Pre-painted hardcover targets are definitely a time saver when it come to match prep, but they don’t always have consistent painting of the hardcover and require some sorting and possibly repair to prevent scoring issues.
Here is an example of a pre-painted target that was supposed to have hardcover to the A/C zone perforation. You will notice that the hardcover actually ends a good distance before the perforation. So how is this scored?
The rules say that we score targets based on what we see on the actual target. So in this case, this is definitely a C hit and possibly an A hit when overlayed. This picture was sent to us by a member who said at the match there was discussion about how this was a miss because it is supposed to be in hardcover. That is incorrect. The target is scored as it is painted, even if it is incorrectly painted.
If this was used at a local match with no target changes and on a non-classifier stage, then yes, go ahead and use this target as is and score it as it is marked with the chance of getting a C hit. However, if this was going to be used in a match with target changes, you will need to take a stack of the pre-painted targets and make sure they are all consistently painted the same. In my experience, there usually is a wide variety of paint lines in relation to the perf in a single box so sorting to get a stack of consistent targets may take awhile.
The other solution is to take some black tape and just fix the hardcover to align to the A/C perf. Or if the hardcover has gone past the A/C perf, then use some brown tape to repair that. It takes seconds to add a strip of tape and eliminates all scoring debates. Pre-painted hardcover targets are great, but need to be examined and possibly fixed to ensure everyone gets the same shooting challenge.