A quiet indoor target for densely populated areas

Happy new year TAF!

The opportunity to play with my PCPs has became a little more precious ever since I moved to this apartment. I’m sharing walls with my neighbors and it’s almost impossible to leave them unbothered if I do discharge 1 of those at home. Thanx for what I’ve read in this forum I can have the muzzle report controlled to an acceptable level, but there’s still this terrible TWANG! when the pellet lands on its target, which echos & accumulate in the corridor like a freaking bell tower.

Need a new target!

I used a cast iron grill w/ epoxy filling for striking face and enclosed it with an angled iron bracket w/ clothe muffling pad. The iron casting grill is thick enough to stop a .25 pistol round and it sounds a bit quiet compared to ordinary steel plate. The epoxy filling feels like tire rubber after hardening, which I suppose may effectively dampen a wide band of vibration upon pellet impact. The muffling pads consisted of old underware, socks etc which serve to absorbe the radiating sound waves to kill the echoeing.

The glassy looking epoxy filled grilling pan and angle iron bracket with muffling pads on 3-sides:

The bracket is further enclosed by soft desk mat on 4 sides:

Setting up at target position, canted a little bit on a cake tin for the ease of pellect collecting, with the striking face fits snuggly into the muffling pads:

And this thing is quiet 😆

This sound of silence is beyond word, in order for us to see some difference, I setup a microphone several inches away from the point of impact for ordinary steel target(frying pan) and the new target I just built(target1):

As mentioned, the impact is much louder then suppressed muzzle report on a steel target(frying pan):

An overview of the whole firing-impact cycle reveals that the new target(target1) is much quieter and the noise fades way faster on it:

The normalized specrum here shows -20dB or more attenuation on target1 at almost the whole audible band:

The new setup effectively eliminates the peaks at 1K, 2K and 4KHz, achieving almost complete muting from 10kHz on–no need to worry about waking up animals capable of hearing HF noise:

took some $25 and 5 hrs work to finish this, the epoxy on the otherhand, needed 40 hrs to harden instead of the advertised 8~10 hrs. Happy with this at home but nothing compares to shooting outside on a beautiful day. 🙂