So if a guy wanted to redesign an English air-rifle "Bell Target" (designed for 6-7 yards, indoors, air rifle) for .25 yards, outdoors, for .22 rimfire.... 

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I've got no problem "scaling" things up, or building the "center hit bell clapper" or whatever you want to call the mechanism that does the dinging when you hit the "5" ring.. Nice piece of AR500 plate, etc etc...

My concern is SAFETY... a flat (90 degree) plate, with a hole in it, does not strike me (please excuse the unintended pun there) as a good design for .22 rimfire at 25 yards.

So what ideas do YOU have to alter the design to make an effective, and SAFE, "bell target" with suitable "bullet trapping"?

I've got a couple ideas... but I would love to hear what anyone ELSE has for ideas!

Paul F.

I built 5 air rifle bell targets for a club I belonged to. Even with air rifles, velocity needs to be very limited. Even so, pellets will occasionally return to the shooter and friends. Eye protection for everyone is a must.

You could easily beef things up for .22rf, but velocity would certainly still need limits. Part of bell targets is the dead vertical steel circle that forms the target. If you put things through the bullseye bell hole every time, no issue, but if every round goes there for every shooter, where's the fun/challenge? I don't think I'd want to shoot even standard velocity LR rounds. Keep things safe.

Thanks for the replies!

The "bell" itself is easy.. behind the "hole" there's a swinger (with enough "swing" to soak up the kinetic energy of a hit), connected to an arm that strikes the bell.   

It's the face-plate that is precisely my safety concern...
I will definitely have the whole face-plate-and-bell-mechanism mounted inside a trap-box of some kind with sloped steel walls (to direct any "misses" into the box).   
I'm wondering if mounting the whole face-plate-and-bell-mechanism on a "swinger" arm would "soak up" enough kinetic energy (in addition to having it angled down 10-15 degrees) to keep rounds where they belong?

My ideal is for this to be used with any .22 Short, Long, and Long Rifle (up to and including high velocity) so it could be used by a wider variety of folks at our range... not just shooters who can spell "Colibri". 

I wish I could find a better picture of the mechanism of the Bell Targets... they're really fairly simple, and very cool. 

Paul F.