The last of the materials arrived last week, and this past weekend I set up to cast the first blocks.I was thrilled when the first block slid out of the mold! I also had a local sheet meta fabricator make me two 8.5x10x18 gelatin molds from 18 gauge stainless. Inbetween bouts of building the refrigerated chest, I got on the phone and ordered up 50 lbs of ballistics gelatin, some dimethylpolysiloxane (de-foamer), and propionic acid (mold & fungus inhibitor). It sits on my utility trailer (so I can tow it anywhere), and is powered by a room air conditioner I've redneck-engineered to maintain 4 degrees celsius inside the chest. It is pretty much a chest framed with 2x4s and lined with 4 inches of rigid board insulation. This time around I wanted the freedom to make/store gelatin at any time of the year, so I set out to make a poor-boy refrigerator that I could tow anywhere. I only had one gelatin mold, so it would take me a while to make enough gelatin, and then I would have to wait until the weather was 5 degrees outside so that I could move the gelatin to the range, get setup, and then shoot it while was still the proper temperature. I would have to wait until it was cold outside, then use a small space heater to keep my garage at 5 degrees C.
Previously, I had been constrained to winter gelatin testing only, as I was using my unheated garage as the source of refrigeration required to make and store the gelatin blocks. The first was in the actual preparation of the gelatin. In addition to better video equipment and better media delivery mechanisms, there were other improvements to make. That was pretty much it then.I knew what my next project would be and I got busy! It also got me thinking about how much better it could be in today's world of HD cameras and YouTube! In fact, on another forum in a similarly themed thread my old ballistics gel tests came up again and it got me a bit nostalgic as I remembered how much fun it had been to do all the testing. I've allowed some of the photographs to survive over in one of the stickied forums at, and they occasionally get referenced in other forums (such as ) when folks ask about the performance/suitability of a paticular shot size for a paticular application. Then for various reasons, several years ago I took down the website where all the results were catalogued. Not only did I have a tonne of fun in the process, but I also learned a whole lot. I tested in ballistics gel pretty much everything from #9 shot all the way through the various buckshots and even a handful of different slugs. So about 10 years ago (before my kids came!), some of you may remember when I had a website where I chronicled a big ballistic gelatin shooting extravaganza I'd spent a winter doing.