The Targetbunny

Use your Air Gun sensibly or you may lose the right to use it at all!

Welcome to Targetbunny!

First things first. I started this site on the 7th June 2007 so depending on when you log on depends on what's made it on line yet.

The idea is to provide downloadable files of shooting targets which will print out on A4 paper. Uploading to this site is slow but, hey, it's free so don't complain.

Just a sample below but this is not the size or format to print out A4. Look at the bottom of this page and you can download the pdf for this target.

Also this is not a static site. As I learn how to manipulate it and the idiosyncrasies of the operating system it will develop and change.

About the reasons for starting Targetbunny...

I keep on searching for downloadable targets for air guns or small bore firearms and I find that they DO exist but are scattered all over the web so Targetbunny was conceived as a way of collating target files while emphasising the safe use of airguns. Below are a couple of files, one to help you keep track of your improvement and one, if you've downloaded any targets you'll need somewhere to hang them up. Just remember to use a proper backstop.

Targets are grouped on pages with a theme to each. For example the rabbit above is on the Prey Targets page as are realistic and representational targets of the small animals and prey/vermin species allowed to be shot in the UK. OK we don't have groundhogs but think of them as burrowing squirrels.

Look through the targets and download the .pdf of your choice. It should print out on A4.

If you have any ideas for targets drop me a line and if possible I'll put them up and credit you. Just remember there is no charge for downloading so you will get credited but not paid. Take a look at the rabbit above. Also, there will be no targets showing photographs or drawings of known individuals. If you want to do that I will include a Graticule on a transparent background at a later date so that you can make your own.

Be safe and enjoy your hobby.

Hunting

OK I know that this site is mainly about non-living targets, BUT, there is nothing wrong with using your air gun to shoot for the pot or for vermin control.
My personal philosophy is "If you aint gonna eat it, don't shoot it.", although I do recognise that this is not a good idea with rats, feral pigeons, crows, magpies or foxes. There are recipes out there for squirrel and locally there have been several prosecutions because some independent cafe/burger/curry shops have been caught selling cat as chicken. It does prove, however, that these things are edible if not acceptable to the vast majority of people.
This link www.airgun-hunting.co.uk will take you to the Vulcan site where you can get good sound information and advice but just remember you need to practice, practice, practice, untill you are certain you can get a clean kill.

Recipes

So just for all you Doubting Thomases out there, Here are the recipes. No I have not tried any of them and the legal position if you terminate the local tom whilst he's crapping in your seed beds is that it is ILLEGAL. Do NOT attempt to do this.

Warning

The recipes contained in the file Collated Recipes .pdf are for animals not normaly considered as food sources and as such may be repellent to some people. Remember that these are animals shot in the wild or around farms and food stores. They are NOT the ferral population of towns and citys

Vermin Control

I thought that this would be simple but it's not. For starters what IS classed as vermin? There is actually quite a long list BUTyou are only allowed to "take vermin" if you are a "authorised person" and that has legal definitions of its own so I will simply point you to the hunting link above. You can get better info from this site than I can offer so I wont.

The Target They Tried to Ban

This innofensive little number below was refused a place on one of the airgun BBs. No one told me that it had been refused, my post was simply edited by the moderator.

Now I am not going to argue with the moderator since he/she was doing the job they were supposed to be doing. It would have been nice if a message had been sent to me instead of simply mangling my posting.

Is this target offensive? If it is I will remove it.

USEFUL LINKS

Recently a number of people have been sympathetic or friendly to the site and three of them in particular have resources airgunners can use.

Pyramid Air have a links page offering many sites where good advice can be found and tom thumb on Airgunbbs has a site offering targets for download.

Respectively they can be found at http://www.pyramydair.com/blog and http://www.tomgirling.co.uk/hobby/airgunning.php and there is a photographic database of pellets here http://www.photosbykev.com/wordpress/2009/01/20/air-rifle-pellet-database

I really must get a links page on this site NOW!

Paper for Printing out Targets

On a local Airgun Bulletin board someone asked “What is the best paper to use when printing out Targets?”.

Ah, well, it sort of depends. What the poster was bothered about was tearing of the target upsetting scoring. Now that’s fine for high level competition but let’s be honest, do YOU have a shot gauge for the calibre you shoot in? I don’t.

The problem still exists but I have found, on a personal level that for informal competition or fun shooting using empty cereal boxes works well. They are stiff enough to hole cleanly and if they do tear its on the side with the shiny printing so, since after your first mistake when you put it through the printer wrong way up, you will be shooting at the other side and that means that the thickness of the card will most likely give you a clean hole on the target side.

Cereal boxes are not the only thing you can use. Any scrap paper can be utilised. I get great satisfaction from using the back of council tax bills etc, and a lot of the junk mail that lands on my doormat. Like all simple ideas you do need to do it right to succeed and I have tied together some of the things I have learned to help you avoid the worst mistakes. Have a look below and see what relates to you and then give it a go.

Cereal Boxes

Cereal boxes are great but there are snags. Some printers will not accept Kellogg’s boxes as the card is actually too good. It would not go through my old HP deskjet because it was too stiff to bend round the feed roller. If you can feed flat or your printer is butch enough to handle these you have some excellent target material. Wheatabix boxes have great card but the size of the biscuits means that, unlike most other cereal boxes, they are an odd size and you either have to measure (see cutting up boxes) or you get results like the picture below.

At the bottom you can see where the fold in the box was and at the top you can see the target was deformed because the sheet was smaller than A4 and the printer could not carry on moving it forward to finish the printing. This was on the old HP where it needed a large margin at the bottom so that everything looks like the standard Word template. Incidentally, if you are printing out in Word change all your margins to .5 CM to get a better fit. On all programmes tell your printer to print at 100%. This is specially true when using Acrobat since the programme is so accurate it will print odd sizes like 97% or 103% if you leave it on “fit to page size” mode.

Cutting out cereal boxes is an art form in its own right so a few tips may be in order. OK you may know all of this already but someone out there will be saying “Oh that’s where I went wrong.” And it’s them Im doing this for.

Below is your raw material. Here in the UK it is an almost perfect A4 when cut as follows.

Note that it is not Kellogg’s. Yes there are five targets already on the box, three stars and two blue dots.

If you open it out by either cutting up one side or just splitting the join you get something like this

Don’t worry about ragged edges, but if you want to run this through a printer try not to put cuts, tears or creases across the main part of the box. It will help prevent jams.

Where the box has been folded by the machine making the box it has creases. Because of the thickness of the card it means that on the inside of the box there are raised ridges. Cut along the inside of these

ridges using a pair of scissors or a straight edge and craft knife so that you end up with a piece like this.

No ridges to foul you printer and a nice clean sheet to put your chosen target on.

You can use any type of box but remember that frozen food boxes are waxed or plasticized and inkjets will not stick to this surface and the heating in a laser could burn it off and damage your printer. Always check before you put any recycled material through your printer.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Other Recycled Material

You can use Wheatabix boxes but you need to cut them down to A5 size or a special size to fit your target holder and then set up your printer to print on that size sheet.

For small targets I mainly use the little A5 leaflets that are currently being used by the advertising industry to assist with global deforestation and in their short sad life they may as well end up in the recycling bin with a few holes in them as in the pristine and unread condition the landed on my mat in.

Have a look at these. They are glossy paper but they still make targets.

The clothes pegs holding them up are not a good idea to use if you are shooting at them as they inevitably get hit and destroyed. Same goes for drawing pins and those plastic map pins.

You can use most paper but the stuff below tears like crazy. It is glitter wrap from a present and has been heavily folded and creased but the printer still took it.

On the subject of creases etc most printers will print on creased paper but the results will not be spectacular. The bill below has been folded back so that you can see what I mean about folds.

The main problem with folded sheets is that the pick up mechanism for the printer can miss the sheet due to the fold causing the sheet to lift up (or droop down) away from the pick up fingers. If you put it in and it fails to pick up try reversing the sheet or folding in the opposite direction.

Happy Printing

Safe Shooting

Target Bunny

If you don't feel like copying this article a bit at a time from the site just grab the .pdf

Shooting Permission

The document below has no LEGAL standing. What it will do is stop most of the "difficult" members of the public from raising a hue & cry as it shows that you have a right to be doing what you are doing provided that you stick to the legal requirements and common sense safety precautions. Download as usual.

Take a few blank ones with you wherever you go. I do and they have been invaluable.

OK this is apology time.

When I first picked up this document it was on

http://www.airgun-hq.co.uk/Info/tabid/58/mid/395/newsid395/3/Default.aspx

but Graham, the webmaster was having problems with the site host so I did not credit it.Since then he has contacted me and politely asked me to give him a mention and I am pleased to do that. The site is http://www.airgun-hq.co.uk

He also runs a postal competition using the target found at http://www.airgun-hq.co.uk/PostalCompetitions/tabid/56/Default.aspx.

Unfortunately it is the target used in the article in the right hand column showing you how NOT to print them out so if you fancy the competition why not print it out properly and have a go.

Cheers Graham!

This one was a request from Cookie!

The 6 and 12 FOOT POUNDS limits

I came accross an article about the legal implications of exceeding the legal power limits for an airgun in the UK. The author fell into the trap of saying that using a lighter pellet could put your gun above the 12 Foot Pounds Muzzle Energy (fpe) limit for a rifle (6 fpe for a pistol) and how tests on your gun could be biased against you if you got it wrong. The method of calculating the power of a gun of any description is based on the speed of the projectile leaving the barrel and the weight of the projectile.

For example at 11.5fpe:

The Air Arms Field pellet at 16.25 grains comes out at 564 47 Feet Per Second (fps).

The Bisley Magnum pellet at 19.66 grains will only travel at 513.19 fps

The Prometheus Hunting pellet at 8.52 grains will travel at 779.56 fps

The only way that the authorities can measure the fpe of your gun is to measure the speed of the projectile as it leaves the muzzle and as close to the muzzle as possible. The SPEED of the pellet is what changes, not, the fpe.

So what does that mean for tuning?

Well, if you tune to the heaviest pellet available and do it to 11.5 fpe you SHOULD stay inside the law and get the best possible performance throughout the standard range of pellets. It works in reverse since you are using the speed of the pellet to calculate the fpe but most people will feel happier if they use a heavyweight as the datum.

If you really want the math it goes like this

To find out the Energy of a rifle = fps x fps x grains / 450240 = ft/lbs.

To convert ft/lbs to Joules = ft/lbs x 1.355817 = Joules.

To convert Joules to ft/lbs = Joules x 0.737562149 = ft/lbs.

1 grain = 0.06479891 grams = 0.002285714 oz (ounces)

1 Kilogram = 2.2046 lbs (pounds)

1 inch = 2.54 centimeters

.177 caliber is 4.5mm .20 caliber is 5.05mm .22 caliber is 5.5mm .25 caliber is 6.35mm

Personally I use the calculator contained in tne zipped file agpower.zip below but if your pellet is not in it you need to do it the hard way: You can add pellets to the file but you really MUST read the help file first..

Have fun. Stay safe. Stay legal.