Archery trap shooting

chrisgas

Supporter
Supporter
I came across a video of an American club using a Trap shooting machine with 65 x 35cm foam discs, it looked fun, does anyone have experience of this type of archery, the machines and has any club in the UK have one? https://youtu.be/NuCpygofOjg
 

Berny

Active member
I came across a video of an American club using a Trap shooting machine with 65 x 35cm foam discs, it looked fun, does anyone have experience of this type of archery, the machines and has any club in the UK have one? https://youtu.be/NuCpygofOjg
We ArcheryDuns have one - one of those 65 disc ones.
 

GaryN

New member
How about shooting actual clays as Jeff Kavanagh does in the following video?

https://youtu.be/1PfXC4lscWY

At least normal clay traps are easy to get hold of.

The foam disc machine does look like great fun, would love to have a go at that.
 

Chil

Member
I was asked along with another club member to try one of these archery trap shooting machines as the owner of a local golf driving range was interested in buying one. The company supply the trap, targets, bows and arrows and although it is great fun we found it very difficult to hit the moving targets as when they fire from the trap any wind also comes into play. We spent most of the morning shooting and only managed to hit one target, you can use the trap indoors with blunt arrows, basically a tennis ball on the end of an arrow. The guy from the driving range did have a second look at the system along with an international archer who had more success than we did. The whole set up if I remember was ?5000+. Great fun though and did the guy buy one the answer to that is no as he could not see that he would get a good return on his money.
 

ieuan_johns

New member
Pro, good fun, probably avoids target panic as you dont have time to think.

Con, need lots of space to do safely, potential loss of arrows.
 

Berny

Active member
What are the pros and cons of them, are they just something to play with or are they treated seriously?
Cons: space to store & means to transport to place of shooting, weighs 110KG & then there's the battery (+spare).
Needs relatively windless day, as foam discs are quite light.
Laporte's UK dealer/rep would not honour the remainder of the warranty period
& tried to flog us a nearly full-price re-conditioned one.
Ours has needed some minor engineering work (which could be why it was sold) but we identified the prob. & how to fix & did.
Pros: good fun.
Can adjust trajectory from anywhere between horizontal & vertical
Can adjust force with which disc launched.
In theory could be used indoors e.g. horizontal'ish in front of safety/backdrop net.

In theory & for maximum life of discs & safety should use relatively low powered bows & flu-flus.
Ours cost ?1500 2nd hand & came with 4 bows (Ragim Snake bows, 2x 22# & 2x 26#) & 100+ (Beman carbon) flu-flu's
all rebadged/labelled as "Laporte".

Personally as an "instinctive" archer, i like the challenge of moving targets, so for me at the price we paid it's brilliant,
but we don't get it out often enough!
 
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