The Box of Truth (or, What Happens When You Shoot Stuff With Stuff)

Sparks

Neat little website here from the curiosity point of view. Some lad in Texas (little surprise there!) wanted to test the penetrating ability of various calibres in an informal way, so he built a frame to hold sheets of drywall (the stuff you make interior walls in houses with, for the non-builders amongst us). Then he shot it. (Pretty informal methodology, but entertaining enough!).



http://www.theboxotruth.com/

Some interesting results - a .22lr round from a pistol going through six sheets of drywall (that's three interior walls for the seriously non-builders). And from a rifle, that'd be going a bit faster so it's probably make it past the seventh sheet. It also made it through four 3/4 inch pine boards. Gives you a bit more viscereal respect for the little .22lr, doesn't it? I mean, you know, academically, that the little bugger has a lethal range of a mile or so, and you know from cleaning the backstops what it'll do to a railway sleeper (cut it in half, given enough rounds), but seeing it go through walls just seems to give it that little bit more weight, doesn't it?

And on the amusing side, there's the results from using a .45-70 Sharps buffalo-hunting rifle
As the site puts it, there's no such thing as cover!



That's several sheets of drywall, a full water jug and a layer of bricks clad with pine. What you can't see is that the round didn't so much penetrate the brick as punch a brick through a 3/4 inch pine board ahead of it...

And the bit where he wanted to see if you can shoot a lock off a door a la Hollywood was interesting too -

The answer is, not with a pistol, not with a rifle, but yes with a 12ga shotgun slug. :eek:

Irishglockfan

It also shows what sort of overpriced crap modern day houses are built of!
That is the standard construction materials used in an average US house,no wonder they have such devestation when a hurricane or twister passes thru.Or that some innocent gets shot five doors down in some south central LA shootout! One word for bullet proofing your house. STONEWORK AKA Bricks&mortar Or Loghouses.

E@gle.

only in texas

benhurt1

Brilliant!! really debunks the movie myths!

woody

Well it proves the shotgun slug it the most dangerous of all bar the buffalo rifle.


It is amazing the way AK's,AR's and Clot M-16 etc are banned yet a simple shotgun slug is more devastating

Those locks look like special armoured ones though - a friend uses them to lock up his tack (thats saddles, bridles and assoc. equipment for you non equestrian people out there). Those locks are meant to be pretty much bullet proof. Real problem when you loose the key.....

It would have been interested to see the effects on a normal Tri-Circle or non ultra heavy duty locks.

Sparks

Those locks look like special armoured ones

Close enough:

The locks were "MintCraft, 2 inch Laminated Padlocks", a knock-off of Master type locks. They were heavy-duty and turned out to be tough.

But then, you give a tri-cycle a solid enough wallop with a sledgehammer and it'll "open" I think what he was trying to do was show that the locks you'd use to secure an outside door were tougher than what hollywood was showing.

Sparks

Incidentally, he has a new page up on the effects on sand. Remarkable how such a small amount of sand (in this case, less than 6" thick) stopped everything from the .22lr to the .45-70!

Barry Aldwell

Sparks wrote:

Incidentally, he has a new page up on the effects on sand. Remarkable how such a small amount of sand (in this case, less than 6" thick) stopped everything from the .22lr to the .45-70!

I wonder if the effects are different with soil

Sparks

Barry Aldwell wrote:

I wonder if the effects are different with soil

My guess would be that the general results would be similar, but I wouldn't want to test it because of the possibility of a ricocheting fullbore round if it hit a stone at the wrong angle...