Falling Plate Rack Details

A blog reader sent me an email asking about how our rimfire falling plate racks were made. After the falling plate match on Saturday I took a few pictures.

Shooter's view of the plate rack.

We C-Clamp the plate racks to the steel tables that we use for pin shooting. If you don't have pin tables, some heavy duty tables or saw horses made out of angle iron will have to be built. They have to heavy enough so that when you pull the rope to re-set the plates you don't pull the table over.

The "No Pull Rope" end view.

The plates can be moved from one position to another by pulling out the hairpin clip and sliding the pivot pin to the side. Then the plate can be lifted out and moved to another position. The big plates are 6" in diameter, and the smaller stop plate is 4" in diameter. Since we only shoot rimfire at these plates, they are only 1/4" thick steel.

The pull rope end.

We have four racks, two with the pull rope on the left end, and two with the pull rope on the right end. We have snaps to go on the end of the pull ropes, but they aren't installed yet. Big ugly knots do the job for now.

One last modification was to weld a small piece of angle iron to the very rear of the flat bar pieces to hook over the rear edge of the table. We found that the racks would work loose and creep forward when the rope was pulled, but this ended that problem.

Hope this helps other clubs to build their own plate racks.