Shotgun Art

My neighbour and tame builder, Colin, regularly goes clay shooting. Now the gun clubs make you take your spent cartridges home, as the cost of disposal is very high and they want to push this back to the sport enthusiast. The problem with that, however, is that you're not allowed to dispose of them in your recycling or your general rubbish.

Colin gave me a bag of spent cartridges when I spotted them, and I thought it would be a great idea to upcycle them somehow. I had the idea of taking the brass ferrels off the plastic cartridge and making something from them using resin - perhaps coasters.

Using a blowtorch I heated up the plastic cartridge to melting point and pulled the ferrels off with pliers, pushing the ferrels on to the flat stone to level off the remaining plastic. The plastic cases can go into the recycling and the ferrels become the surface of the coasters.

There is a myriad different gauges and different sized ferrels, so it was a bit of a problem, but not insurmountable. I chose Ely 12 bore cartridges, as they have low-profile ferrels which just fit in my coaster molds.

A bit of a bugger if I mistakenly heat up an unspent cartridge, as I'd get peppered with lead shot and possibly have my head blown off - but I do check first.

I started with 2 test pieces, which I will present to Colin in way of a thank you. A problem is that I placed the ferrels in the mold first, pouring the resin around the ferrels. That trapped air, caused by cavities under the ferrels, making for a rough underside, as shown in the finished article below.

I could overcome this by placing the ferrels the other way up and filling any depressions on the upper surface, but my molds aren't deep enough. As it is, the business end of the ferrels stand slightly proud of the resin, which isn't a problem for a coaster, as they are all at the same level and it provides a nice tactile surface of brass (if indeed it is brass).

I tried filling the depressions and holes, but that just mucks up the bottom of the coasters so, for the next run I'm filling the underside of the ferrels with resin first, allowing it to cure, and then placing them in the mold so as to eliminate the holes in the first place. Very messy and time consuming though.

Ideally, if you're making coasters and suchlike, you don't want to put anything into the resin that can trap air, as it could produce all manner of dimples. Shotgun ferrels are not the ideal decorations.

One possible way of overcoming the problem is to use the layer technique, whereby you create a resin layer, allow it to cure and then place the decoration on that layer before pouring in more resin, but you need a deep mold and there can be refractive issues if the 2 resin mixes are even slightly different.

Another solution would be to simply put an opaque layer of something on the bottom of the mold and hide any holes that way. It also overcomes the scrattiness of the bottom of the ferrels.

Here are the finished tester coasters:

Then I went a bit mad...

Looking on YouTube, I've seen plastic cartridges used in all manner of creative ways.