The big reveal is this: I’ve got Joe’s Boomershoot steel with me at school.
It seems that while the steel was loaned out a while back, someone either didn’t think or didn’t care or didn’t know that they had some old Soviet era steel core 7.62×39 ammo and decided that shooting it at his rather expensive AR500 steel plates was a good idea.
Quick review of steel grades. AR 500 is so called because it is “Abrasion Resistant”. It resists abrasion because it is harder than your average hot-rolled grade of mild steel. Think of case hardening, except that instead of being hard only on the shallow treated surface, it is harder all the way through. This makes it brittle and less ductile, and impacts do not deform the steel in the usual way and instead blast craters out of it.
Like this (click to enlarge, of course)
And like this
Now, you can fix these pot marks. And you want to. Letting further impacts happen in these craters will do the metal no good and will, eventually, after many repeated impacts, weaken your steel to the point where it is unsafe to shoot it from under 25-30ft because of shrapnel likely coming back at you. Yes, even with pistol rounds.
I spoke to Joe and Gene at Boomershoot and made mention of the program I’m in at school. I offered to make repairs to their steel targets and stands. Not only because I’m a nice guy, but also because I wanted an up close and personal look at the targets so as to give me ideas on what I’d like to make for other folks in the not too distant future.
Gene already had a repair guy lined up, but Joe said he’d be down with letting me fiddle about under the tutelage of my instructor at school. I took delivery and them made the haul into the Fab Shop.
Only slightly coincidentally, my current afternoon class is Metallurgy. We’re learning about metals and filler metals and heat treatment and annealing and all sorts of other down the rabbit hole information about metals and their properties. My instructor, upon learning that I was a gunnie asked if I had any plans to make shooting plates in class. I gave him a rather enthusiastic affirmative and he seemed quite pleased.
When I told him about possibly making some repairs on some AR500 repairs before Boomershoot, he gave me an enthusiastic affirmative. What can I say, the guy gets excited about metals. He lets himself get drug around to garage sales and swap meets by his wife and looks for wrought iron to play with. That, and he knows that I am trying to learn as much as I can in the short amount of time I have in the course. This knowledge will be useful to me in the future and learning from an expert is the best way to go about it.
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