I am nearly ready to move my reloading/gunsmith shop to a new location on the property. I am working on plans for the concrete work and DJpaintless and I were wanting to make a bullet trap stout enough for big game rifles to be discharged into. The property is in town and in a residential area. We are not crazy, but thought on the rainy days when there is no shooting to be done at the range, we could season and clean barrels if we had a bullet trap. The local gunsmith has a bullet trap in his shop to discharge pistls into. Is there any design plan short of an expensive commercial unit available for such a project????

I built a bullet trap several years ago and it worked very well. It was nothing but a 4' X 4' X 4' plywood box filled with gravel and sand and dirt. I used it as a 100 yard target and shot a lot of rifles into it. Even the 375 wouldn't get thru. Probably a 3' depth would have done as well.

I just read a thread on this and folks are worried about lead. If you shoot solid copper bullets there is no lead just smoke and noise.

You might try "Googling" or "Ask Jeeves" the words bullet trap. I know several yeers ago when I was making some money as a gun magazine staff writer, there were several larger companies manufacturing "snail-type" bullet traps for gun shop use.

I also know that in the old Custom Gun Shop on Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, they simply had a piece of concrete culvert point-on at about a 30 degree angle into the dirt floor of the basement. (Whole floor wasn't dirt, actually, they just cut a hole in the concrete floor to expose the dirt where they wanted to put the bullet trap culvert.) Anyway, that shop was there a good many years, and the trap was used for testing all of the guns they did gunmithing work on, and was never a problem.

They did yell "Fire in the Hole" before touching a round off so they didn't startle the beejazzus out of the customers up on the main floor directly above.

As to the lead "problem", that is more political than practical. How much does the cancer rate in Galena, Illinois vary from small cities all over the rest of the U.S.? And what does "Galena" mean? And why does one suppose the city is named that? Couldn't be that the area is plumb (pardon the pun) full of naturally occuring lead in the earth around there could it? If so, then why isan't everyone there dead if lead is so danged dangerous? They must not have any kids in that town either, as we all have been told how lead kills them like flies.

I built one out of a piece of 12" pipe about 3' long filled it with sand then welded a piece of 6 inch pipe about 2' long to a plate on top of the big pipe. Next I rolled up a piece of carpet in the smaller pipe for noise suppression. I've shot from .22 up to 375 with no problems yet.