Watch: Clay Pigeons on ‘How It’s Made”

I think we all know what a “clay pigeon” is — and most if not all of us have been entranced by watching “How It’s Made,” the TV documentary that shows how stuff is manufactured in “Reader’s Digest condensed” form. I haven’t watched it in years, and back when I did my wife constantly complained about the monotonous narrator. These days there’s a different narrator, but I think he might be related to the original one because he’s just about as bland.

This 5-minute episode is about the making of clay targets, sometimes called skeet, and early on we’re told they’re not made of clay at all, but of petroleum pitch or resin mixed with talc.

After they’re molded, they’re flipped with the hollow side down — the way we are used to seeing them stacked in boxes — and they’re still soft. Check out this guy squishing one. This explains the weirdly distorted ones we sometimes find amongst the good ones.

After they cool & harden, they’re coated with a water-based paint and conveyed through a hot-air tunnel to cure the paint. Finally, they’re machine-stacked into nice neat columns.

Nice. I only wish I could hit more of them during a round of skeet!

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.