Supported Air Rifle Shooting - early days

[zooma]

Making a bar holder can be simple and easy from 1/2" (or thicker) plywood.

First find yourself a piece of 50mm bar cut to the minimum permitted length of 100mm long (it can be longer if you prefer - our's are 125mm long). The easiest way to do this is to buy a piece of mild steel bar from you local metal supplier cut to length to save a lot of hard work with a hack saw!

You could make this bar from hard wood, but 50mm diameter steel (or other metal bar) is a lot easier to find.

We have also made a couple from 50mm outside diameter alloy pipe. This also works just as well and it much easier to cut to length and weighs a lot less too!

Cut some strips of the 1/2' (or thicker) plywood to 25mm wide and cut two lengths exactly the same length as your piece of bar.

Place them (on end so they stand 25mm high) each side of your bar centrally on a baseboard cut from your plywood and run some thin superglue down the outside edge of each strip keeping them as tight as possible to the bar to make a very close fit. This will dry almost instantly making assembly fast and easy.

Cut two more short lengths so you can superglue one tightly across each end to completely surround the bar completing the box that will retain the bar securely on the base board.

Remove the bar and run superglue completely around every joint (inside and outside) to make a really secure open box fixed to your baseboard. Modern superglues are very powerful and are more than up to the job but the steel bar is very heavy so I also added some headless nails to the joints for additional security.

Your bar holder is now assembled and can finished in any way you choose. As we made ours from used scrap (and water damaged) plywood the finish was not too good so we painted ours to improve the appearance and to help them survive a future life in our cellar!

When the bar is placed in the retaining box, only the top half will be showing and it can be removed anytime for cleaning or for safe transport.

All that remains now is to fasten it to your chosen stand. We used heavy duty speaker stands and these usually come with a flat top to mount the speaker on so all that needs to be done is to screw your bar stand onto this fat top and it is ready to use!


To fit the speaker stands that we used the ply base was made 5" wide. We decided to make the base a bit longer than the bar holding box so we had enough left over on each side to hold a plastic pellet holder box or a tin of pellets.

Some self adhesive Velcro can be used to secure the pellet holders (if you choose this option) so they are easy to place securely on the sand for convenient use when Supported Air Rifle Shooing ( SARS).

We will be having a go at Supported Air Pistol Shooting (SAPS) too in the future and will use these same stands and bar holders for this discipline too. The speaker stands can be easily adjusted in height to suits any shooter for pistol or rifle use.