Chronoing/testing indoors

[neftaly]

Just curious, what setup you guys have for chronoing/testing guns in shops/labs?

I tried the old box with padding trick, ended up with splatter and bounces all over the shop (plus I hate shooting across the room). Also tried setting up a bit of PVC pipe with a catch on the end and a radar, didn't work well at all. Another local retailer/tech I know has something like a fenced-off indoor cricket lane, I just don't have that much space.

[y0da900]

2x4 frame with an angled back wrapped in a few layers of an old sheet. I have a few layers that hang freely in the front. Just sits on a table behind the chronograph. Works pretty well provided I don't accidentally shoot the frame instead of the hanging sheet. The vast majority of paint I shoot into it does not break making cleanup really easy too.

[Nobody]

i have some reballs, but rarely use them or forget to use them.

since i'm an amateur, i just go into my backyard.

[FirePro84]

We use an A-Box with A-Ball here at the shop...just like re-ball they are rubber balls and the a-box is a heavy canvas shooting box that Angel makes. It works great and hangs from our ceiling on a pulley system.

Palmers had a shooting alley under the catwalk with hanging sheets like Yoda had mentioned that worked very well, but took up a lot of room at the shop when i worked there, now they use something similar to the one i describe next...

the best solution I used was at Foothill paintball before they closed. They had a metal frame made from angle-iron that held a red chrono in place and then had a 6" wide piece of PVC pipe mounted on the rack in front of the chrono about 15 inches away. the pipe itself was around 3ft long and inside at about the 2ft mark there were a bunch of 3" long deck screws going into it from every side so it created a "net" or sorts...when you shot over the chrono it had enough space to pick up the velocity before the ball hit the screws and broke. at the end of the pipe was a 90 degree elbow pointed down and had a short cloth screwed in around the outside of it to prevent splatter. it was over the top of a 5gal bucket so that when you shot into the screws, the paint would splatter on the elbow and it would drain into the bucket. barely any mess, once the bucket is full you can empty it out and start over again. very simple and easy solution to build really.

[neftaly]

That foothill setup sounds cool, I was considering something similar out of sheet metal mounted on the wall above my sink (so the paint can drip straight in). I like the idea of using a forest of nails, would work a lot better than the simple 45° bend I had envisioned.

[cockerpunk]

the best thing me and bryce ever used was like a 10 inch diameter 90 degree PCV tube. they bounce down and through the system and almost never bounce back.

[neftaly]

I couldn't get very good readings when I tried that, plus it eventually smashed the elbow at the back

[FirePro84]

the 'forest of nails' prevents wear and tear on the PVC pipe, also, PVC is quieter to shoot into than a sheet metal structure (less reverb from the metal). if you're worried about the paint leaking out of where the nails are screwed into it's fairly simple to put a thick coat of epoxy or caulking over the screw heads. The DevCon 5 minute epoxy works great and is the same stuff our hydrotesters use for their re-cert stickers.

[SNAKESNIPER]

I have a small plastic cylinder meant for shipping liquids. It's about 3 feet long, and a foot thick. I put a small feather pillow in the bottom of it, barely any splatter. Most of the paint doesn't even break, so I re-use it.