Range Repair

The weekend after the 4th my buddy called asking if I could help him do some repairs to his shooting range. I shoot there quite often with him so I don't mind at all helping him with any maintenance on it.

He had family over for the 4th and noticed sand coming out from around the main wall. The wall we shoot into is one wall of a 8' x 8' sand trap. Its really overkill for anything we would be shooting and typical of my buddy.

This shows about two years of use and after looking things over has been falling apart for at least six months. Normally this would be a solid wall of rail road ties with some old interior doors screwed over them. The doors make it easy to staple targets in place but they also tend to hide the damage to the ties.

After we started removing the ties we noticed that the sand was also moving out around one of the sides. There have been a lot of recent heavy rains and the lag screws holding the ties to the 4x4 pulled through the ties. We had to bring in my buddies toy to dig the sand out and then dig out the corner by hand so we could push the ties back into place.

Here you can see the area we had to dig out to get the lower ties on the right side back into place.

This weekend we finished up by putting the lower ties back in place. We cut one in half and placed each half on end on each side to hold the lower ties in place. I talked my buddy into leaving out the upper ties. The sand sloping across is still over a food deep at its thinnest spot at the top. Behind that there is a railroad tie, 75 yards of heavily wooded forest and a 30ft berm, I think it is more than safe.

I bought a rail road tie from Lowes to place over the top since the upper tie is now gone we had nothing to hang the AR500 plates from. Unfortunately Lowes 8' ties are apparently only 7.5' so we had to add some 4x4s to hold it in place.

I think this setup will work much better and last a lot longer, the only consumable with this is the doors and I think he has about 12 more of them. To this point we have gone through three of them in two years. The 22's and .223/5.56 don't do much damage to them, not like the rail road ties that splinter and break up.

Parts Storage

Over the years I have collected literally boxes and boxes of aviation hardware. Its not useful to me because I don't know the majority of what I have. Last month I noticed a hanging bin cabinet for sale on Craigslist for $100.00 minus the bins. I didn't know that I wanted to take the plunge on a large bin cabinet so I blew it off until last weekend. Id looked up some options for just hanging bins but I didn't find anything that I liked or that was really even cost effective. So I texted the guy with the cabinet and Matty went with me to Greenwood to look at it.

Other than being really dirty the cabinet was in really good shape. Since the guy had the ad up for it for over three months and he had no bins for it I offered him $60.00 which he took and we loaded up.

When we had loaded it I notices something was up with the feet on the bottom of the cabinet. After we got it home and I could lay it down and look closer I realized they were extended nearly all the way out and had bent over from people sliding the cabinet around. I took them out of the cabinet and dollied the floor back to flat. The feet themselves were relatively undamaged so I added large area washers to the openings and put the feet back in.

I gave the cabinet a good bath and after drying it I hit it with the power buffer and a good coat of wax. Generally cabinets like this spend their lives in an industrial environment and look pretty rough. This one is in really good shape with really only a couple paint scratches.

 All the boxes on the floor around the cabinet have the hardware I want to load in it.

The cabinet is 36"W x 24"D x 72"H, 16 Gauge welded steel. I am not sure who makes it, it looks exactly like the cabinets sold by Global Industries. Their cabinets have a logo on the upper left corner of the left door which I believe is just a decal, this cabinet has no decals or stampings.

Last week I ordered 96ea 4-1/8 x 5-3/8 x 3 bins to fill the doors and 24ea 5-1/2 x 10-7/8 x 5 bins for the back wall. The bins set me back $150.00 and there is room for 40ea more of the large ones.

Today I cleared a spot on the wall next to the compressor and started loading it up, I basically have the bins 90% full and still have half the hardware to go through. I may look at purchasing bin dividers before I buy the last 40 bins.

I have $210.00 invested at this point and I have no fear that I cant get that back for it easily. A Global cabinet with the same bin loading sells for just over $1,000.00.

It may take a while but every time I'm able to use something from the cabinet versus buying hardware it starts paying for itself.