVC so it makes for non-sloppy joints and bases. It also provides a way to make hinges or sliders:

I used the cross joint fittings at the corners and middle upright ends to allow connection versatility (modular design). You can "tee" walls off of the ends or in the middle. End connections could be made with triple finger top and bottom connectors or with two fingered top and bottom connectors and 1" nipples screwed into bushed ends of the cross joint

For long sections it would be easiest to anchor one wall panel end with a t bar and use 1" pipe nipples to slide the ends together.

In the wall panels you can see that there are any number of ways to build in ports just remember to measure twice and cut once, although PVC is very forgiving about those mistakes too, since you can correct mistakes with couplers and shorter/longer sections of pipe. If you make up one panel a week, in a year or two you'd have a lot of easy to set up walls. The hardest part might be making the metal bases.

For wind resistance, even when using the construction fencing, the bases would have to be staked down and possibly 4 foot sections of rebar stuck into the pipe base then sleeved with an appropriate length of 1" PVC to slip up into the wall panel uprights to reinforce them. Also using the hurricane strapping is expensive, better to cut the flat bases out of 2" or 3 " flat stock and drill or punch the holes for the stakes. I was thinking of getting a quote from a local welding shop to see what the price would be to make up the metal bases out of regular stock and paint them for rust resistance.

Edited April 8, 2007 by gino_aki

[Flexmoney]

Nicely done. Thanks for posting that.

[shred]

very nice. Looks like you've solved many of the PVC issues in a clean way.

[Jim Norman]

While PVC walls may be lightweight it is my opinion that they are out of place in a match. We use 8 wide x 6 high stockade fence sections. They are relatively inexpensive and they serve a properly as a "WALL" You cannot see the targets before you get to them. Ports are real. Shots through the wal actually make holes that you can see.

About the only thing that the mesh and PVC does is allow the RO to look downrange without going downrange.

Jim

[HI5-O]

About the only thing that the mesh and PVC does is allow the RO to look downrange without going downrange.

Jim

...and makes the stage easier to shoot

Our range has winds that whip up every so often so that is why the "mesh"

We have a small club and have to set-up a stage, shoot it, set-up next stage, shoot it......

I agree with you Jim, I prefer solid walls as it is more challenging...however you have to play the hand you're dealt sometimes.

barry

[Jim Norman]

About the only thing that the mesh and PVC does is allow the RO to look downrange without going downrange.

Jim

...and makes the stage easier to shoot

Our range has winds that whip up every so often so that is why the "mesh"

We have a small club and have to set-up a stage, shoot it, set-up next stage, shoot it......

I agree with you Jim, I prefer solid walls as it is more challenging...however you have to play the hand you're dealt sometimes.

barry

I hear you. We are lucky in that we have 8 bays and lot of people to help. Have you thought about using plastic tarps instead of mesh? You would still have to deal with wind, but maybe some of those half-moon cuts like they put in banners might help?

Jim

[Mark A]

JFD, Any chance you might check www.target-stands.com

I am familiar with the problem of setting up, and got tired of all the work.

I wanted something strong, simple and easy.

This system is modular, and I can build a 'hotel', if you wish on demand, using standard and cheap lumberyard materials. And non see-thru walls.

The secret is in the bracket, which creates a extremely strong base system.

Check it out, and see if it may work for your problem.

Mark

[rishii]

About the only thing that the mesh and PVC does is allow the RO to look downrange without going downrange.

Jim

...and makes the stage easier to shoot

Our range has winds that whip up every so often so that is why the "mesh"

We have a small club and have to set-up a stage, shoot it, set-up next stage, shoot it......

I agree with you Jim, I prefer solid walls as it is more challenging...however you have to play the hand you're dealt sometimes.

barry

I hear you. We are lucky in that we have 8 bays and lot of people to help. Have you thought about using plastic tarps instead of mesh? You would still have to deal with wind, but maybe some of those half-moon cuts like they put in banners might help?

Jim

Jim

I shoot at the same club as barry and gino. we've tried plywood, shade cloth, plastic tarps, plastic sign boards, the black construction dust fencing, plastic latices, and finally the orange plastic fencing. like barry said, our range is windy, gusts of 20-30 mph are common, and it has torn up everything we tried except for the orange fencing.

I totally agree solid wall are the bomb, but out with the orange fencing,our stages would be from box A engage T1-4, from box B engage T5-8. instead of our usual stage procedure of from shooting area engage all targets.

[mscott]

JFD, Any chance you might check www.target-stands.com

I am familiar with the problem of setting up, and got tired of all the work.

I wanted something strong, simple and easy.

This system is modular, and I can build a 'hotel', if you wish on demand, using standard and cheap lumberyard materials. And non see-thru walls.

The secret is in the bracket, which creates a extremely strong base system.

Check it out, and see if it may work for your problem.

Mark

That looks handy, but why available to government agencies only?

[Jim Norman]

So, buy some steel tubing and get a member with a welder....

We build our target stands about once every two years. 1 x 2 tube and 1 x 1 angle, 90 stands cost of material is about $6 per and they stack really nice.

We use fence and have built 2 x 4 wood supports that we screw to the walls and pin to the ground, when it gets too windy, we put a brace on both faces, OR we turn a wall to form a corner. Yes we have had some blow downs. Usually when we built for calm and go wind we were not expecting.

Jim

[shred]

One plus of mesh walls is they're light and easy to carry around and setup & re-setup for practice. Same for Core-plast (surplus 'vote-for-me' signs), but they have the wind problem again. Without a lot of weight or really good staking, wind is a big problem.

I've found that attaching some opaque material (plastic, no-shoots, etc) around ports does ok to cut down on the pre-indexing some worry about, but doesn't solve the whole problem.

I don't like steel tube uprights for walls-- they work nicely, but I've seen a lot with nice bullet-reflecting craters in them. A good MD & RM can avoid that, but stage designers do love tight shots around the ends of walls.

[rishii]

I also don't like steel uprights, in fact I don't like any steel anywhere near the muzzle of a gun, the first barricades our club had was made out of a angle iron frame with plywood covering it. one of our MD decided to use it as a vision barrier by turning it sideways. well to make a long story short, I saw the target in my scope, forgot about the whole sight height over bore thing and put a round square in the angle iron at a range of about 3 feet. thank god for safety glasses, I was picking/digging lead out of me for a week.

as far as the wind goes here, we once spent a few days building a house stage out of 2x4 studs walls covered with plywood. staked it down by pounding 2x2 square tubing a couple of feet into the ground and using lag bolts to attach. we used 2x4 studs as braces across the top of all the walls, and on the outside braced to the ground using more 2x2 tubing. the night before the match, the wind picked up big time and it huffed and it puffed and it blew the damn thing down as we watched.

now we use orange fencing, because we're not just getting older, but I think we're getting smarter.