Why poor man? Cause after buying a clipIR ELR and axsr, I’m going to be eating ramen noodles for a year.
Anyways. I bought eight 4” sq tank heater pads off Amazon for under $20. And stuck one as a test on the back of the head of my old spin drift auto popper. (Those of you who shot PMG or PTS matches in Cookeville will recognize these targets.)
The heater is 25 watts and I wired it and the targets into my 12v cabin with a long direct burial cable with a switch and fuses so I can just turn them off and on anytime I want. It looks like this from the back
And they look like this from 415yd through spotting scope on 12x in the daytime (and through some trees which are around 360yd). So far I only wired the black reduced IPSC on the left behind the white hostage but I intend to wire the two black 6” circles next week.
Idk how to embed video but this is what it looks like at night in light rain, using triggercam and NF 7-35x on 12x power. (Rifle is Stuteville impact 6.5x47L in sentinel stock) and the clipIR ELR. I don’t do the best job of focusing it but it’s good enough to hit essentially a 4”x2” target at 415yd. I’m extremely happy with the results.
(Hostage took a round too…)
This horrible unfocused pic is what the target looks like at noon in full sun (sun 90* to right) with me just holding my iPhone up to the spotter. (Note clipIR on 2x, spotter on 12x and iPhone on 2x)
The heated head is about 2 mil right and 1 mil low and you can see the 25w pad is heating the whole IPSC enough to see the roughly inch and a half or so of bad guy exposed on the right side of hostage.
Anyway it looks better through the scope than my crappy phone pic but obviously not as much contrast as you see in the night video. Kinda hard to tell where one target begins and the other ends but you can definitely get hits. BUT without the heater the steel is pretty much invisible to the thermal, as it’s at ambient temp and again the sun is to the right not shining on the face. So it seems like a pretty successful test.
As bright as the 25w makes it at night, I think it would easily be visible at 1000yd but I don’t have a spot to test that at the moment. I might also move it down into the body to make the head a little more dim.
Not sure how it will work but when I wire the 6” black circle in front of the full size white “no shoot” IPSC, I’m going to also run some heat tape around the edge to hopefully make an outline. The heat tape is only 3 watts/ft. But with about 9 feet on the perimeter of a full size IPSC, it’s going to pull about the same power as the 4” sq heater. Hopefully that’s not too much but I’m afraid the steel will conduct the heat quickly and just make it all ‘hot’ with little contrast to the plate in front.
Anybody else try this before?
Anyways. I bought eight 4” sq tank heater pads off Amazon for under $20. And stuck one as a test on the back of the head of my old spin drift auto popper. (Those of you who shot PMG or PTS matches in Cookeville will recognize these targets.)
The heater is 25 watts and I wired it and the targets into my 12v cabin with a long direct burial cable with a switch and fuses so I can just turn them off and on anytime I want. It looks like this from the back
And they look like this from 415yd through spotting scope on 12x in the daytime (and through some trees which are around 360yd). So far I only wired the black reduced IPSC on the left behind the white hostage but I intend to wire the two black 6” circles next week.
Idk how to embed video but this is what it looks like at night in light rain, using triggercam and NF 7-35x on 12x power. (Rifle is Stuteville impact 6.5x47L in sentinel stock) and the clipIR ELR. I don’t do the best job of focusing it but it’s good enough to hit essentially a 4”x2” target at 415yd. I’m extremely happy with the results.
(Hostage took a round too…)
This horrible unfocused pic is what the target looks like at noon in full sun (sun 90* to right) with me just holding my iPhone up to the spotter. (Note clipIR on 2x, spotter on 12x and iPhone on 2x)
The heated head is about 2 mil right and 1 mil low and you can see the 25w pad is heating the whole IPSC enough to see the roughly inch and a half or so of bad guy exposed on the right side of hostage.
Anyway it looks better through the scope than my crappy phone pic but obviously not as much contrast as you see in the night video. Kinda hard to tell where one target begins and the other ends but you can definitely get hits. BUT without the heater the steel is pretty much invisible to the thermal, as it’s at ambient temp and again the sun is to the right not shining on the face. So it seems like a pretty successful test.
As bright as the 25w makes it at night, I think it would easily be visible at 1000yd but I don’t have a spot to test that at the moment. I might also move it down into the body to make the head a little more dim.
Not sure how it will work but when I wire the 6” black circle in front of the full size white “no shoot” IPSC, I’m going to also run some heat tape around the edge to hopefully make an outline. The heat tape is only 3 watts/ft. But with about 9 feet on the perimeter of a full size IPSC, it’s going to pull about the same power as the 4” sq heater. Hopefully that’s not too much but I’m afraid the steel will conduct the heat quickly and just make it all ‘hot’ with little contrast to the plate in front.
Anybody else try this before?
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