THE Orange and District Pistol Club will hold its first official shoot this weekend, since three of the shooting ranges were burnt down in February.

The club has been working on rebuilding the ranges since the start of April and the work should be complete in time for the State Service Pistol Championships in August.

Club president Roger Bond said the club would hold its first official shoot this Saturday as range one is near full completion.

"It's been going pretty well," Bond said. "We are at the stage where we can have our first official shoot and we will this weekend."

"We are also definitely looking at everything being ready for the State Service Pistol Championships, because we made the commitment."

Bond said he expected for the rebuilding of all the ranges to be complete by mid to late June.

"We have put the development applications in with Cabonne Council, because our 24 bay range needs to be completely rebuilt," he said.

"Ranges two and three have about 10-15 per cent left to do."

Bond said working bees on weekends have helped get the range back on its feet, but they had done as much as they could now.

"We haven't got a great deal more we can do, things that need to be done now need to be completely rebuilt so we have had to sub-contract someone to do it."

He said the scorers hut, which was burnt to the ground during the grassfire which started from a neighbouring property, had $20,000 worth of equipment in it and needs to be built from scratch again.

He said the club did not know where they stood with insurance and in the end were under-insured, which has meant the club has had to spend $5,000 of their own money on rebuilding.

"Even though we were required to use some of our own cash reserves, we could end up better than we were in some circumstances."

The air pistol range was untouched by the fire and has been operation during the past three months.

The club will also hold their 40th anniversary shoot in October and Bond said the deadline of the service championships meant the club had a goal to work towards.

"If worst comes to worst then the ranges won't be complete as we'd like them for the championships, but we will still hold them," he said.

"They would go to Wagga if we can't hold them and we don't want that because we want to keep this event in Orange."