Milk jugs full of water are loads of fun.
So are empty propane tanks (OK, there’s a bit of a story behind this one).
We also take old phone books or (if you can still find it) fanfold computer paper. It’s fun to stop the round and see what it looks like, post impact.
Get an RC car and a couple of different colored helium balloons. Tie the balloons to the car with equal length string. Designate one balloon as the ‘Terrorist’ and the other, the ‘Hostage’. Have a buddy drive the car around and try to make the shot.
I can’t find one for sale, but a Ritz Cracker launcher sounds like fun - using the round crackers as skeet. Cheaper than clay pigeons and environmentally friendly.
The cracker launcher looks like it could be fun in a number of ways.
Last time I needed actual metal hangars, I went to a dry cleaner (they buy them by the caseload) and asked if he would sell me some. He just gave me a few dozen for nothing.
ETA: You can also go to any home improvement store and buy a few marker flags. They come on ~3-foot metal wire rods that you jam into the ground to mark things like buried cables or property lines and such.
Cool, thanks for the link! Yeah, it looks like it could be a truly devastating weapon in a food fight, especially if you load the crackers with Cheez Whiz. Freaking expensive for something that I could whip up out of a broken handle off of something, a bit of scrap sheet metal and two bolts.
What calibers were you shooting it with? It seems hard to beleve a nerf ball would hold up well to rifle fire.
I fill empty milk cartons with water and freeze them to make blocks of ice. You can add food coloring, if you like. You take the ice out of the carton before shooting at it. It shatters, giving you all the joy of shooting at glass, only with no mess to pick up. The big blocks work best when you’re shooting something with enough oomph to really make the chunks fly. Larger caliber pistols and intermediate cartridge rifles work great.
If you’re shooting smallbore stuff, just use smaller containers to make smaller blocks of ice.
This might not be cost effective anymore considering the price of food but we always had a lot of fun after Easter because we got to shoot those brightly colored eggs.
If you talk to your local grocer, you might be able to get a deal on old eggs. Even though it’s biodegradable, it’s still pretty messy, not a polite target for a frequently used venue but if you can get out a ways where no one will smell the aftermath, good times.
Also, those bags of army men are awesome for .22’s. We always set them on an old saw horse and watch the little plastic limbs fly.
The bullets fly right through them, and the heat self seals the hole. There isn’t the usual exit being larger than the entrance, the exit is just as tiny.
Nerf would make a bad choice in ballistic vest material.
.223 and .30-06 mainly. Just this past Saturday, I tried out a Nerf-style soccer ball (same brand as the football I tried before), and it survived fairly well: http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/9128/soccerball.jpg
It tends to spin every time it gets hit, so it’s not getting hit in the same spot over and over. It does end up wandering quite a bit, though. Depending on where you’re shooting, that can be frustrating or fun.
Oh, and I was wrong before about the color. They’re red and black rather than orange and black, although I seem to recall other colors being on the shelf, as well.
It would be nice to have a high-speed movie of this. I’ve observed this with silicone rubber membranes, and that stuff doesn’t melt.
I’m pretty sure the material stretches forward quite a bit before the bullet pierces it, and when it rebounds, there is a only a small sub-caliber hole left. Or it may have something to do with shock waves off the tip of the bullet traveling in the material and opening a hole for the bullet to go through.
Also bullets that ricochet and tumble before hitting the membrane will leave big nasty holes in it.
Yeah, I’ll definitely give some nerf targets a try. I’ll have a mountain as a backstop so I can try to pull off mid-air shots when it gets kicked into the air.
I’m thinking balloons (regular air filled ones) taped to those marking posts mentioned above will make nice cheap and very portable targets.
That RC car idea is awesome!
Counselors would confiscate the cans of shaving cream we campers brought for cabin raids and shoot them at the range. Good show.
That makes me wonder about other pressurized containers, especially flammables like hair spray. We use Final Net to launch our potato gun tubers. If you could insure ignition that’d present a pretty good bang for the buck.
Dwarves?
Yard gnomes.
Watermelon.
Remember whatever you blast, you should clean up. ( So food, you could leave behind for any animals.)
