American Airguns Blog
The Random Ramblings Of An Airgun Addict

I was surfing some of airgun sights a while back and came across Dick Ottens After Hours Target Company web site. Dick has done a lot of work over the years on his target mechanism. Looking at the design on his website intrigued me so I decided to order a target and check it out a little more in-depth.



His previous mechnism design used hinges and rivets and was made from aluminum. Frankly, I wasn't all that thrilled with that design. It works fine, in fact I have two of them, but something about the materials just never set well with me. The Rhino targets are made out of steel and instead of using hinges it uses steel rods for the axis points. The parts are laser cut so there aren't any welds and the parts are uniform from target to target. The design is very clean.

The mechanism is an over-center design. It uses an adjustment screw to set the trip level so that it can be made to to trip with low and high power. I bought a Vulture target and at first I had it adjusted to trip with my 12 ft lbs TX200. I sent it off to David Slade to have it tuned so I re-adjusted it so that it would trip using my Walther LGR. The target works great.

My target came with a 1 1/2" kill zone however I ordered two reducers with the target. The reducers are produced for Dick by the Bingham Brothers but Dick uses a retaining ring to hold the reducer on the target rather than a wire. The retaining ring holds the reducer tight.

My target works really well. It resets easily and falls flat when hit. I only have two critisizms of the target. The first is the base. The base is located behind the target face, which could cause problems with the target spikes being pulled out of the ground during a big match. I have seen this happen with other targets. I would like to see a few inches of base extend in front of the target to help balance the load, so to speak. The second is the aluminum kill zone paddle that is riveted on to the paddle arm. I would rather have a steel paddle welded onto the arm. That is more personal preference than a functional thing. Other than those two issues the target has worked well. I plan to use it this next year at our local club matches to give it a long term test and see how it holds up in the long haul.