What is a Plate Rack Drill?

A plate rack drill is an incredibly powerful drill for testing your ability to transition between targets. Simply put, it consists in it’s most basic form of putting 1 round onto 6 plates each, as quickly as you can.

How to Perform a Plate Rack Drill?

Performing a Plate Rack Drill using Dryfire with Project MARS

Project MARS supports running plate rack drills at home. To perform this drill, cut up to 6 circles out of cardboard about 6″ in diameter each. Ideally, you’ll have a laser dry fire setup that will allow you to fire semi automatically. Check out our equipment guide for more details on the ideal dry fire setup.

• Make sure that you are dryfiring in a safe environment. Make sure there is no ammunition located anywhere in the dryfire area.
• To begin, set up to 6 plates against a wall
• Setup your phone with MARS Mobile, with the rear facing camera pointed at the plates.
• Add up to 6 target areas covering the plates.
• Select the “Plate Rack Drill” mode. Begin.
• The “Shooter ready?” range command will commence
• Position yourself 7 yards or so from the target
• When the shot timer rings, fire once onto each plate
• If you want to change the drill up, shoot the targets in a different order (e.g. right to left)
• Additionally, I sometimes like to change up the rhythm to make the drill more difficult (e.g. shooting every other plate)

Interpreting the Results

Goal: Speed

The main goal of the plate rack drill is to develop shooting speed while transitioning between targets, maintaining a combat proficient level of accuracy. You want to shoot a string of fire as quickly as you possibly can while maintaining minimum acceptable accuracy standards. Your goal is to have no misses on any of the plates.

Goal: Shooting Cadence

The reason for establishing shooting cadence is that it keeps you from developing bad habits and it will keep you from plateauing in terms of your speed. It’s better to go slower at first, focusing on the fundamentals of marksmanship, picking up speed gradually as you get better with a given weapons platform.

Applying the Plate Rack Drill in a Live Fire Range

Finally, the whole point of dryfire is to make as many gains as possible before trying a particular skill on the live range.

A plate rack drill on the live range will feel a lot more comfortable if you have already practiced it dozens of times in dryfire.