No, spring is in the Glock…
The 13 pound recoil spring worked as expected. I did have two ammo issues, but they appeared to be ammo dimensional issues.
As I was rushing somewhat to have 100 rounds of this low recoil ammo recipe ready for the match, I QA’d the rounds with the gauge block only. Usually, I run all rounds through the Bulge Buster first, then case gauge block. In the interest of cranking out 100 rounds that morning, I just cleared all rounds though the case gauge only. If they drop unrestricted into the block, I called them good. I’m not sure if that allowed a couple of marginal rounds through or not. Shrug.
What I really need to do is take a few hundred rounds to the range and test them under non-competitive conditions, with the chronograph, too.
I have also been looking into a bullet trap for easier and safer ammo testing at home.
We have about 12 acres of land in a subdivision with a minimum lot size of 5 acres. We have a pond on the property which includes a dam that I have used as a firearm backstop before. However, that area is muddy much of the spring rainy season, limiting access to keep it mowed. Consequently, it is overgrown much of the rest of the year. It is a good place for daytime target practice, for part of the year, but it less than convenient for the kind of shooting needed to work up a handload recipe.
After shopping for commercially available bullet traps, I have found that there are a few available that would suit my needs fairly well, but they tend to be $1000-2000 and I just can’t justify that kind of cost. I think I’m going to have to go homebrew.
There are three *basic* designs for small bullet traps, four if you include clearing traps. Clearing traps are designed to simply be a safe direction to point the muzzle when unloading and clearing a weapon. They are not truly intended to be fired into regularly. For bench work, a sand filled bucket is adequate for most handguns.
The other bullet trap designs are variations on a theme of safely dissipating a bullet’s energy. The most common design, both commercial and home made, uses a hard steel plate, generally at somewhat of an angle to the shooter, to absorb most of the bullet’s energy and deflect it into a soft material, often sand, to absorb the rest of the energy and capture the projectile. The home made version might be adaptable to indoor shooting and in fact, many indoor and even outdoor ranges use another variation of this technology wherein the angled steel plate deflects upward, but the plate is covered in several inches of shredded tire rubber.
Another very common design that is a little more complex is some form of a design that uses highly angled plates to deflect and guide the projectile into an enclosed tube to dissipate the remaining energy in the tube. This design makes recovery of the spent projectiles easier, thus making the lead easier to recycle. The specifics vary somewhat, but they mostly look like a big funnel connected tangentially to the side of a pipe. This would be my favorite design to try, mostly because there is no need for any kind of sand, ground rubber or other media to sift spent projectiles out of.
The last common design is really basically a scaled up clearing trap, a tube filled with baffles or some other energy absorbing media, large enough to safely shoot at from a distance. One of the slickest example of these was from a company called Target Shooting Solutions. As of November 2017, their web presence is now for an indoor range in Pennsylvania, with no bullet traps to be found. Sadly, their least expensive model was $1000. However, their basic design lends itself somewhat to the DIY builder, a tube filled with absorption media.
The easiest to build your own tube trap with would be 12″ or larger steel pipe, about 3 feet long, with a heavy plate securely welded to one end, the other end made of something a bullet should be able to pass through, like a piece of a horse stall mat.