I was looking through my stuff and I realized that I had six different cans of white spray paint. I don’t exactly know why that is the case but I was going to paint a project that I was working on white and I wanted to see what I had. As it turns out, three of those cans started spraying and then plugged up. I tried to clean them and figure out their day had passed.

I was going to throw them away, but I didn’t want to do so pressurized. I also didn’t want to poke a hole in them pressurize because that is a good way to have white paint sprayed everywhere. So, decided to shoot them with my pellet rifles. I thought I would use the same pellet in three different rifles to see the performance difference at three different power levels.

What I learned was actually not as much as I thought I would. All three rifles shot through both sides of each can. I have the energy calculations for each combo but when that exceeds the standard, it doesn’t tell much about performance. For a while now, I have been thinking about how I would test performance of these difference rifle/pellet combinations.

I have the pictures in order of power where the first one to the left is the lowest. One other thing you might observe is not every shot is dead center. This is because I don’t have every rifle sighted in for this pellet weight. But, I will say that this is an honest to goodness, three shots. There were no misses.

The first shot (left) was the most fun. When it hit, it twisted out of the box and sprayed paint all over the place. This is why the term reactive target exists. The target is hit and reacts. I thought that all three might do that, but that wasn’t the case. Since I have shot spray paint with 22lr before, I was kind of expecting it. This is why I had them inside a box to contain the mess.

I have heard from others that cans of shaving cream will do this as well. The advantage of those is the foam dissipates with the addition of rain. In my case, the small amount of paint on the grass will eventually get mowed and collected. But, if you are going to do something like this, be sure you have a good radius between your target and anything you wouldn’t want sprayed with paint.

End Your Programming Routine: I will continue to collect energy information and that is a good baseline to know. But I will also continue to look for a way to quantify what energy means against some sort of target. It appears that spray paint cans are not the answer, but I kind of wish that I had some more.