Wednesday, January 04, 2017

Make your own shooting rest bags

if you have, or have access to, a sewing machine.*

Problem: found that when shooting an AR15 or -10, the rear rest that works great on most rifles doesn't work very well.  So messed around with some denim fabric and came up with this, which seems to work pretty well.

Note: with nobody around to take pictures, there's not many, I'll try to make the description cover the gaps.
Made a pattern like this,
in this case 4" wide and about 9" tall.

Cut a strip of fabric 2.5" wide.  Figure how long it'll need to be to go all the way around, then add a good six inches(or a bit more) because you want extra.

When you lay the first two pieces- one of the body and the strip- together to start, figure on stitching about 1/4" in from the edge.  And leave about 3" of the strip sticking out from the corner.  Sewing the curves at the top is a bit of a pain, but can be done.  When you finish leave the same amount of strip extending out as you did on the first end, and stitch that side together.  Reason is that when you're done, those two strip extensions will make the tube you fill this thing through.

When the first side is sewn to the strip, do the other side.  Then comes the hard part: turning it rightside-out.  I used a pair of needle-nose pliers to help.  You have to work the whole thing out through the filler tube, which will take a while, and leaves you with the finished body.

I used a funnel made from the top of a soda bottle to fill it with beans, then ran a big safety pin across the base of the filler tube

to close it.

Finished

And here it is in use

Nice thing is you can make it more or less solid by adding/removing beans(or whatever you wind up using).  And you can make it whatever height suits you.  Can make your own front bag as well, same pattern but much shorter.




*Yes, you can hand-stitch it; it'd take forever, but it'll work.

2 comments:

taminator013 said...

Beauty..........

Justin said...

Nice work done. I feel it will be really good to use. I have tried out shooting bags of multiple brands. But most of the shooting bags were not given enough support for me to use it for shooting. I have made a search online to find the best shooting rest bags. Finally got the best shooting bags from Crosstac. Quality of their shooting bags is awesome. If you have any plans to buy shooting bags in the future I will suggest everyone to go ahead with them.