TIN CAN SHOOT

[308magtip]

Remember the days when we knew of dumps on a farm or a small landfill where we go on a Sat or Sun afternoon and shoot a couple boxes of .22's ? Our club held their first "tin can" shoot today. Aimed for kids to shoot as we did. Plastic replaces glass but a special top with a needle valve that can be used to fill them with compressed air or 1/2 full of frozen colored water make good targets.Also steel animals and tall soda bottles and just small blocks of ice. Much more fun than punching holes in paper. Fun just not for kids.Old timers were there just to remember the days.
Our club is located in North eastern Lancaster Co,Pa. Northern Lancaster County Fish and Game Protective Assn. is name of club. Need not be a member to shoot trap or tincans on the third Sunday ea month now thru October.

[2ndovc]

Sounds like fun!

Pretty much how I started the boys out shooting. Plastic bottles and jugs filled with water, bowling pins and some chunks of steel plate when they got older.

Good stuff!

jb

[jeepnik]

I used screw top bottles about half full of water with a couple of alkaseltzer inside makes a pretty spectacular target.

[AJMD429]

.
The MOST fun was going for RATS in the trash-dump. The town 'dump' was just a 5 acre or so plot near the railroad tracks where you'd drive your car or truck in, and pick a handy pile (no sort of organization I could see as a grade-school kid - my mom would drive in there and I'd help dump the trash cans). Some would show signs of fire so maybe 'burnables' were supposed to be separate, but I don't know.

All I DID know was that as a fifth-grader, I'd keep track of what was where, and look out for CERAMIC stuff... bath tubs, toilets, sinks, and so on. When there'd be enough of them, the call would go out...!!! The dump was about a five mile walk from my house, and probably about the same for most of the others, although one lived maybe just a mile away. We'd grab our trusty 22's on some weekend afternoon, and head down there ready to rid the world of rats.

We even had RULES about what to do when one ran into or behind something ceramic, because the ceramic stuff was so fun to shoot (it shattered) that we'd get mad if one guy had all the fun. Once we got our semiautomatic ('assault-style') rifles - typically around age 12, instead of the single-shots, whoever had that gun did get 'first dibs' on a rat that went 'ceramic', but then had to load and hand over the gun to the next kid, so we all got to shoot the semiautomatic at some ceramic on any given day.

Such fun...

I'm presuming that after someone burnt what was burnable, the town must have bulldozed it into a big pile to load onto a freight car and send to a landfill, but this was back in the 60's and 70's, so who knows.

[308magtip]

thanks for all the nice replies.Got some good ideas for next month from all. Funny thing was almost all of us could shoot and hit what we aimed at and new how to take care of a firearm.That was till we got in the Army then I learned I was doing it all wrong.?!@#

[earlmck]

Fortunately for us tin can shooters they still make fine tin cans. That's what I use when us boys go out for a bit of can shooting. Plastic with water in it is fun but it is also "one and done"; tin cans can be shot until they are practically steel confetti.

[gamekeeper]

Bud Light seems to have caused an increase in tin can shooting lately.......

[Walt]

Good point, Gamekeeper.
In the current climate, they're all full cans.

[Rube Burrows]

Man, if I had a dollar for every Prince Albert can I filled with holes from my .22 I could retire and be set for life. My grandpa and all the old timers smoked a pipe and I use to shoot up their metal cans. Fond memories.

[Sixgun]

Back when it was acceptable, we’d go down to the Delaware river and throw bottles, cans, even 55 gallon drums in the water and let ‘em drift out. Didn’t have to worry about bullets reaching the New Jersey side as it must have been a mile.

Where did they come up with the name “tin can”…..the heavy metal cans, like vegetable or tomato sauce cans are the ones to shoot…..we’d keep ‘em rolling. One time in 1975 I shot a beer can off of a fence post and the can must have flown 60’ in the air….huh? Here I hit the rim and it stuck….still have that can…

At our club, Atglen Sportsman’s Club we have a once a year “Youth Day” where anything goes. One guy has a Gatling gun and the kids love it……there’s a real deal Civil War cannon with reduced charges, a mortar that shoots bowling balls……every type of conceivable cartridge gun. And then there’s the crazies with class 3 stuff and BAR’s, M-16’s………The fire company brings their machines for the kids to check out…..it’s all free and open to the pubic.

These events stay in the minds of children for life and hopefully will follow in our footsteps….(well, others peoples, not mine)

[COSteve]

I remember I'd take a few cans up with me but they were a pain to handle (literally) when they were all tore up. So, I was lucky enough to plink in an area with a ton of pine cones so we'd gather up a few, set them where we wanted them and blast away. No satisfying 'plink' when you hit them but the small ones would explode.

[Grizz]

we plinked sea shells and kelp heads . . . . endless fun

[Woodsloafer2]

Do a lot of hiking in the mountains in winter and there are always ledges with icicles hanging that make great targets....no clean up after except for the brass...

[308magtip]

Sixgun
When is that shoot? Might want to take one of our club members to get an idea or two. Bud Light can? Would not spend the money.never did like Bud.

[EdinCT]

We must of shot a 100,000,00 dollars worth of old bottles in the farm dumps around home. Every place had one too, When we got more skillful my Dad suggested Neeco wafers. They would explode and the ants cleaned up the mess!

[Ysabel Kid]

Bud Light seems to have caused an increase in tin can shooting lately.......

I will admit I absolutely love shooting glass bottles. Always have.

[Paladin]

Excellent. I had a game warden friend in the early 80s show me an uncovered dump full of rats. When things quieted down we would go there and shoot until the flashlight went dead. I went through 10,00 rds that year and became a great revolver (S&W Model 17 to match the Model 19 I carried) shot.

[Griff]

Every time I see the title of this thread I think of the nearly 2 years I spent in one of Uncle Sugar's Tin Cans off the coast of Viet Nam firing our 5" gun as artillery support for our land based troops... Guided Missile Destroyer.

[Ray]

Every time I see the title of this thread I think of the nearly 2 years I spent in one of Uncle Sugar's Tin Cans off the coast of Viet Nam firing our 5" gun as artillery support for our land based troops... Guided Missile Destroyer.

On the subject of tin cans there was the charles f. adams..... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Charles_F._Adams

Like the Forrestall..... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Forrestal , it was said to be "haunted"..... perhaps for different reasons. The adams went every everywhere we (the silly willy) went. In port, we were often moored outboard of the adams which is most annoying. The most aggravating was having to cross the adams,
then the yoyo.....https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yosemite_(AD-19). When you were outboard of another tin can it was just up and over. Being moored outboard of a destroyer tender was more complicated. You could get lost as you had to go through it to get to your ship on the other side.

Anyways, the adams was said to be cursed. I do know that there were two deaths on it in the two years, two months, and eleven days I was on its neighbor. On med'87 there was a mess decks stabbing and n.i.s., the precursor to the current n.c.i.s., had the corpse flown over to us for preservation in the reefer decks until we reached naples. The idea was that there might be the temptation to evidence tampering over on the adams.....MM 1 Matthis, our acting a-gang chief protested to the mpa and cheng that our reefer temps were in the red 40+.....Sure enough when the n.i.s. agents and the masters at arms from the saratoga came down from the flight deck with the body, they balked at the reefer temps and flew it back to the carrier where it should have been kept in the first place.

Then in early '88, the ship's counselor, a NC1 Guzman robbed the adams' payroll. A few days later his bloated body was found on the carrier pier (mayport n.s.) in a garbage dumpster with just a portion of the loot....obviously a multi-perp.conspiracy.

[Rockrat]

As a teen, there was a dump down by the river. We would take our pellet rifles and take in after cans and bottles. Got pretty good. We would take a can or bottle and throw it in the air and shoot at it. Got to where we didn't miss a lot. Use our 22's down there after a good rain and shoot who knows what stuff that would float down the river. Cans, bottles, even an old Igloo ice chest. Those were fun days. We didn't know how good we had it.