Tracer

What can you do with tracer? Shoot bats at night.

Roger,

You need to see the Bats first, before you can shoot tracers at them. Maybe tracer ammo with a sniperscope? :madsmile:

Jim


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It's always fun to use it to set stuff " over there " on fire without getting up and going over and using a match.
I once set seven separate brush fires with one 250 rd belt out of a Browning , firing blind into the mountain backstops at night . Being in the desert , there isn't a lot to light and if you do , it don't go far . Still a range record , though .
I once had a batch of .30 carbine tracer that a few seconds after it lit , would explode in a big flash . Not every time , but better than 50% . Would alternate with GI ball ( told everyone it was hotter handloads to " catch up " ) . Shoot one tracer followed right after with a ball load , then everyone would see the tracer get hit by the ball load and shatter. I had a bag loaded with mags with these loads ( for me ) and regular tracer / ball loads ( for everyone else to try. Could tell by feeling what the base was ( flat or grooved ) which one I grabed in the dark. People thought I was reeeeeal good .
Chris

As far a shooting Bats, you fire one tracer, the bats will follow thinking it's a fast bug, and you hit him with the second shot. Just like the above story.

Many years ago we had a stack of Canadian 1943 .303 tracer . No American type deserts here and setting light to the the bush is obviously frowned on and stupid. We were down on a remote beach and firing the tracer at a rock out in the water some 3 to 4 hundered meters away. Good fun. A hit was confirmed when the bright orange tracer would bounce off at an odd angle. As dusk approached we took to shooting at high flying sea gulls. Never hit one but as the day wore on we were getting much closer.
Shooting over we put a couple of rounds of regular ball through our rifles and then cleaned them. The rifles were then cleaned again the following day with hot water. We did this as we had been instructed by an old hand that tracer was highly corrosive and this was the ritual to follow after using it. True or not, I have no idea. We were young and did not want to take the chance.

I shot some off a cliff near Pt Arena, straight out into the Pacific at night. It was spectacular to watch. With an 03A3. Beyond that, they start fires like crazy. In BCT we did night firing on a close combat course with tracers and it look like CHP flares at a night time wreck. Those things just sat there burning. By the way, this was the first time that I realized that GIs can't hit squat at night. They are a felony to posses in Calif.

Had a carbine on my boat 1st tour in Vietnam. They never gave us any tracer ammo for it. But for our "Ma Deuces" it was every fifth round. As I recall, 44 years later, it was pretty cool. But at eighteen just shooting a fifty was cool.

When I was in the USAF Security Police reserve after I got out of the army in 1977, we went to the range with several thousand rounds of 5.56 tracer that had to be "destroyed". We loaded or GAU-5A/As and GUU-5Ps with 30 round mags full of tracers. Started shooting at dusk. Looked like Star Wars.

Use them as I do, at The Big Sandy night shoot. Really only safe place to shoot them in Arizona.
We also shoot them during the day as the good ones are visible too.....
There is a manufacturer that brings them to the shoots.


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AZB