UVA Staff Review – CTK Brass Catcher
By Kelly Higashiyama
A little while ago, I was asked to test out a couple of products from the guys over at CTK Precision. One of them was their newly designed brass catcher. I’ve used a couple of brass catchers and both of them were homemade designs of my own and while they worked reasonably well, they were very bulky and didn’t work as well as I would have liked them to. This one on the other hand is very light weight, easy to setup and works very well. I took it along with me to the range while I was testing another new CTK product, The Ultimate Mono-Pod. I reload all of my varmint and predator hunting ammunition and being the compulsive reloader that I am, I HATE to lose perfectly good brass when I’m firing my semi-autos.
Setup of the catcher takes only a few seconds you simply insert the legs of the netting frame into two protrusions on the frame. The rear portion of the net is held by a small stud on the rear part of the frame. One thing that is very nice about the catcher is that it takes up a fairly small footprint on the shooting bench, as you can see below. Once aligned it performed flawlessly. It sure was better then chasing the brass and it was a lot better then packing the old brass catcher that was so large that it had to sit on the ground. One thing I did find very handy on this catcher is the ability to mount it to a tripod. I used it in this setup while shooting the AR from the sitting position and having it mounted on the tripod made it easy to get the catcher in the path of the ejecting brass.
All in all, I fired about 150 rounds of .223 ammunition, a couple boxes of 9×18 and a few hundred rounds of .22lr testing the catcher. When I was done, the net held a nice little pile of freshly fired brass and showed no signs of stress on the frame or mount. It was also very simple to empty, as you just unhook the net from the rear support and slightly lift the far end of the netting. The brass tumbled out of the front of the net and into my brass bag.
The only issue I had with the catcher was when it was mounted on a tripod and the tripod was extended high enough for shooting offhand. The range was fairly windy and the netting acted like a sail and pulled the entire rig over. Nothing a few rocks around the legs of the tripod didn’t fix though. In afterthought, it more than likely was the fault of my cheap tripod, but it was still kind of un-nerving to be shooting and have the catcher crash into you.
Original Review: Utah Varminters Association