Close Range shooting and layered foam boss.

geoffretired

Supporter
Supporter
I have been shooting at 5-6 yds for the last few weeks and my layered foam boss has taken a beating.
Normally when arrows start to shoot through, I dismantle the frame and throw away the badly damaged parts. I then re assemble with the top and bottom good bits in the middle, and put the larger, part sheets at the top and bottom. I get about 2/3 of a boss to shoot at.
This time, I just didn't feel like dismantling; and it looked as if there were very few sheets that would be usable anyway.
But, rather than discard it I have re hung it from the garage roof. Instead of shooting at the front or the back, as is normal, I have hung it from 4 corners so I am shooting at what was the top edge of the boss. I am looking at an area of about 30cm tall by 60-70cm wide. When that gets shot out, there is still the bottom to aim at!!
 

bimble

Well-known member
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I've not had the chance to see how my little boss (a mini Danage one) lasts... I injured my shoulder the week before lockdown and I'm waiting for it not to be hurting before I restart...
 

Sinbad

Member
I have a foam boss, around 1m x 1m, use all of it. Had some old foam from the club, and made a 2' x 2' one that i hammer, put it in front of the main one. I use ratchet straps to hold it together around the frame, takes less than 20 mins to open, move the foam around and tighten again.
 

geoffretired

Supporter
Supporter
Yes, ratchet straps are good.
I remember at the last club where I shot, we had wall to wall layered foam bosses permanently set up. It was wonderful.
We did dismantle three 120cm bosses and made one "good as new" one from the good bits.
We( two of us) were very pleased with ourselves. Then we turned round to look at the spoiled pieces that were left over.
With those bits being under no compression during the time we took over our re assembly, they had swollen to about three times their size.
We were really worried about getting rid of it all. Our silly plan was to take a little away in our pockets each visit... for the next 5 years.
 

upinsmoke

Member
Hi I like the idea using every last bit of space up on your target. i'm just wondering what type of foam would be needed to replace the shot out layers
 

geoffretired

Supporter
Supporter
The fancy name is plastozote. To make a boss from scratch, or to fill up spaces on a used one is not cheap.... unless you can find someone who sells offcuts.
The worst thing to do to them is shoot tight groups at close range. It tears out lumps and then the rest become loose. Then they start to get damaged more easily as they are " out of line" with the direction of the arrows.
I set my sight to miss the mark by an inch or two. Shoot the second arrow at the first arrow and miss by an inch or two. The pattern repeats and the equivalent of a group is a straight line of equally spaced arrows. The line we get is a record of the end of arrows shot, with the duds being out of line from the one before.
 

Nictrix

Member
I have a 60cm boss and use the rear blank side of a portmouth face that I have stuck 16 yellow target centre stickers on.
This way I can use the whole target and not damage any arrows while practising.
 

geoffretired

Supporter
Supporter
Nice idea.
Are you able to move the face around the boss from time to time so you don't end up with 16 holes forming behind each centre over time?
 

Nictrix

Member
I could move it a bit but as the boss is around the same size as a portsmouth theres not much movement.
When this makeshift set of faces is used up I will make another hopefully with the new stickers where there is an unused part of the boss.
 

geoffretired

Supporter
Supporter
Hi Andrew,
I shoot with vertical layers, until the wear is such that there are unused bits top and bottom, then I turn it 90 deg to be able to shoot at those.
It is odd, but I don't like shooting too near the top.... I think it might be something to do with the top cam being very close to the rafters. I could lower the whole boss on its straps, but I feel better shooting down the side than across a narrow strip at the top.
Shooting into the ends at the moment, they are vertical. There will be so little good stuff left after that, there will be no point in rotating. It will be recycling time.Christmas parcel packing??!!
 

Howi

Member
Have used layered foam bosses at home, cut down from an old warn out one, using ratchet straps as others have stated. these work really well, but do need something else behind if using compound. I currently use a target bag, roughly 70cm square from Merlin. These will stop anything BUT you have to keep compacting the filler or arrows, especially thin ones, WILL go through. ( you compact it by laying it down flat and jumping on it - it is obvious when you see the before and after.
One suggestion I will make is - DO NOT LEAVE IT OUTSIDE UNCOVERED as the UV will degrade the polyweave material to the point it turns to dust. Also these are NOT waterproof. I recently had to replace the bag itself (keeping all the contents of course) and found a supplier on ebay selling woven polypropylene bags/rubble sacks, there are lots of sizes to chose from, I settled on 75cm wide by 120cm tall which proved to be a perfect fit for the old contents (after I dried it all out), they cost £7 for 5 and I doubled up 2 sacks on mine.
It was amazing how much stuff was in there, I had it spread out over most of my back garden, I did not expect it all to go back, but it did.
I now cover mine after shooting to prevent UV damage, I also put something waterproof (bin liner) over the target face, mainly because I use self printed faces.
This handily now leads me onto another item you folks may not be aware of, a program called "Scaled Targets.ppt"
This program has targets for distances of 5yds and 10yds but can be scaled up to 19 yds.
An important point is that when the powerpoint presentation starts up you will probably get a warning about enable/disable macros for obvious reasons. I can vouch the the macros (in my copy) do work and are not harmful, but if it bothers you, disable and just use the targets as is, which is what I do. You need to alter some of the code in the macro to change the size/range distance but it should be obvious after a few tries.
The variety of targets means you can shoot recurve or compound and not get overly bored shooting the same target style.
The 6th target is especially challenging for compounders in the 14 to 19 yard range. This program has been out for a number of years and as far as I know is still available.
 

Kernowlad

Supporter
Supporter
Mine has taken a beating; the 5m Wabtool league thing was hard on it.
But my bag target is worse; I forgot that you can’t shoot screw in tip arrows at it and had to do some serious open target surgery to get one out.
 

cave dweller

New member
One or two old memory foam pillows make pretty good back yard targets. And when they start to get a bit eaten up by all the arrow shots you can just plonk the whole thing into a plastic rubbish bag and go at it again. When the plastic bag gets so full of holes bits of shredded memory foam start leaking out you just plop the whole thing into yet another plastic bag and carry on. Each layer of plastic bag sort of makes up for the continually diminishing state of the shredded memory foam inside.

I've had one going like this for about a year now and it's had probably thousands of arrows flung at it and it's walls are currently ten to fifteen plastic bags thick. It still works. It's getting increasingly harder to stuff it into a new plastic bag each time but when it finally gets to the point where it's too much hassle to cram it all into another bag I can just throw it away and start all over again with another memory foam pillow. Cheap targeting.
 
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