With all of the Boomershoot posting going on, both here and around the gunosphere, I was jonesin’ for some “aim small, miss small” action.
Not having an ATF license or 700yds available, I decided that I’d have to scale back my demands a bit: Targets that explode, but not because of chemical reactions. And because I only had 200yds to work with, they had to be one inch or less in size so as to not be easy to hit, even with no wind.
Rack ’em up, Slim. We’re gonna shoot some pool.
Billiards chalk is 7/8 of an inch per side and even when hit with something as slow moving as a standard velocity 22LR out of a pistol, makes a bigger poof than Charles Nelson Riley.
If you can hit it.
Recently, I took my old, trusty gross box of Master blue chalk and a roll of clear box packing tape to the range, along with the still unnamed Ruger M77 MKI in .22-250 Remington, a box and a half of the green and yellow boxed Remington 55gr Core-Loct and my video camera.
This was the result, set to the tune of ZZTop’s – I Wanna Drive You Home, from 1981’s El Loco album
The video starts out at the 200yd berm and the first three segments are out of order. That was all my fault in editing as I originally started out at the 100yd target berm (had to make sure I could still hit them). I could go back and redo it but that’s a pain in the ass and I think the damage build-up works better this way.
Also, sorry for the shaky footage in some parts, but I still cannot find my good tripod after the move and with the extreme zoom, whenever someone nearby would light off it would move the camera.
You’ll notice that some of the hits are “wiffs” instead of “poofs”. If you look at the picture above, you’ll see the 1/2 inch dimple in the cube face. If you don’t put the bullet in that dimple, it’ll “wiff” on you. If you “wiff” it, you had better hope it didn’t break the top edge of the tape and cause the chalk fall off the target (kind of like knocking a Boomer off the stake). If the chalk stays on, you get a second chance to center hit it.
Unfortunately, there are a pair of downsides to shooting at Billiards chalk: Number One is that some of the people at the range will tell you that you won’t be able to hit them. Some of them will actually get amusement from telling you so repeatedly. Even when you hit your first one, they’ll call it luck. After you start hitting them in strings, those same people will then tell you about how they could probably do that with an SKS.
RNS Top Tip: Try to go to the range when there aren’t a lot of people there.
Secondly, if you hit them in the dimples, you will not only splatter chalk dust on your shooting neighbor’s target board, you’ll blow a one inch-plus sized hole in the back of the target board. Make sure to get your range’s permission, or your actions may end up in the range’s monthly newsletter.
BTW, you can use your favorite search engine to find a supplier for this, or you can just hit this link. For as little as $24 for a box of 144 targets, these are much cheaper than Shoot-and-See stickers and are one of the best ways to get trained up for Boomershoot without frightening folks.
Enjoy!
PS: I do have a better quality vid that DM said was too big for upload. Let’s try this one first and if enough people demand less color wash-out I’ll post it for download.
I’m gonna add this to the sidebar, probably under “David Likes” as “308 Ammo Sources” — but I’ll post it here first.