I Was Wondering?
 

The Last and first time I fired a luger was awesome. A Spiritual Experience, indeed!! I noticed an employee scooping up spent pounds of brass. I wondered, Do they more more on hourly fees or the brass goldmine? I will check on the going price of virgin raw brass!

$1.43/Lb Beat shoveling snow! http://www.scrapmonster.com/scrap-pr...-scraps/26/1/1

Most ranges "own" any and all brass that hits the floor. Employees are usually paid by the hour- so they don't benefit from the brass. At least that is the way it is around here.

Hi Eric
That's the thing about virginity, it can only be lost once. All that brass on the range floor? It's no longer "virgo intacta", as you lawyers like to say.
Norm

Merci, Res Ipsa Loquitor, "The facts speak for them selves"

I scrounge brass at our range. I keep for myself the ones I may need in the future and the rest go into the scrap bucket. Once a year I take a 5 gallon bucket full to the scrap yard and get anywhere from $35-50. When law enforcement has a shoot is when I get a really large amount of brass. Some of the LEOs will even help me pick it up.

Range policies differ. Most ranges will allow you to pick up YOUR OWN brass and take it home. Indiscriminate scrounging for brass is usually frowned upon, at least where I shoot.

Back in Miami, I was once shooting a 1911 for score, working toward The Camp Perry matches. We were so meticulous, that we would actually draw chalk outlines of our footwear, to insure that we always took the same stance. As I looked down to make sure I was within the outlines, I see an arm come between my legs to pick up one of my .45 cases!! Talk about disconcerting! The culprit was a notorious scrounger who made side money "commercially reloading" for a lot of the local shooters on a budget. He was eventually banned from the range.

Locally, we called people like him "br***holes".

At our club range, we're welcome to help cleanup. Of course, it's not a commercial range open to the public...

I usually come home with more brass for reloading than I shoot that day. It's one of the benefits of being part of a club.

I am lazy, I seldom pick up my brass. Since I don't reload presently and have a bunch of brass, I simply don't desire to srounge through the grass for it.

But I do like the freedom of the range close to my house.

[QUOTE=alanint;303572]Range policies differ. Most ranges will allow you to pick up YOUR OWN brass and take it home. Indiscriminate scrounging for brass is usually frowned upon, at least where I shoot.



This ^^^^^ is how it works at the indoor range that I shoot at. I have been shooting there for sooooo long, and they all know that I am a reloader, that they pay me no attention. I do sometimes end up with more than I shot, but it is a challenge to recover ALL of YOUR brass....especially the 30 Luger brass!! Some of it just hides in places unknown to me. :confused:

Ed, my range is in the side yard, and I had a problem with about 15-20% brass loss in the grass. I've kept it mowed with the deck on the second lowest setting, and what was once a span of brass-eating foliage is making a transition to moss. As the proportion of moss increases, it's more like a green carpet with short nap. These days I might miss an empty or two when I pick up after shooting a couple dozen rounds, but often as not, I get it all back--plus some that went undiscovered before!

The optimal surface would be a wide alley of prepared, level ground with a putting green variety of grass on top.

When shooting in the same grassy spot on a regular basis, I just brought out a canvas tarp to stand on. No brass has a chance to hide. Those blue tarps you see on roofs would work well today.

Doug, I'd need a pretty big tarp to be universally helpful. Since I'm shooting different guns, the landing zones for the brass vary with the guns' different ejection behaviors, and the bearings and distances from where I'm standing are all over the place. If I'm shooting my Thompson or M1 Carbine, I'll use a tarp because I'm usually set up back farther than for pistol shooting, on more standard length and texture of lawn. and it helps a lot. But for the trampled/mowed area, my recovery success is sufficient to forgo the hassle of messing with the tarp. If I decide to shoot, I can just go out and do it.

A while ago, before the grass was somewhat tamed, I fiddled with a screened structure made from old sliding door screens. It had a roof and a right hand side and was mounted on a parts rack on wheels I used to use for spray painting small things I could suspend form it. A small tarp on the ground completed the setup. I was still amazed both by how the brass could hide, and how different pistols' ejection groupings could somehow circumvent whatever capturing power was created.

I have a metal detector that I tuned to brass cases, but since this was basically a farm, the false positives made it not viable.

Everyone else with a similar range probably has an approach to the problem of disappearing brass, and I'd be interested in hearing about them and how they work.