Bending alluminum for horseshoe shooter

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by Joe G.

We used a .063" 5052 aluminum bent plate, which bent easily by hand. We used tabs cut into this plate, which interlocked with slots cut into our shooter's top and bottom plate, to keep the piece bent to a perfect arc. Here's a few pictures:

Top view
Side view

We used the same method... I highly recommend it if you can relatively accurately cut the slots in the bottom and top plates. If you have a sponsor with a laser cutter, it's trivial. I suspect careful use of a jigsaw could be made to work also.

It sounds like some people pre-bent the curved backplate... although this works, instead we just used a piece of 1/8" lexan (could definitely go thinner - our backplate was overwhelmingly rigid).

We also found a slick backplate to be preferable to a grippy one. Our shooter wheel had quite a bit of "squish" to it though, so perhaps a more rigid shooter wheel combined with a slick (and rigid) backplate would be too unforgiving of varied Frisbees? If you haven't yet picked a shooter wheel, I'd recommend the one 1114 and 2056 used this year. Sounds grippy, squishy, and incredibly wear-resistant.