DIY HOMEMADE ARCHERY TARGET FROM SCRAP MATERIALS!

Hey guys, so today we're gonna build an archery target with this scrap material here. We're gonna do a little DIY how to build an archery target. Now, I don't want it to be just any archery target. It's gotta be one that works, that's durable, that lasts. I don't wanna build something kinda junky. I want it to actually work. And so what I have here is some scrap materials. Found this canvas thingy in the dumpster. I have some extra screws and stuff that I'm gonna use. Some scrap plywood. I do have one full sheet of cork plywood that costs like $12. It was left over. You can probably use whatever you want. But I'm gonna try to make something that works really good here. And what we're gonna stuff it with is gonna be something that's free and you're gonna be able to turn it around and use it many different ways. And it should last a really long time. So we're gonna make this, we're gonna test it out, and we're gonna see if this works. So let's get right to it. What's up, guys? I think this build turned out awesome. And I wanna show you how I did it. So first, I started by breaking up this full sheet of plywood. I set it on making a 32-inch target by 16 inches deep. And so depending on what you decide your target is gonna be, you're gonna have to do the math and decide how to break it up. But for this full sheet of plywood, it worked out really well. Now, if you did not want to make such a big target, you could just take a four-foot-by-four-foot sheet of plywood and make a 16-inch-by-16-inch-by-16-inch cube for your target. In my case, I used the full sheet of plywood to make a 32-inch front and back of a target. For the face frame, I decided to cut out a square out of this 32-inch-by-32-inch piece of plywood. What I did is I clamped the two pieces together so that I could cut them out at the same time to make them the exact same. Now, I wanna reiterate the purpose of this project. It is to give you ideas on how to make a target for cheap. I was able to make this full target for under $15, but lots of us have screws and pieces of wood and a bunch of things laying around that we can actually make a target out of. And so I wanna give you some ideas on how to do that. It doesn't have to be the exact same as I do here, even though if you choose to, it'll be really cheap for you still. And I'm gonna show you the exact mistakes I made on this project. I made more than I should have just by not thinking. And so I'm gonna show you those so that you can avoid those and get it right the first time. After I finished cutting out the face frames, I decided to go ahead and paint them so that they could dry as I built the rest of the project. In the name of resourcefulness, I did not go out and buy a paintbrush or anything. I just had this fluffy thing I used to paint on this paint. And the only paint I had was chalk paint. I guess it could be dual purpose and I could keep score on the target as I shoot if I'm having a competition or something. Right here, I am cutting out the sides, the bottom, and the top of the target. Now, these are 16 inches by 32 inches, and this is where my first mistake happened. What I didn't account for is the thickness of the plywood. I should have, you will see me have to fix that mistake here soon. The second mistake I'm making right now, these extra brackets I had, I thought would be a great idea. Well, although they did hold the target in place, they added little to no rigidity for the project. So I had to support it later on with extra plywood. So I guess what I'm saying here is that these brackets are not necessary at all for this project. Actually, I'd probably recommend not using them. Now, if you were to put them on the outside of the plywood, it would have been better instead of the inside here. But after I added the plywood support, I decided, well, I'll just leave it. It's not gonna hurt anything. Now, these plywood supports are really what make the build strong, especially when you're gonna use such thin plywood as I did here. It is cost-efficient to use thin plywood, but you're gonna wanna support it. Now, you could probably get away with one-bys here instead of plywood. You're just always gonna wanna pre-drill so that you don't split out. If you ever have an opportunity to make a project stronger or less chance of it breaking, and you have the means to do so, I always recommend doing so. And so I went ahead and pre-drilled here and I put long screws into this plywood. And you'll see that I maybe kind of overbuilt it in a way on parts of the project, but I think that's always better than underbuilding it because if you underbuild it, it's just gonna break and you're gonna have to redo it. If you overbuilt it, the worst thing that can happen is that it lasts a really long time, which, well, that's not bad at all in my case. In saying that, with a project like this, I'm not trying to make it absolutely perfect. So you can see I just used my circular saw to make it quick and dirty. And I had a corner like this that I had to true up with a hand plane, but that's no problem. It's not gonna functionally mess it up. I really care more about functionality than I do looks. Although, if you do make something that looks well, you are more proud of it. So I think it's good to get a good balance of both a functionality, looks, and then also speed because, yeah, truth is, I don't have all day, nor do you guys, to just do whatever we want. So I try to find that good balance in between all of that because without a great balance, projects can get very frustrating. I have made so many projects that when I have finished them, I was just very disappointed with the functionality of it. And so I think if you're gonna spend extra time on anything, make the stinking project functional. So here you see, well, I was like, I'm gonna make this as good as I can. I'm gonna fix my mistake. And like I said earlier, I did not account for the thickness of the plywood. So I'm having to cut off three quarters inch here so that the face frame will cover the whole front of the target and not be three quarters of an inch too short. And oh boy, here we go with making the top. Now I had a great idea, or so I thought, for the top that had one little hinge left over from an old project that I thought, I'll just screw right into this three eighths inch piece of plywood and it'll hold up. Yeah, right, Kramer. And so I went ahead and screwed this on and you'll see it kind of breaks off later on. As soon as I tried to move it outside of the garage, it completely broke. So I ended up just screwing four screws in through the lid into the top of the target. And then if I ever need to restuff the target, I can just unscrew those four screws. I thought a hinge would be good just to lift it up and down real quick, but really it's not that necessary. Four screws isn't gonna take me long at all. There's a lot of different materials you could use for the face frame of a target. A lot of people will use like burlap or like a grain bag, or you could even use like an old dog food bag. I've got a canvas thing here. It's not even really canvas, which you could use canvas, but it's like that harder plastic canvas stuff. I don't even know what it's called. But the point is just to use what you have. This part is my guess is what's gonna wear out first, but I can just unscrew four screws off the face frame and then staple on a different kind of material, some more of the same thing, whatever I can find at the time to use. Now, here is another mistake I made. I used some really small screws to screw the face frame on and the face frame started to rip out. And so I would encourage you to use as long as screws as possible so that you do not make the silly mistakes that I did here. When it comes time to stuffing the target full of material, you have lots of options. I chose cardboard because it's what I had. Now, where did I get these boxes? Well, I got most of them all for free. We had a lot left over from moving, but if you don't have any cardboard boxes, you can get them for free in any grocery store. And a quick tip on that is to go at about 10.30 in the morning. That's when they are just finishing up stocking all their shelves so they have a bunch of leftover cardboard that they'll just hand out to you. A couple other materials that you could use is just a bunch of old clothes and stuff them tight. You could also use pallet wrap. Places like Costco or Sam's Club will collect a bunch of pallet wrap and put them in big old bags of trash bags and they'll just hand those to you for free as well. The nice thing about using cardboard is that when it starts to wear out, you can just move the pieces around and then it's like you have a brand new target with just a couple minutes of moving it around. Or you can just get new cardboard and you basically have a lifelong target. All in all, I think this project went really well and I had a lot of fun building it. Hey guys, so far the target is in the first one. Well, truth be told I dropped my mic in the leaves so it's time to reenact this. I've shot 20 or 30 arrows through it so not a lot but so far it seems to be stopping the arrows really well. I'll take one more shot here and then I can show you the penetration into the target and we'll see how well it's working down there. Let's go check this target out. So you can see the arrows are in right here. This is from just 10 yards. One of my complaints is that it is kind of hard to pull it out but you can see the penetration there. We've still, that's only one third of the way to the target. Now this bow is shooting about 160 feet per second. So I would think a compound bow shooting 300, 350 wouldn't pass all the way through for sure. I didn't even stuff this completely full of cardboard because I ran out. So that's working pretty good. I've been shooting in the same area. I'm gonna keep shooting this target many times here and I'll give you updates three, four, 500 shots into this target to see how it goes. A good idea is when you paint the targets on is to paint them on different spots depending on the side you're on. You can see I painted five here and then besides the one in the middle on this other side the other four are in different spots so that you will not wear out the same spot of the target so that it'll last a much, much longer that way. My only complaints is that the arrow are a little hard to pull out, not harder than a lot of targets I'd buy at stores but they're a little bit hard. And then secondly, is it can be a little heavy so you might wanna put wheels on it or something like that if you're gonna make it this big. Besides that, I really enjoy this target. I'd like to thank you guys for joining me for this one day build. If you like this one day build, I got a couple more. I'm gonna link those here at the end of the video for you guys. And on that note, it's getting dark so I'm gonna shoot a couple more times but besides that, you guys have a great rest of the day. Thanks for watching.