Herra Kuulapaa

High Speed Ballistics Photography

18. June 2013

This is B12 vitamin tablet. This one had red filmcoating on it and putting bullet in it makes good show. Contrast between tablet core and coating helps us visualize impact nicely.

Couple words of warning: You better not shoot any harmful of even any medicines at all if you don’t know exact safety profiles of them. Tablets tend to disintegrate into fine dust and inhaling that dust is not usually a good thing to do. They’re not using safety clothing and respiration filters in medicinal factories for nothing.

Ice you say? When I was young it was quite common for kids to shoot around with air rifles and during winter we got good supply of blocks of ice. It was normal and pretty harmless most of the times. Nowadays we live in very different world where you get yourself arrested even walking outside with toy gun. People are panicking just about anything these days. For example in my home town old man was stopped by police when he was returning from hardware store with an axe. Yes, someone got worried about his plans. Come on, 70% of Finland is covered by forests, rest is usually water and in this case ice during winter time.

So, what happens when you shoot ice cube with air shot rifle. Well, cube goes away but interesting is that it actually forms some kind of solid/gas spray upon impact. Check yourself.

Have you ever wondered what happens when nitroglycerin tablets are shot with air rifle? In this experiment 0,5mg glyceryl tri nitrate tablets were shot with 4,5 cal air rifle. Unfortunately result was less spectacular than anticipated. There was no explosion or even combustion of any kind. Of course amount in each tablet was rather small but this should assure your safety walking nitroglycerin tablets in your pocket and even falling down on them. No, you don’t lose your leg like stepping on a land mine.

Air rifle bullet hitting fluoride tablet. Despite of relatively low kinetic energy the impact is nevertheless so tense that tablet dissintegrates to fine dust.

If you look closely the middle picture you can spot bullet clearly flattened on impact.

Air rifle bullet travelling ~190m/s hitting match head. In red head match pictures bullet was aimed just to scrape match head. Interestingly some matches ignited on impact although they were so called safety ones. Safety point of view it may not be the most wise thing to shoot incendiary targets indoors ;) In blue head image bullet hit stick below match head.