Sunday, July 09, 2006
Construction
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, "This would be a great place for a trap field."
OK....so maybe it didn't quite work out that way.
As I've mentioned before, I'm the lead coach for the Buckeye Sportsman Club youth SCTP team. One of our major challenges is the fact that we don't have an actual clay target range to practice on. We shoot at a rifle range using portable throwers, hay bales as trap houses, and shooting stations marked with spray paint on the dirt. We do have our own private section of the range, but it's just bare dirt....no amenities at all. The picture below pretty much says it all.
Things are beginning to change. One of our team parents donated his time and his tractor to level off our range a few weeks ago, and yesterday three of us started laying out trap fields. We began by driving a stake to signify the center of the trap machine and then measured 48 feet (16 yards) back from the stake to locate the center of the forward edge of station 3. Station 2 was located by using two intersecting lines - one line coming from the main stake and extending 48 feet towards the shooting line, and the other line coming from station 3 and extending 9 feet to the left. The other 16 yard stations were located using the same method, all keyed off of station 3.
The handicap stations were laid out by running a string line from the main stake to an additional stake driven about 30 yards uprange, touching the flags that were set to mark the 16 yard stations. A tape was then attached to the main stake and run to the secondary stake, again touching the 16 yard marking flag. More flags were set at 3 foot intervals moving uprange from the 16 yard marker.......rinse, lather, and repeat 4 times. At the end it looked like this:
field 1
Once the flags were all set we had to shoot a round on the new field....just to see how it worked, of course. I'm happy to say that I broke the very first target thrown from our soon-to-be Field #1.
We also took the opportunity to flag the stations for a second field in an as yet uncleared area to the left of Field 1. Field 2 is level, but needs to be cleared of some brush before we can proceed.
field 2
Next step: concrete forms. Stay tuned!
_
OK....so maybe it didn't quite work out that way.
As I've mentioned before, I'm the lead coach for the Buckeye Sportsman Club youth SCTP team. One of our major challenges is the fact that we don't have an actual clay target range to practice on. We shoot at a rifle range using portable throwers, hay bales as trap houses, and shooting stations marked with spray paint on the dirt. We do have our own private section of the range, but it's just bare dirt....no amenities at all. The picture below pretty much says it all.
Things are beginning to change. One of our team parents donated his time and his tractor to level off our range a few weeks ago, and yesterday three of us started laying out trap fields. We began by driving a stake to signify the center of the trap machine and then measured 48 feet (16 yards) back from the stake to locate the center of the forward edge of station 3. Station 2 was located by using two intersecting lines - one line coming from the main stake and extending 48 feet towards the shooting line, and the other line coming from station 3 and extending 9 feet to the left. The other 16 yard stations were located using the same method, all keyed off of station 3.
The handicap stations were laid out by running a string line from the main stake to an additional stake driven about 30 yards uprange, touching the flags that were set to mark the 16 yard stations. A tape was then attached to the main stake and run to the secondary stake, again touching the 16 yard marking flag. More flags were set at 3 foot intervals moving uprange from the 16 yard marker.......rinse, lather, and repeat 4 times. At the end it looked like this:
field 1
Once the flags were all set we had to shoot a round on the new field....just to see how it worked, of course. I'm happy to say that I broke the very first target thrown from our soon-to-be Field #1.
We also took the opportunity to flag the stations for a second field in an as yet uncleared area to the left of Field 1. Field 2 is level, but needs to be cleared of some brush before we can proceed.
field 2
Next step: concrete forms. Stay tuned!
_
