OntheLasGallinas wrote:

Mike, Something tells me that you really did shoot that fly. I'm going to have to try that one. Or a small fly drawing on a target. Cary

Mike,

Was your oversized quarry just sittin' on a stump?

We used to practice for dove season by shootin' down fruit flies over a bag of old apples at 20 yards with single action .22 pistols. You knew you were ready for the real thing when you could "stear" 'em into the bag by shootin off the appropriate wing.

"make my own" answer to original thread
with a black sharpie and fluorescent dots

hunterjoe21 wrote:

Just wait till Vince and Eric log back in... They'll make me look like I'm hooked up to a polygraph while settin' in the electric chair....

HJ....I'm impressed mate. Shootin' legs off'n a flea is pretty good shootin'.

When ya get a chance though mate....and ya wanta extend yourself a little, just pick the male fleas mate and castrate them. The hardest part is makin' them jump first so you can sex the flea to make sure you have a male, then get the next shot off to do the job before he lands. Now if ya wanta get really showy take you can either take one nut at a time or circumcise him. Makes for an enjoyable afternoon's shooting. Of course you must do it on a cloudy day and leave the flea alive...and even better if he looks around surprised at the sound of the bullet crackin' through without flinchin'.

Now the female ones offer some interesting challenges, but I'll let Eric explain those...assuming he has fleas up where he lives.

Cheers, Vince

Pumpkinslinger wrote:

OK, my turn... Once I shot a house fly at 15 yards with a .22 revolver, in front of witnesses! Of course I could never do it again. That had to be the unluckiest fly that ever lived!

Thats good shootin' Punkin. Well done mate.

In the pistol club I used to belong to we always had a "Fun" Shoot on our final day of the club year. One of those shoots was a fly shoot. No you creepy buggers....not shooting zippers...we had an A4 sheet of paper that had 12 flies photocopied onto it...normal size...and the object of the exercise was with a given number of rounds hit as many as you could....at 25m. Needless to say of course the result was always decided by who came the closest.

There are a lot of good, useful and fun targets out there on the net and they are all usually free for the taking. It doesn't matter what you want, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone else wanted it at one time or another and put it together then posted it on the net for others to use.

As I said earlier...my zeroing target is a + covering an A4 sheet of paper with 1/2" graduations marked in the posts for ease of adjustments. After that, I'll shoot at any target that gives me a suitable aiming point.

Cheers, Vince

Actually the fly landed on the target we were plinking at so I took the shot. When we examined the target we found fly remains scattered all around the bullet hole. Like I said, pure luck on my part and VERY unlucky for the fly.

Back to the original question... Depends! I buy some and make some.

Pull mine from a file on my computer that I took from Midway USA...

I'm known to be on the cheap side so I make my own most of the time. I do have a few downloaded from different sites though.
Joe

Vince wrote:

hunterjoe21 wrote: Just wait till Vince and Eric log back in... They'll make me look like I'm hooked up to a polygraph while settin' in the electric chair.... HJ....I'm impressed mate. Shootin' legs off'n a flea is pretty good shootin'. When ya get a chance though mate....and ya wanta extend yourself a little, just pick the male fleas mate and castrate them. The hardest part is makin' them jump first so you can sex the flea to make sure you have a male, then get the next shot off to do the job before he lands. Now if ya wanta get really showy take you can either take one nut at a time or circumcise him. Makes for an enjoyable afternoon's shooting. Of course you must do it on a cloudy day and leave the flea alive...and even better if he looks around surprised at the sound of the bullet crackin' through without flinchin'. Now the female ones offer some interesting challenges, but I'll let Eric explain those...assuming he has fleas up where he lives. Cheers, Vince

We tried that for a while, It got kinda boring. Again we used these exercises to get warmed up for some real shootin'. We progressed from your SHNO exercise into aligning more than 1 male flea, and takin 'em all off at a time.

Tryin to get 'em aligned for the actual "money" shot is sometimes more challenging than pullin' off that shot. I've had occasion to fire over their heads, just so the turbulence will get 'em lined up. This came to be known as "gettin yer fleas in a row", and somehow progressed to include waterfowl....

We never bothered to make 'em jump first though. Kinda figured that might result in some "cheap shots"...

Just lined 'em up and let fly. If you got REAL good glass, you can see the shocked expression on their face as the bullet performs it's task.

'course, my eyesight aint what it was before the surgery either....

Oh yeah,

I seem to prefer store bought "paper" targets over the downloaded and printed version.

Dunno why though...

The biggest problem I have with printing my own are that it uses a LOT of black ink! I have dropped the black down to a level of gray that looks black at range but uses about half the amount of ink. My "record" targets use a 3 1/2" black bull with white rings at 1/2" spacing (1/2" "X") but my practice targets are five 1 1/4" black bulls on a single sheet. They are great for pistols at 25 and 50 yards and rifles at 100 and 200 yards. The multiple targets on one sheet means fewer trips to change targets. When shooting for my personal records I use the "Records" target having one behind the targets I remove so I get a days aggregate on one target and each individual target gives me the results for each five shot string. I use the aggregat target to find the "average" group size for my records and include it in my notebook for future reference. Picking the "best" target of each day might look better but the aggregate target shows me what i can expect when I'm shooting "for real".