After reading a post about shooting "Orbeez" or water beads on another forum I had to try this idea out for myself! For the princely sum of $10 I purchased 50,000 water beads and 100 golf tees off Amazon. I drilled a series of holes into a scrap piece of 2x4 to hold the golf tees.
After a soak over night in water, a teaspoon full of the beads gave me a couple hundred "targets" that measured just under 3/8". As a size comparison each bead is about the size of the 8 ring on a 10m air rifle target or about half the size of a dime.
I put the beads into an old spice shaker jar my wife had. Bonus was that the "shaker" acted like a built in water strainer.
I'm a bonified backyard plinker at heart, I just use more expensive toys nowadays then I did when I was 10!
Today's choice of pellet slinger was a HW30 with a Hawke 2-7 scope shooting JSB Exact 7.33 pellets. At 13 yards the challenge was 1st seeing the beads, 2nd hitting the beads, and 3rd not hitting the golf tee! A solid hit delivers a nice thwack and explosion. I managed to hit more than I missed, so all in all not too bad. What a ton of cheap fun on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
If you are looking for a cheap, non toxic, biodegradable target for backyard plinking give the water beads a try
well that is out of the box thinking and that is good
Good post and great idea.
Bob in WV
Thank you for contributing! That looks like a simple and affordable reactive target set-up.
Very cool idea! Nice little reactive targets.
When I read "old Spice shaker" I thought your wife odd for having a bottle of Old Spice....then I saw the pictures. Lol
Personally, I like asprin or even smaller saccharine tablets. They go up in a cloud of smoke when hit.
I have some of the "Gel blaster" guns that shoot those gel balls. For fun I made a mini gel ball dispenser to shoot them with a 10 meter gun.
At 10 meters and diopter sights it's hard to see the hit. With a scope it was better. They are slippery little suckers!
