Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Dry-Fire Laser Dummy Cartridges

I've been playing recently with dry-fire laser cartridges.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, they fit in your chamber (and sometimes a bit down your forcing cone), usually centering themselves with a couple of O-rings, they have no rim or extraction groove, their "primer" heads are rubber-covered pushbutton switches, they're powered by eensy-weensy little watch batteries, and there's a laser-pointer-class laser in them that is more or less boresighted with the barrel. Once you finish with them and want to reload your gun with live ammunition, you have to run a rod down the barrel and push them out backwards, since they can't be extracted.

Some of them are adjustable with tiny setscrews, but the precision isn't terribly important because they're designed to operate just across the room--or possibly as far as down the hall.

They're great for dry-fire practice, because even though you're pretty sure you know right where the sights were when the trigger broke, they show you a flash of red on the wall (or the TV, if you're like me) that demonstrates that you're not always right.

Okay: enough promotion. I have a problem, and I'm hoping somebody out there has a solution.

The circuit in the particular brand I chose--which I don't remember and don't have convenient to hand--is dead simple: it's just a battery, a momentary on-off switch, and a laser all in series with each other.

That's fine in my revolvers and my pistols, since all the ones I've tried so far have free-floating firing pins. When I dry-fire, the pin bounces off the rubberized switch, and I get a flash of laser light.

But in my repeating shotguns and rifles, the dropped hammer holds the firing pin against the primer, so that the gun becomes an actual laser pointer, with the laser staying on until the action is recocked.

I'd really like to see a miniaturized circuit with, say, a 555 timer in monostable mode, so that when you pulled the trigger, you'd get a clean laser pulse of some standard length, say 50ms, regardless of how short or long the switch contact was.

I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount for something like that, especially if it wasn't made in China, but I haven't been able to find any such thing. Do you know of anyone who sells them?

Thanks!

You might ask on the Target Talk forum. I know there are highly sophisticated laser based dry fire systems out there for use by competitive shooters, but someone on that forum may know of something that fits your needs without breaking the budget.


P.S. Hope you and especially Penny are doing well.

Thanks! I'll try.

I'm doing pretty well; thanks for asking. I'm working, still flying, have added an amateur radio license and rig, and I'm working on learning to copy Morse code. (I can send it, but I can't copy it.)

Penny has had some health problems, chief among them A) Long COVID that has injured her lungs and seriously damaged her ability to oxygenate her blood, B) triple-bypass open-heart surgery that has mostly healed but still causes occasional trouble, C) Stage 3 kidney failure that seems to be healing slowly, D) damage to her right eye from a corneal virus that she continues to fight with, and E) enough arthritis in her big toe to keep her from sleeping some nights.

But even with all that, she's bearing up pretty well, considering. She might come flying with me tomorrow.

Okay, I looked, and I didn't see any Target Talk forum. You meant here on the 24HourCampfire, right?