Opsin/ST6 - Thermal Target Test 1 Chemical Hand Warmers

First a note: I discuss the body warmers being possible duds in the video. That was NOT the case. As soon as I removed them from the target they became quite warm, so the reason they didn't seem hot is that they were sinking all that heat into the target. They also continued producing heat until past noon the next day, so about 15 hours - close enough to meet the standard.

This test is to see if chemical hand warmers / body warmers can be used to create a durable thermal target. For this test I applied 8 HotHands body warmers to the back of the target, and then stuck 8 HotHands hand warmers underneath them. The test was mostly successful, in that I was able to alter the thermal signature of the target pretty drastically compared to the control target. However, the target was not warm enough to out-emit the wood of the range backstop. Moving the target to be in front of cooler foliage made it stand out quite a bit better, and I had no trouble picking it out at range.

An 8-pack of these body warmers costs about $10, so two match nights with 50 targets would mean 800 warmers at $1000. There are bulk discounts, though, so it would almost certainly be less expensive than that. I'm only counting the body warmers as I don't believe that the hand warmers were actually necessary, and they may have actually reduced the amount of transferred heat.

I also discovered that HotHands makes a stronger version, the Lava Warmer, which I'm going to get and run a test on.