by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

Part 1

This report covers:

• Big bore match
• What amazes you?
• Bell target
• The action pistol match
• Back to basics
• Texans galore!
• What about the show?
• Prizes galore
• Was the show a success?

Pyramyd Air was the sponsor of the 2015 Texas airgun show, and we put their banner at the entrance to the show. The entrance had to be outdoors this year, because both buildings were full.

Pyramyd Air donated a raffle prize of a Sam Yang Light Hunter .45, plus safety classes for the public range and gift bags for everyone who attended. Crosman couldn’t attend, but they generously donated the grand prize of a Benjamin Bulldog for the LASSO big bore match.

Big bore match

Last time I reported on the LASSO big bore match I apparently didn’t say enough. Unfortunately the competitors were all allowed to fill out their own data sheets, so some of the information I have on the guns that were used is lacking.

The guns in the match were:

AirForce Texan .45 (6)
Hatsan .35 Carnivore (1)
Shin Sung Fire 201 .357 (1)
Mrodair P30 Velociraptor .308 (1)
Professional Big Bore Airgun (2) .257 and .401
KAM Custom (2) .257 and .45
Cook Custom (1) caliber unknown
AirForce Condor .257 (1)

Rossi Morreale was the Grand Champion, shooting a Texan. He also took first place in the Big Game class. Jeff J. shooting a Texan took second and Brian C. took third with his custom gun (so we know Brian’s rifle was .40 caliber or greater).

In the Varmint class (under .40 caliber) Jared L. took first with a Fire 201, Jess A. took second with a Hatsan Carnivore and Bennie N. took 3rd with a Condor.

What amazes you?

I have been to dozens of airgun shows over the past 21 years, and I’ve seen just about everything that can be seen. What I look for now is how the show appears through other people’s eyes. Let me begin with our own Reb. He is a quiet guy who wanders the show looking and listening, but not necessarily doing a lot of talking. He’s like a walking sponge. But when his eyes fell on the huge box of airguns at the end of the tables I was in, he got real serious, real fast.

Reb saw the potential in that box, and when he realized he could own it all, he bought it. Readers of this blog have watched him take the guns out of that box and examine them one by one. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see where he is headed with those airguns. As far as I am concerned, that was a success!

Bell target

David Enoch is a blog reader who comments from time to time. I know him from seeing him at numerous airgun shows and LASSO events in the past. I even bought a Gamo 68-XP from him at one show that lead to a 6-part report. I thought I knew him pretty well, but at this show, I saw a different side of him. He was captivated with a Quackenbush bell target from the 19th century.

Quackenbush bell target from the 19th century is large and mechanical. David Enoch fell in love with it!

This target was important for 2 reasons. First, just for what it is and second, because it was priced at $950 — substantially less than an identical target that was displayed at the Findlay show, earlier this year. The target is mechanical. When the bull is hit, a bird (?) drops from the top rim. The rest of the target would have been painted with non-drying lead paint to show where the pellets impacted. This is airgunner man-cave jewelry!

I heard from a 10-meter target shooter who attended the show that there were airguns on display that he never knew existed. His world consists of 4-5 brands of target airguns, so seeing all the other odd stuff at this show opened his eyes in a major way.

My brother-in-law, Bob, had the same reaction. He came mostly for the firearms at the show, but left with his head exploding from all the odd airguns he never knew about.

The action pistol match

MegaBOOM target systems and Umarex USA teamed up to run the public action pistol match. It was a timed match at a rotating target with 4 MegaBOOM targets and the fastest time to break all 4 after the time started was the winner.

Ralph Hoetger, owner of MegaBOOM target systems had an unusual way of attracting attention at the show.

The bottles were filled with pink dust that looked like Pepto-Bismol. When they broke, a cloud of pink dust erupted. I thought the contest was over with a winning time of just 20.8 seconds, but that was before Rossi Morreale broke them all in 20.01 seconds to win the match!

Looking over the shoulder of the match winner, Rossi Morreale broke 4 MegaBOOM targets faster than anyone, to win the public action pistol match.

All I can say is this — for three years on American Airgunner Rossi has said that he’s not a shooter and just wants to learn from the experts. Well, the jig is up! Your honeymoon is over, pardner!

Back to basics

Back at the show there were a pleasing number of antique airguns to be seen. On one table next to the the bell target sat three Quackenbush guns. One was a No. 1 pellet/dart gun and the other 2 were safety cartridge rifles shooting .22 rimfire ammo. That is the beauty of the Texas Airgun show — both airguns and firearms are okay. So instead of not showing these two vintage rimfires, the dealer was able to display them proudly with the airgun of the same period — where they belonged.

A Quackenbush No. 1 air rifle flanked by two Safety Cartridge Rifles. Only at the Texas Airgun show will you see a display like this that contains both airguns and firearms.

Unusual stuff

At every show you see things you didn’t imagine — because nobody ever imagined them. Well, nobody other than the person who made them, I suppose. This time a man named Dan Hill stopped by my table with a version of the Walther Lever Action rifle I had never seen. It had a gold-plated receiver and a long octagon barrel. It looked like an old Winchester. I though it was a Henry rimfire rifle at first. But he told me it was a Walther lever action that he had customized.

Reader Jim Hill showed me his beautiful custom Walther Lever Action rifle.

I sent Jim over to the Umarex table to show the rifle to Umarex USA marketing manager, Justin Biddle. He was as impressed as I with the rifle. I bet he thinks the rifle could sell in this configuration. These are the kinds of wonderful ideas that sometimes get missed by the makers.

And, speaking of unusual stuff, Tank Fisher the knifemaker had a table next to me where he displayed his gorgeous handmade knife collection. Tank is a custom maker whose brand is TbarK Knives and he is well-known for making automatic knives (switchblades) Automatics are legal to own and carry here in Texas (what a wonderful state!) and Tank had some beauties at the show.

Tank Fisher was selling these beautiful knives at the show. The folders are all switchblades., and many of them can also be opened manually.

One thing Tank is known for are his Case conversion knives. What looks like a Copperlock is actually a switchblade that also opens manually if you want. Very few knifemakers offer this option and Tank’s are widely considered to be the best.

The guys at the Hatsan table enjoyed the entire show.

Jody Shackelford of Rocket Shot targets had a good show.

Prizes galore!

One keynote of the Texas Airgun show is the prizes that are available. There are raffle prizes, match prizes and a huge door prize that’s available to anyone who pays admission. The raffles started at 10 a.m. and were held every hour until 2 p.m. this year. These were the raffle prizes:

Pelletgage and Speedy Pellet Sorter in winner’s choice of calibers — .177 or .22. From Pelletgage and Speedy Pellet Sorter.

Hatsan .35 Carnivore w 6 tins of H&N Grizzly pellets. From Hatsan USA.

Diana RWS 34. From RWS USA (Umarex USA).

Umarex Legends P08. From Umarex USA.

MegaBOOM target system with pump. From MegaBOOM target systems.

Sam Yang Light Hunter .45 cal. single tank. From Pyramyd Air.

$50 gift card to Umarex website. From Umarex USA

Rocket Shot target system. From Rocket Shot Targets.

MegaBOOM and Umarex USA put on the action pistol match. Entry fee was $5 and the winner won $100.

We already read about the big bore match grand prize from Crosman, which was the Benjamin Bulldog I tested for this blog and for Shotgun News.

The door prize was the last prize drawn at the show. It was a Condor SS rifle, donated by AirForce Airguns. There were several tickets drawn, but the holders who had to be present to win didn’t come forward. Then they found a winner, and what a winner she was!

Sherry Williams drove all the way from San Antonio to attend the show. She is AirForce Airguns official huntress, and bought her own Condor SS back in February of this year. Her fiance introduced her to hunting about three years ago and she currently hunts varmints and feral hogs. Her normal rifle is a Tikka T3 in .308 Winchester, but she recently added a Texan to her growing collection.

Sherry Williams drove up from San Antonio to win the door prize — a Condor SS donated by AirForce Airguns and presented by Rossi Morreale.

Since she already has a Condor SS, Sherry is raffling her prize off on the GoFundMe website for Aiden & Rowan’s medical bills. Go there to buy a ticket to win.

Was the show a success?

I am always asked whether I think the show is a success. The answer to that is personal for everyone who attended. One guy might have found exactly what he was searching for, and another person might have struck out.

From an observer’s standpoint, though, I would call this show a success. It was very large, it had multiple competitions, the door/raffle/contest prizes were off the charts and there were more major dealers present than you will ever see at another airgun show. From that standpoint, I would say it was a huge success.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

Today’s report is a guest blog about the advantages of airgun hunting by Pyramyd Air employee Derek Goins.

If you’d like to write a guest post for this blog, please email me. Now, over to you, Derek.

This report covers:

• Introduction
• Space
• Noise level
• Cost
• Versatility
• Some things to consider…

Introduction

Like a Carhartt-clad stone I sat motionless against a large oak tree, a rifle braced on my knees. The reluctant morning sun was just peeking into the horizon, bringing relief from the swirling fall winds biting at the back of my neck. A rain the night before left the ground soggy, the moist air heavy with the smell of earthworms and rotting leaves. Earwigs and tiny beetles fled through the humid dirt as I shifted my feet in an attempt to thaw my toes.

As a branch rustled a few feet away from me on the fence line, I looked to see a cardinal, feathers ruffled in loathing for the chilly morning. Begrudgingly he pecked and hopped about on the crisp ground for his breakfast making an awful ruckus in the dead leaves all the while.

I shifted my rifle and figured if the birds were crashing through the leaves, the squirrels were sure to be up soon. I took to scanning the pecan and oak trees that stood around me and in a few minutes a fox squirrel materialized on a leaf-barren oak branch about thirty yards in front of me. Blending right into the tree bark, the flicking of her bushy tail was the only giveaway. My hand grasped an ice cold barrel as I methodically cocked the RWS 94 air rifle in my lap.

Setting the rifle on my knee, I quickly found the squirrel in my scope. She was working on an acorn as I lined up the scope’s crosshairs. Gently sliding the safety forward I moved my finger to the trigger and nearly jerked it as the angry cardinal exploded from the ground in a huff, giving up his hunt. Seeing the elusive squirrel was as startled as I was, I settled into a steady trigger squeeze. The rifle jumped in my hands as a .22 caliber pellet snapped out of the barrel.

The squirrel tumbled out of the tree at the sound of the pellet impacting flesh. I stood up, after giving the animal a few minutes, stretching my cold limbs and walked to retrieve my squirrel. It was a clean shot behind the eye, an ethical respect any game animal deserves. The lazy morning rays finally warmed me as I stretched again and started to a large stand of pecans; relishing a good start to a dreary morning.

For many years I hunted with that airgun and not initially by choice. My family had moved to a semi-rural town in Texas and as a young man I was infected with the love of hunting. A 22 rimfire was not safe to shoot in the area and I soon discovered air rifles. The half acre property had a half dozen nut and fruit trees, to the delight of the squirrels. To this day airguns are my primary hunting arm, as there are several advantages of airguns over firearms.

Let’s begin with the very reasons most folks will get into airguns for hunting:

Space

Airguns fill a niche nicely where the 22 caliber rimfire or small bore shotgun is too much gun for the area. Simply put, airguns do not require very much space to shoot safely. The huge variety of airguns on the market right now can fit almost any space needs. The lead pellets that air rifles shoot flatten upon impact and typically do not ricochet. Additionally the moderate power levels produced by airguns let them shine over firearms for hunting or taking care of pest critters in enclosed spaces like barns or feed silos.

Air rifles like the Air Arms S510 FAC Sidelever Carbine have adjustable power, allowing the hunter a wide range of power levels for different scenarios. I have found many opportunities for hunting simply because an air rifle was a better and safer tool. Airguns have allowed me to be effective on small game from as close as 7 yards and as far as 120 yards. Under 100 yards is where the modern air rifle really earns its keep.

Noise level

With few exceptions, airguns are significantly quieter than firearms. The primary reason for this is that airgun velocities are typically sub-sonic, meaning the pellets are not breaking the sound barrier. In addition to not disturbing your neighbors, the decibel levels are low enough that the rifle report won’t cause hearing damage. Spring piston breakbarrel rifles like the Diana RWS 34 produce a dull slamming report similar to a nail gun.

For true silence, the shrouded Benjamin Marauder is so quiet that the pellet impacting the target is louder than the gunshot. The low noise levels air rifles produce will not spook animals quite as much as firearms, which is great if you want to take multiple shots. Typically a firearm rifle shot thundering through the woods will silence all the wildlife for quite a long time. It is an eerie quiet that lets you know that you’re the one who is out of place. Activity resumes much more quickly after an air rifle shot, and, though animals still react, the life in the woods remain calm. I’ve nabbed a lot of small game by bringing an air rifle on a deer hunt. More often than not I found myself putting squirrels and rabbits in the freezer in addition to venison.

The Benajmin Marauder is one of the quietest airguns on the market, allowing most people to shoot safely in their backyard without the ear-splitting crack of a firearm.

Cost

It’s no secret that with the turbulent firearm climate both centerfire and rimfire ammunition have had spotty availability. Long gone is the $20 brick of 500 .22 LR rounds. The same brick is over double the price now! Besides the increased cost you’d be lucky to find more than a box or two, but here I am singing to the song birds. Y’all may be nodding your heads saying, “Everybody knows that son.”

What you may not know is that you can shoot and hunt with airguns for a fraction of the cost. I shoot thousands of pellets per year hunting and stay on a trigger year-round. A tin of match-quality domed pellets may cost me $12-17 for 500, depending on the caliber — even less if I order in bulk, using the buy 3 get 1 free deal offered by Pyramyd Air. While most centerfire cartridges can be economically reloaded with the right equipment, I still can’t reload cheaper than I can shoot airguns. The cost savings is significant in an economy that’s forcing us to keep our wallets closed.

JSB Exact Jumbo domed pellets are premium ammo at an affordible price.

As much as I like shooting firearms, the drastic price increase in ammo over recent years has made shooting high quality airgun pellets the economical choice.

Versatility

Perhaps my favorite quality of airguns in general is the amazing versatility they posses. The market in the US has exploded! We’re seeing rifles capable of ethically taking down deer, coyote, fox, hog and other medium-sized animals. Rifles like the Sam Yang Dragon Claw .50 caliber can kill deer with 175 foot pounds of energy, while the Sumatra 2500 .25 caliber is ideal for coyotes with a bone-crushing 60 foot pounds of muzzle energy. These energy levels may sound low, but shot placement is the equalizer. A properly placed airgun pellet will kill an animal just as effectively as a firearm, and with less tissue damage.

Here are (from the left) .177, .20, .22, .25, .30, .357, .45 and .50 caliber pellets. The huge variety of airgun calibers now on the market allow not only small game hunting but medium and large game as well!

Some things to consider…

While I view the airgun as the ultimate hunting tool, there are a few things you’ll want to consider before making the jump yourself. The first thing I would do is check hunting legislation in your state or county. In many states airguns are not yet legal for hunting small game. Other states have caliber restrictions without regard to actual muzzle energy. To confuse things further some states consider certain animals to be game animals while others are not. For example, when I last lived in Texas, squirrels were considered game animals and thus not legal for airguns, however cottontails you could take year-round.

The power and low noise is great but it does come at the cost of reduced range. Airguns have similar ranges to archery, and you will simply need to keep this in perspective for your skill level. The challenges that come with stalking animals in airgun ranges can be quite rewarding. Most of my shots on animals are under 50 yards. While longer shots can be taken, you’ll want a well-tuned rifle and some experience with it before considering those.

I know that airguns will never fully replace firearms, but they do make a fantastic alternative when the situation dictates. As always, take my word with a grain of salt and do a bit of research. You may find that you have an open space in your gun safe for a well-built air rifle!

Semper Fi,

Derek Goins

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

The history of airguns

This report covers:

• Everything old is new again
• Feet per second (f.p.s.)
• FX offers many arrow launchers
• Missing the boat
• What I would do
• Advantages of a pneumatic arrow launcher
• The downside
• Summary

Everything old is new again

This will be a different kind of history report, because today the past is also the future. Today’s topic is one that has been touched on ever-so-lightly over the years, yet is also one of incredible significance today, when hunting with airguns is at the forefront of the hobby. I’m talking about airguns that launch arrows.

I’m not talking about crossbows, though they do serve as both the inspiration and the performance baseline for this subject. The airgun that launches arrows is very similar to the crossbow, except that it exceeds it in many important ways.

Feet per second (f.p.s.)

Our cousins using crossbows are assaulted by ads that tout  f.p.s., just like we do in the airgun world. The crossbow makers are as prone to ignore the weight of the arrows or bolts their products shoot when they give those velocity figures as any airgun maker would be. The advertising appears very similar to airgun advertising, though if you dig a little you can discover the facts that really matter. This is where I will start the discussion. A hunting crossbow that shoots a heavier hunting arrow of 400 grains at 350 f.p.s. is considered a powerful hunting weapon. But you really have to dig to get the arrow weight, because the advertising is all about the velocity.

However, where conventional crossbows struggle to get velocity, airguns do not. Their struggle for airguns is to shoot the arrows slow enough

I have shot airguns that propelled their arrows so fast (in excess of 440 f.p.s.) that they were either damaging the arrows or burying them so deep in the backstop that they were damaged when extracting them. In fact, it is a little-appreciated fact that when someone shoots an arrow from an airgun that their biggest concern may be slowing the arrow down!

Swivel Machine Corp Airrow Stealth

The airgun I shot that went that fast was one made many years ago by the Swivel Machine Corporation. It was both a pellet shooter and an arrow launcher. As a pellet shooter it was a miserable failure for many reasons. It was a revolver whose cylinder had to be rotated by hand for the next shot. The tolerances were machined to the ten-thousandth of an inch, and, while that sounds good — trust me, it isn’t. The parts fit so tight that they didn’t move freely on a cold day. And the trigger was a pneumatic valve release that had to be yanked fast or all the air would leak out of the gun. That gun just wasn’t fun to shoot at all, and it wasn’t accurate — probably because of all the trigger-jerking I had to do.

But their arrow launcher, called the Airrow Stealth, worked quite well. We operated it on CO2 outdoors on a 38-degree day and I was still burying bolts so deep in the backstop that some of their hollow shafts were damaged when they were extracted. The launcher had a red dot sight and, at about 40 yards, the whole thing was very accurate. I didn’t want to stop shooting it! I didn’t chronograph that launcher, but I can believe the claim of greater than 400 f.p.s. for a heavy hunting arrow on a 60-degree day.

I shot the Airrow Stealth on a cold day and was surprised by the performance!

One thing Swivel machine Corp saw was the potential for military sales. Arrow launchers are quieter than lower-powered pellet rifles, both because they have a lower muzzle blast and also because their arrows do not approach the sound barrier.

Swivel Machine appears to still be in business and still offers a pneumatic arrow launcher. I’m sure there have been changes in the nearly two decades since I shot one, but it still looks similar.

Another pneumatic arrow launcher of the recent past was the AirBow from Pneumatic Arms. It was pretty much the same thing — a rifle-looking launcher that shot an arrow. The trigger was a long lever grasped by the entire hand — very similar to a crossbow trigger of the Middle Ages. Not many were made and they are considered collector’s items today.

The AirBow from Pneumatic Arms is a collectible today.

FX offers many arrow launchers

FX of Sweden has seen the light and offers several arrow launchers today. Some are made specifically for that purpose, while others are adaptations of their existing pellet guns. So, it is possible to get a new pneumatic arrow launcher, but the price is high and the wait can be long if it isn’t in stock when you order.

Missing the boat

There are also several boutique arrow launcher makers out there. They come and go with the seasons. If you want something different it pays to go online and look around, because at any point in time, somebody if probably making them.

The remainder of the mainstream airgun community, however, is missing the boat. They scramble over one another to build big bore rifles that have become the flavor of the month while disregarding the technology that has the greatest potential for bearing fruit. With hunting as hot as it is today I would think this would be the next hot thing, but it isn’t.

When I talk to these makers, they tell me that crossbows are not legal for hunting in many states today. To which I answer, “Yes, and silencers were illegal for hunting until a few years ago. Now they are experiencing a boom!” If you wait until the climate is right and all the laws have been passed, you’ll miss the boat. Get out in front of the development curve and start defining the future yourself,  rather than waiting for it to be defined for you. Everyone else will have to scramble to keep up

What I would do

From time to time over the past 20 years I have advised certain manufacturers on new airgun projects and accessories. If I were asked to do this with an arrow launcher I would advise them to build it on the chassis of an existing gun. That saves a lot of development time and simplifies production.

I would advise them to sell the arrow launcher as an upgrade to the existing platform. Even if the existing platform isn’t perfectly suited to being an arrow launcher — say the stock is too fat and heavy — make a new stock part of the upgrade.

I would advise their marketing departments to create a package that includes everything in one handy field-transportable box or case — both the airgun and the arrow launcher. Shooters like systems that have multiple applications. To put it succinctly, everyone likes MacGyver and most men own at least one Swiss Army knife.

Advantages of a pneumatic arrow launcher

I’m not against crossbows, but air-powered arrow launchers do have several advantages. Weight is a good place to begin. A crossbow gains weight as the power increases. The makers are doing a lot to keep the weight in check, but an air launcher is so much easier to trim down that there is no contest.

Bulk goes along with weight. The limbs of the crossbow stick out to the sides. Compared to them, the air launcher can be as thin as a pipe.

Cocking effort! Do I even have to say it? Cocking a crossbow is daunting — especially the powerful ones. Air, on the other hand, weighs almost nothing. And we know that the pneumatic launchers have to be scaled back to keep from shooting too fast!

The downside

I’m sorry, but I don’t see a downside to this. If you are reading this subject I assume you want to hunt with arrows, so let’s not make comparisons between the trajectory arrows and bullets.

The fact that it takes compressed air to fill the gun isn’t a drawback. You can do that with a hand pump. Hand pumps are in the same price range as electric cocking winches for conventional crossbows.

Summary

Let’s wrap this up by observing that this idea of a pneumatic arrow launcher today is as obvious as a group of chemical engineers standing around a pool of oil in Titusville, PA, in the late 1800s and wondering whether the stuff had any commercial value.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

Air Venturi’s Wing Shot air shotgun is a serious new player in a very small field.

Air Venturi Wing Shot Review

This report covers:

• Description
• Shooting impressions
• Trigger
• Sights
• First and second test
• Test with bullets
• Ammo
• Third test
• A good 25-30-yard wing gun
• Summary

Today I begin a report on the Air Venturi Wing Shot air shotgun. This is not only a new product, it may be the first air shotgun I have tested that is really worthy of that title. We shall see as this test unfolds.

This isn’t the first report on the Wing Shot. You were treated to an early look by guest blogger and Pyramyd Air employee, Derek Goins. Today we start a detailed examination.

Description

The Wing Shot is a .50 caliber gun. It is smoothbore, and has a screw-in choke tube at the muzzle that reduces the bore size by 0.07 mm. We will see today what that does to the shot pattern.

It is 43 inches long and is shaped like a fine shotgun. My shooting buddy, Otho, is a shotgunner and the first word out of his mouth when he saw the gun was, “Wow!” He likes the Turkish walnut buttstock and the general feel of the gun. He felt it was perfect for him when he shouldered it.

Otho patterns the gun at 15 yards.

The Wing Shot is 43 inches overall and weighs 7.25 lbs. That’s on the heavy side for a smallbore shotgun (28 and 32 gauge and .410 caliber), but it doesn’t seem to slow it down. The balance seems about right — very neutral, front and back. The barrel is 22 inches long. The gun loads via a sliding breech cover that slides forward to load a shotshell and back to seal the breech. When you slide it back you must hear the breech cover click into place over the o-ring or the breech isn’t sealed. I failed to do that once and the breech blew open with the shot. No damage was done, but it alerted me to the need to close the breech tightly.

The breech cover slides forward to load. Place the shotshell into the trough and push it forward as far as you can. Be sure to close the breech cover all the way. That o-ring at the back seals the breech.

The gun cocks with a lever on the right side. Pull it straight back to one of two possible stops. The first stop is low power and all the way back is high. I am only interested in high power in this report, so that’s all I’m going to test.

It isn’t easy to cock this gun. Most adult men can cock the lever to the low power setting, but when the gun is new about half the men I sampled could not cock it to high power.

That changed after the gun had about 30 shots on the action. Then the cocking effort became smoother and everyone could cock it all the way. It now has around 60 shots on it and it is much smoother than when it was brand new. I expect it will continue to smooth out as it is used, because that’s the way these things usually work. But it is still a hard-cocking airgun.

These are the things new buyers need to know. This gun particularly is going to break in before your eyes in just a few shots. Don’t condemn it before that happens!

Shooting impressions

The gun is loud. It is a .50-caliber big-bore airgun, after all. It is much louder than any smallbore pneumatic you have heard, but not so loud that you need hearing protection when shooting outside.

There is some recoil when it fires. That recoil varies with what projectile you are shooting. The heavier the projectile, the harder the kick. At its hardest, it has perhaps half the recoil of a medium-weight .410 shotgun.

Trigger

The trigger is hard to evaluate, because you don’t notice it when shooting in the shotgun mode. Fortunately I also shot it with .50 caliber bullets off a bench and can tell you that it’s 2-stage and breaks crisply at 5 lbs. 11 oz. It feels like a lot less than that because of the crispness. It is non-adjustable.

Sights

This is a shotgun and real shotguns that are meant for wing shooting don’t have sights. They have a bead up front that you use to cover the game in flight and that’s it. The bead on the Wing Shot sits atop a low ramp. It is large and obvious. I acquired it very quickly after bringing the gun to my shoulder.

First and second test

My first 2 tests didn’t go so well, but in retrospect that was good for all of us. I had been given early experimental shotshells that performed variably. Although the gun is rated to shoot faster than 1100 f.p.s., all my early shots were in the 700 f.p.s., region. Of course it is very difficult to chronograph a shot column in flight and I managed to hit the chronograph skyscreens a couple times, but those early shots weren’t good. However, toward the end of that testing, after about shot number 30, things changed dramatically.

I chronographed the gun several times. After it broke in, the velocity was over 1100 f.p.s on the first shot. It remains over 1000 f.p.s for 3 shots.

Now that the Wing Shot is broken in, I fill it to 3000 psi. Then I start shooting. On one string I got 1156 f.p.s on the first shot and 1106 f.p.s. on shot number 2. Shot 3 went out at 1049 f.p.s. and shot 4 dropped to 783 f.p.s. And that is the way the gun has performed ever since this time. I tested it again several times and the result was always the same. The first 3 shots are powerful, then there is a quick dropoff in velocity on shot 4.

The low initial velocity I told you about was the gun breaking in. It was probably also the fault of the prototype ammo I was using. I shot about 40 of those prototype shells, and their performance was variable so I’m not reporting it.

Test with bullets

I also shot the gun with .50 caliber 210-grain Air Venturi Balle Blondeau bullets at 50 yards. Yes I did remove the choke before doing this.

I used the front bead and the top of the receiver as my aiming reference. The bullets landed 3 feet low, but I put 10 of them into 7-inches at that distance, which isn’t bad. I think out to 35 yards I could keep a bullet in the kill zone of an animal like a Javalina or even a small wild pig. Forget scoping the gun — it wasn’t designed as a big bore rifle. Only the high-drag design of the bullets I used kept them flying straight and grouping together.

Ammo

The Wing Shot uses shotshells that are consumed when fired. They cannot be reloaded. They are made to break up as they pass through the choke, which is where you get the excellent short-range patterns you are about to see.

The shells are currently offered with either number 6 or number 8 shot. Each shell holds about 120+ grains of shot inside the 130+-grain shotshell. There are 50 shells in a box. That makes the ammo expensive, but for what this shotgun can do, it may be worth the cost. I will explain that at the end of the report.

The shotshells are designed to break apart in the gun’s choke.

To make a comparison, a .410 low velocity shell launches 1/2 ounce of shot at around 1200 f.p.s. One-half ounce is about 219 grains, so the Wing Shot shotshells have about half as much shot at the .410 shell. Half the shot going just as fast means the Wing Shot is the most successful air shotgun to ever come to market.

Third test

The third test I conducted was the one that really told me what I needed to know. I had production shotshells to test and things went much better! Now I could really pattern this gun, and when I did, the results were amazing!

I couldn’t believe it, but I got a decent 9-10-inch pattern at just 10 yards! Try doing that with your .410. Even with a cylinder-bored gun you aren’t going to get a pattern that open at that distance, I don’t believe. I did this several times and always got the same results.

At 10 yards the pattern spread out to between 9 and 10 inches. The Hobby pellet tin is for scale.

Otho and I discovered that the test gun shoots low and a little to the left. We were able to adjust our hold to compensate.

At 15 yards the pattern opened up to a full 12 inches. That is phenomenal. And the pattern is even, with no open spots for a pigeon or dove to slip through.

At 15 yards the pattern spread out to a full 12 inches. This is a hunting pattern! Again, the Hobby tin is there for scale.

I thought the pattern would continue to open fast, but it didn’t seem to. Because at 20 yards it was only about 16 inches wide and still very even. No birds lost there, either.

At 20 yards the pattern opened to about 16 inches. Some shots were off the bull when it was stuck to the cardboard box. They don’t show here. This is still a good hunting pattern! I’m showing this target upside-down, as the gun patterned a little low.

A good 25-30-yard wing gun

What we have in the Wing Shot is a good 25-30-yard wing gun. That’s something we have needed, because the .410 is too much gun for closer distances like 10-15 yards. The firearm shotgun pattern is so dense at that distance that it will tear birds apart. But each individual shot (I mean just one piece of the shot) from the Wing Shot hits just as hard as one shot from a .410. There is just less of it in the shot column, and it spreads into a good pattern at that range.

The naturalist John James Audubon was a hunter and wingshooter par excellence. Though there is a conservation group that uses his name today, Audubon actually shot thousands of birds for his art studies. What would he have given for a shotgun that could be used effectively at such close range? Those of you who are wingshooters know what I’m saying.

Summary

This was just our first look at the Wing Shot air shotgun. I showed you the velocity, measured the trigger-pull, talked about the need for a break-in period, gave you the accuracy with a bullet at 50 yards and showed you several shot patterns. That’s a good start. I think the world has its first useful air shotgun.

With apologies to Dr. Pepper, Otho sent this can into orbit at 10 yards.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

The history of airguns

This report covers:

• First air compressor
• Condensing chamber/reservoir
• Valves
• Controlling force
• Sealing against air loss
• The first air valve
• The rest of the gun was easy
• Performance
• When did it happen?

I just finished reading about the Wright brothers quest to fly, and I learned some things. For starters, I never thought about their first flight — how did they know what to do? There was nobody to teach them because mankind hadn’t flown a powered airplane yet. So how did the Wright brothers learn to fly?

Don’t answer that. That was a large part of what the book was about. But do you see a parallel between the Wrights and the person who built the first pneumatic airgun? He had no one to copy, either. He had to do everything himself, because pneumatic guns didn’t exist yet.

First air compressor

The inventor of the first pneumatic gun was probably aware of certain pneumatic experiments that came before his time. The condensing syringe was known to the Greeks of Alexandria 200 years before the birth of Christ. We call them air pumps today, but they do their work today the same as they did back then. This is the first air compressor. With it, the pneumatic airgun becomes possible.

Compressed air can be used immediately upon compression to do things like power a siren or a whistle. The sound tells you that the air was compressed and it also tells you when the compressed air is completely exhausted. However, if you could store the compressed air and then call upon it at any time, it would be a source of energy that might have a lot more uses.

Condensing chamber/reservoir

I don’t know when the first condensing chamber (reservoir) was invented, because its history is pretty vague. But it is the key to the first airgun. We know that airguns with bellows have been around since the 1500s, but the bellows gun is a spring gun that compresses air and uses it immediately. The gun we are interested in is the one that holds compressed air as long as desired and releases it suddenly on command. To be able to do that you first need a way to store the compressed air, and that’s where the condensing chamber (reservoir) comes in.

A reservoir (I will use that term from now on) needs a way to accept compressed air, and we call that an inlet valve. If there were no inlet valve but only a straight hole into the reservoir, the air would enter, but the moment the incoming pressure was relaxed it would come back out again. The valve acts as a door that only opens one way.

Once the air is safely stored inside the reservoir, there needs to be a way to release it on command, as well. That’s another valve. It could be the same valve as the inlet valve, but it has to work in the opposite direction — to only release air from the reservoir. The same valve can be made to do both tasks, but the mechanism needed to do both things with a single valve is complicated. It’s easier to just use a second valve that’s located at a different place on the reservoir.

This valve has to work one way also, but its function is exactly opposite that of the inlet valve — to only release air from the reservoir. You have probably experimented with something like this already if you ever shook a bottle of soda pop and held your thumb over the opening. Your thumb acts as the valve and with it you can control where the soda spray goes. The gas pressure of the soda is low enough that you can control it.

Valves

We are just getting started designing the first pneumatic gun, but building the reservoir is the key. Barrels, triggers and locks are simple compared to pneumatic valves. At the time the first pneumatic gun was created, mankind was used to valves that controlled water. The pneumatic valve had to control air — something much more ephemeral. What could do it? Not your thumb — that’s for sure!

Controlling force

One key to making a valve was controlling a powerful force. A clockmaker, for example, knew that a small lever could be used to control a very powerful force if the lever’s fulcrum were in the right location. The air valve had to be like that — able to control a large force with just a little effort.

Something better than a thumb was needed. The valve had to be strong enough to hold back the air, yet it had to be able to open at the right time. Before you start wondering how this was ever conceived, remember that at this time in history (a time we don’t exactly know) men already knew a lot about designing gun locks, door locks and mechanisms like clocks. These were the same men who had the knowledge to design the first pneumatic gun.

Another key was controlling the amount of the force, itself. Mill operators knew that opening the millrace allowed more water to flow through and hit the wheel, generating greater force. The way to control the mill was to control the flow of water through the race. The same idea could be applied to compressed air, though in far smaller scale because of the thinness of air.

Sealing against air loss

This is the big one. The other problems have solutions in other areas that can be studied and modified, but no one had ever tried to contain compressed air before. However, they weren’t without ideas. One was obvious, although I don’t suppose it struck them that way until they tried it and found that it worked. Make the seal from leather! Make a leather valve face contact a metal valve seat, sealing all airflow through the valve. As long as the leather remained pliable, it would seal against air loss pretty well. No one knew this until they built several valves and tried them for the first time, of course, but it did work.

This seal worked for both inlet valves and exhaust valves. Once a valve was finally built, the builders discovered that the pressure of air compressed by a condensing syringe (hand pump) was sufficient to open the valve to admit more compressed air into the reservoir. When the incoming air pressure dropped (at the end of the pump stroke), the valve spring inside the inlet valve forced the valve shut again. Once that happened, the air pressure inside the reservoir held the valve shut, along with the tension of the valve spring.

The first air valve

Controlling the amount of force that came from the reservoir was solved by making the air passage through the valve body very small. It was just like the millrace only far smaller. They couldn’t control the power in the same way as the race, because once the air valve opened things happened too fast. So they found themselves in our world of valve dwell time. The size of the air passage leading out of the valve combined with the strength of the spring holding the valve shut determined how much air escaped when the valve was hammered open.

Sounds cool, no? Well, at the time it was among the most advanced technology mankind had ever seen. Still, leather is somewhat porous and also prone to dry out, so the compressed air didn’t stay inside the reservoir for long. At best it might hold for several days. But eventually it leaked out and you had to fill the reservoir again.

The rest of the gun was easy

Once he had his air reservoir holding air that could be released at will, the first airgun designer found the rest of his task easy. As I said before, designing a lock to hammer the exhaust valve open was child’s play. And the remainder of the gun came together rapidly.

It was a successful condensing syringe (hand pump) and a working valve inside a working air reservoir that challenged that first airgun designer.

Performance

Once all these things came together, a first shot was fired. Maybe the projectile (a ball?) came out of the barrel at 200 f.p.s. — fast enough to dent the wooden walls of his shop. Within a week he was denting the wood deeply and on one fine day that first ball passed completely through the wooden plank and left the building. That shot wouldn’t impress any of us today, but to the man doing the work back then it must have looked like he had just invented anti-gravity or invisibility!

When did it happen?

No one knows when that first pneumatic airgun was invented. We suspect it might have been in the mid-1500s, though there are sources that claim it happened as early as the mid-1400s. We do know it wasn’t much earlier than that because no trace of airguns or writing about them dates that early. We also know of dated airgun parts from around the year 1600. Their designs are advanced far enough to suggest that there must have been something that came before. So the time of the first pneumatic airgun is pretty much fixed to between 1450 and 1600 AD.

That puts the first airguns at 100 to 200 years after the invention of firearms. But firearms advanced rapidly after they were invented, because their technology was relatively simple. Airguns, though, would remain the stuff of rumors and legend for several hundred more years.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

The Modoc from Air Ordnance is a new single shot big bore in 9mm.

This report covers:

• What is the Modoc?
• The difference between 9mm and .357 caliber
• Aluminum barrel!
• Long barrel
• Air cartridges
• 4500 psi
• The gun
• Open sights
• Weaver bases
• Air cartridges
• Open sights
• Summary

Today we take a look at an unusual air rifle — the Modoc from Air Ordnance.

This is the first time I have written about an airgun from Air Ordnance in this blog, but it isn’t the first time I have tested one. Several years ago I tested the SMG 22 belt-fed carbine they produce and wrote it up in a feature article in Shotgun News. Indeed one of the main photos on my website, The Godfather of Airguns, shows me holding that gun. My buddy, Otho, was so impressed when he shot it that he considered buying one.

What is the Modoc?

The Modoc is a 9mm big bore single shot air rifle, built on what looks like a Remington rolling block action. It isn’t, of course, but the action is steel. It uses an air cartridge instead of a reservoir inside the gun. There are many things about this airgun that are different, and we will consider them today. The first is why Air Ordnance decided to market the Modoc as 9mm instead of .357 caliber, when every other big bore maker on the market has switched over.

Cock the hammer and roll back the breechblock, and the rolling block is ready to be loaded.

The difference between 9mm and .357 caliber

Nine millimeter is very close to .357 caliber in size. A 9mm pistol bullet is either 0.355 or 0.356-inches in diameter. People who are not shooters will look at that and say that’s close enough to .357 caliber (which uses a .357 or .358-inch bullet) that those bullets will work, as well. What is one-thousandth of an inch? This is where it’s good to have some experience with reloading, because one-thousandth of an inch can make a huge difference in accuracy.

I advise big bore makers that there are hundreds of different lead bullets available in .357 and .358 caliber, but only a very few lead bullets in .355 and .356 calibers. That’s because most modern 9mm pistols shoot jacketed bullets, while .38 Special and .357 Magnum revolvers can shoot either lead or jacketed bullets. Lead bullets are not even loaded into 9mm calibers by the major reloading houses. Finding a supply of 9mm lead bullets will therefore be something of a challenge. Most people who shoot big bore airguns do not cast their own bullets, so the fact that bullet molds exist isn’t really a solution.

However, sometimes a larger lead bullet works well and even better in a gun than a bore-sized bullet — especially when driven at the low velocities of airguns and black powder guns. That is the nature of lead bullets. Shooters who shoot muzzleloading firearms are well-acquainted with this fact. So all is not lost for the Modoc. I have to test it on the range to see what works and what doesn’t, and that will include testing the H&N Grizzly bullet and the JSB Exact .35 caliber pellet.

Aluminum barrel!

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Modoc is its aluminum barrel. Yes, I said aluminum, as in no steel liner. The airgun community is buzzing with talk about this, but all the comments I have read are focused on the wrong thing. They are concerned with the burst strength of the aluminum, and that’s not the problem. Aluminum can be more than strong enough to contain airgun pressures. What they should focus on is the wear resistance of the metal. Even steel muzzleloading barrels will wear out when shooting patched lead balls.

Air Ordnance is aware of the concern over barrel wear. They say they have shot their gun thousands of times and noticed no wear in the barrel. There is no way I can test for that in this report, or even in the feature article I plan to run next year in Shotgun News, so for now we will just have to accept what they say. As long as you don’t shoot jacketed bullets in the gun I think you’ll get a lot of use from the barrel.

The other thing the aluminum barrel does is it makes the rifle very light for its size. What should weigh 9+ pounds weighs only 6.5 pounds, according to the Air Ordnance website. The rifle I am testing weighs 6.5 pounds on the nose! That doesn’t happen too often.

Long barrel

Whoever designed the Modoc understood precharged pneumatic airguns because the barrel is 31.125-inches long. The Air Ordnance website says it’s 34.5 inches, but it’s not that even on the outside. I loaded an air cartridge and measured the barrel from the point where the bullet sits. From there to the muzzle is 31.125-inches.

That still gives the air plenty of time to accelerate the bullet to speed. Air Ordnance told me at the 2015 SHOT Show that they were getting as much as 180 foot-pounds from the Modoc, which is a lot for such a small caliber. That would be a 123-grain 9mm lead bullet moving at about 812 f.p.s. Lighter bullets and pellets can be expected to go even faster. We shall see.

Air cartridges

The Modoc uses air cartridges. Three cartridges and a filling station come with the rifle. If you have an air compressor you can fill these 3 cartridges to 4,500 psi before leaving home, but when you fill in the field from a carbon fiber air tank the pressure in the tank is going to start dropping with the first fill. This is going to present a problem for me testing velocity. After the first 3 shots I will be filling the cartridges at the range from my tank and the pressure will star to drop. There is no way around this without obtaining additional cartridges.

The steel air cartridge is filled with air and a bullet, then loaded into the rifle.

I will describe the air cartridges in detail in the next report. I will also explain how they work in the rifle. I will also show the cartridge fill station that comes with the rifle and describe how it works. For today, though, I have said all I’m going to.

4500 psi

The fill pressure is a severe limitation for the Modoc because it puts a real strain on the shooter. Many shooters do not have 4500 psi tanks yet, and the number of those who have compressors that go that high is smaller. I understand why the gun uses this pressure. The barrel is so long and the cartridge volume is so small that they need all the air they can pack into the space.

Of course the cartridge will function fine when filled to a pressure lower than 4500 psi. What it does to the gun’s accuracy at 50 yards, though, will be something we will find out together.

The gun

The Modoc is a long rifle — Air Ordnance says it’s fully 54-inches from stem to stern, but my tape measure says it’s 51.125-inches. It dwarfs most modern rifles — airgun and firearm. To find a gun case remember you need to get one that’s at least 52-inches long. I stuffed the test rifle into a Plano single scoped rifle case and it just fit. That case is 51.5 inches on the inside.

The gun is all metal and wood. The barrel is aluminum finished matte black and the blackened receiver is steel. Air Ordnance must have designed the receiver so it can’t be turned into a firearm, because BATF&E wouldn’t permit it to be sold without registration if it could.

The buttstock and forearm are walnut that’s stained dark brown. The wood is plain, but the stain is even and there is no wood filler to be seen. The forearm ends in a slight schnabel.

The gun is light but very well balanced heavy. The lightweight barrel does not pull down at the front.

Open sights

The rifle comes with open sights front and rear. The front is a tall brass blade similar to a Kentucky rifle blade but much taller and the rear is a full buckhorn — a type of sight seldom seen these days. It’s a range-compensating sight, once you learn how to use it. The rear sight has a couple different notches to choose from and is adjustable for elevation, only. Some windage correction is possible by drifting both the front and rear sights sideways in their dovetail slots.

The front sight harkens back to the 1850s.

The full buckhorn rear sight has different notches to choose from. It adjusts for elevation only.

Weaver bases

The rifle is supplied with Weaver bases that attach to the action and the barrel. So the gun can be scoped. I will do it, because the test wouldn’t be complete without it, but my personal preference is to use the open sights.

The rifle comes with Weaver bases that attach to the receiver and barrel.

Summary

We have a brand new big bore airgun to test. This one has a number of differences from other big bores that will make this an interesting test. There is so much new stuff that I will make a Part 2 to the introduction, and we will look at the air cartridges and filling station in that part. I’m learning this stuff right along with you, so stay tuned.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

This report covers:

• The argument
• Liability
• So, is nitrogen dangerous?
• Oxygen can kill you!
• So what? We’re talking about nitrogen
• What about other gasses?
• Show some respect

Tomorrow is Thursday, December 24. It’s Christmas Eve. On that day I’m running a special blog that allows you readers to do most of the writing. We will all tell which airgun we would like to receive for Christmas, and I will start it in the text. Be thinking about the one airgun you want the most this year.

I realize that not all readers celebrate the Christmas holiday. But don’t let that deter you from commenting. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, this exercise is open to all readers.

I’m running some Best of B.B. reports to give myself some time at Christmas. I have family and guests this week, and I can’t get to the computer as often as I would like. This report was first published back on January 15, 2008. I have updated and added a few things to it for today.

This report was requested by reader Pestbgone, but from my years working at AirForce I know that a lot of other shooters also wonder about it.

The argument

Here is the argument – Air is composed of approximately 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and the remainder a smattering of other gasses. With nitrogen as the principal component, these people want to know why a precharged airgun can’t be operated on it exclusively. Nitrogen is more readily available to many of them (welding), and if it can be used it will lessen their airgun support problems immensely. I will address the issue today.

What I used to tell people who called in to AirForce with this question is that we only recommended our guns for use with breathing air and no other gasses. The seals in our guns were selected for use with air (a true statement) and we could not be responsible for their use with any other gas (also true). What drove that answer was product liability.

Liability

Do you have any idea of how much money an airgun manufacturer pays EVERY YEAR for liability insurance? It’s a heck of a lot more than most of us make. I’m not talking about the level of liability the company is insured for, just the actual cost for the coverage — the bill! The cost is based in part on how many guns you expect to sell, so as you prosper, your rates increase, because the insurance company’s exposure increases.

To even get covered a company has to have solid product literature, solid technical data on its products and a solid base of information that directs the customer in the safe use of the product. Remember, and this is no laughing matter, that there once was a man in the U.S. who sued a lawnmower manufacturer for damages he received when he picked up the mower deck while his lawnmower was running, in an attempt to trim his hedges! He won a settlement for that! That’s why all mowers sold in the United States today have a kill switch that must be depressed at all times for the mower to run. It’s that spring-loaded bar you have to squeeze when operating the mower.

So, is nitrogen dangerous?

Will nitrogen hurt your PCP? No, it won’t. Nitrogen is an inert gas that doesn’t react with most things. Oxygen, on the other hand, supports combustion, and the oxygen that both medical personnel and welders have access to has been known to blow up airguns!

Oxygen can kill you!

Now, here is the bad news. While nitrogen is relatively harmless, oxygen can kill you! Oxygen supports combustion so violently that it overwhelms people standing near. A fire in a room saturated with pure oxygen is so violent that people inside have almost no chance of escaping.

Do you think that nobody would be stupid enough to try using pure oxygen in a PCP? Think again. It has happened many times, once probably resulting in death. That one happened in England in the 1990s, but take a look at Pyramyd Air’s experience with it.

This Fire 201 9mm rifle was filled with oxygen instead of air. The caliber doesn’t make any difference. It’s the oxygen that does the damage. It caught fire while being shot and melted the rifle as seen here.

This is what happens when a VERY HOT flame is held against aluminum for a long time! It looks like a cutting torch has been used on this gun from the inside out. This was a Fire 201 9mm rifle.

Note the discoloration of the anodizing. Forensic scientists use clues like this and the bending of the steel barrel to determine how much heat caused the damage and how long the fire lasted.

This is the SECOND time Pyramyd Air has had to deal with this same problem. The first time a medical technician called in to ask them why his Career 707 was shooting a blue flame out the muzzle on every shot! Had his rifle exploded and he survived, don’t you think he would have tried to make them pay for it?

So what? We’re talking about nitrogen

What this has to do with nitrogen is simply this, PEOPLE DON’T PAY ATTENTION! For instance, nitrogen can come in tanks compressed to 6,000 psi instead of 3,000 psi. I once met a guy who thought the way to fill a PCP was to connect the hose to the gun and open the valve as fast as he could. The gun filled right up in a couple of seconds, though it did get hot. If you don’t understand why, please re-take your high school general science class where they explained about the heat generated by compression.

Now, you take a paintball player who has access to nitrogen in 6,000 psi tanks and the same attitude as the guy I just described and you will have large pieces left to bury. But, take a medical technician with the same attitude and access to pure oxygen and the pieces will be both smaller and probably well-roasted.

What about other gasses?

What about helium, people ask? Yeah — what about it? Will is make a pellet go faster? Yes. Do I care? No. I have firearms for whenever I need to go faster or hit harder.

Show some respect

Guys, these are AIR guns, and they need to be operated with some respect. Yes, the shark blowing up in the movie Jaws was Hollywood theatrics, but we are dealing with some serious technology here, and we need to respect it. It’s funny watching someone else on You Tube shoot a propane tank with a .22 rimfire and get consumed in the resulting explosion. It’s not as funny when you’re the one at ground zero.

So, what am I saying? I’m saying that our current precharged airguns are built to operate on breathing air and that’s how they should be used. Let’s leave the serious accidents to the skateboarders, stunt cyclists and the people on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Editor’s note: Since this report was published, AirForce Airguns has started advertising that their guns may be used with compressed nitrogen, as well as air.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• Your new air cane
• Oh-oh!
• But I saw this on TV
• Back to reality
• What can break on a vintage air cane?
• Dialing it back
• Does this really work?

Merry Christmas! I hope this day finds you smiling and joyful.

Today I want to discuss a topic that seldom arises, yet is at the forefront of every novice collector’s mind. Namely, “Should I (and can I) shoot my antique airgun?” Many of you will agree there is no one right answer to this question, because the answer depends on many things. Today I’d like to discuss a few of them.

Your new air cane

Let’s say you went to an airgun show and were captivated by a beautiful air cane that was still in its original case with all the accoutrements. When you saw it for the first time your heart melted and your wallet popped open with unaccustomed speed. You wanted this air cane!

A fine cased air cane by Reilly, complete with all equipment. It’s museum quality and now it’s yours!

Oh-oh!

You get the cane home and fondle it lovingly for a few days, then the evil part of your brain wakes up and goes to work. “Sure, she’s a supermodel, but can she cook?” You find yourself yearning to see what it’s like to shoot this cane.

But I saw this on TV

Collector’s shows on television are no help in this situation. The guy who just bought the 1915 Stanley Steamer for a quarter million dollars decides to get it into running condition. After a commercial break he tells you it took a lot but he finally got the old girl back on the road and boy is he having fun with it. What he never mentions is the 8 months and half-million dollars he had to invest to get the car to where it is now. And a guy like this can do that because he has all the time in the world and money to burn. He can afford to pay someone ten thousand dollars to fabricate a cylinder head for his automobile, to replace the original one that has a crack. He is connected to people around the world who collect Stanley Steamers, and they can help him solve any problem he encounters. All it takes is time and money.

Back to reality

On the other hand, you have a job to go to every day and bills to pay. Your bank balance is a finite number. Can you afford to play with the big boys? Can you risk your new $5,000 investment, just for the satisfaction of seeing it shoot a few times? As it turns out, you can!

What can break on a vintage air cane?

The first thing to do is assess your new cane and ask the question, “What can break?” And you discover that the only things at great risk are the springs and the air reservoir. A good blacksmith can make new springs, so line up one of them before you start. And as for the air reservoir, why don’t you just not use it at all? Leave it as is and make a new one to attach to the cane.
When you make that decision you realize that the cane’s firing valve has to be transferred to the new reservoir and that’s the perfect time to replace the valve seat made of animal horn with one made of Delrin. Now you don’t have to lubricate the valve with sperm whale oil every time you want to shoot!

Dialing it back

Okay, Ground Control to Major Tom! You don’t really have $5,000 to blow on a cased cane. Wouldn’t that be nice, but like the Stanley Steamer, that’s not you.

You do have $450, however, for that beater cane that’s unsigned but looks like something made by Townsend. It’s ugly and missing the rifled barrel insert and ramrod, but hey — other than the rifled barrel it’s complete and it’s in your budget! It still has a .43 caliber smoothbore barrel that will work just fine and you can make another ramrod out of a dowel rod..

You don’t have the skill or the money to build a new air reservoir, but a collector tells you he runs his canes on CO2 in their original reservoirs and it works fine. As long as they aren’t made from Damascus steel, which the cheaper ones like the one you are looking at aren’t, the original reservoir is plenty strong enough for CO2. All you need is an adaptor to attach to where the hand pump normally goes. Another guy at the show offers to make an adaptor for you for $60. That will allow you to fill the cane from a paintball tank.

Does this really work?

The reason I know all this is I have done it — not once but twice. I used to shoot my .43 caliber air cane at all the airgun shows that had ranges. The guys who taught me all this stuff are mostly gone now, but a few are still around. So if you want to shoot that vintage airgun — yes, there probably is a way. Think about what might break and why, and then deal with those issues and you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Maybe I never went home with a supermodel, but at least I was well-fed.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• They don’t make ‘em like they used to
• Are today’s airguns better?
• 1. Technology — back then
• Technology — now
• 2. Understanding the principles — back then
• Understanding the principles — now
• 3. Company staff and leadership — back then
• Company staff and leadership — now
• 4. Market trends — then and now
• Summary

Happy New Year! May 2016 be a good year for all of us.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to

Ain’t that the truth? Nothing is the same anymore. Usually when people discuss this subject they only remember the good things from the past. Things like the heavy metal Detroit muscle cars that had huge engines. They forget that those engines had to be tuned up every 10K miles, or that they often leaked oil.

As far as airguns go people remember blued steel and walnut stocks. They remember airguns that were made like firearms, and they both looked and felt like it. But a lot of facts are edited out.

Before 1970, an airgun that could achieve 800 feet per second (f.p.s.) velocity was considered a magnum. Today, the same gun would be a youth model, or at best an adult plinker. Today’s airguns top 1,000 f.p.s. regularly. The fastest exceed 1,400 f.p.s.

Prior to 1990, 50 yards was considered the maximum distance an airgun could shoot with accuracy, and even then it could not keep 10 shots in a group of less than about two inches. Today there are airguns that will put 10 pellets in 3/8 inch at 50 yards and less than one inch at 100 yards. Airgunners today are shooting to 200, 300 and even 400 yards.

BSF S54 underlever was a fine air rifle for the 1950s. But it tops out at 725 f.p.s. in .177 caliber and it isn’t that accurate.

Are today’s airguns better?

What made all of this possible are both the modern airgun powerplants and the pellets they shoot. We have powerplants today that eclipse the best guns of 50 years ago, and today’s pellets will make even the old guns more accurate — to say nothing of what they will do in a modern platform.

The traditionalist insists that a modern airgun is no good because its metal is matte black or even painted. Today’s stocks are either made from nondescript hardwood with no grain or worse — they are synthetic. Compare that to the best guns of the past and of course the modern guns suffer.

So, who is right? Are today’s airguns better, or have we passed right through the Golden Age on our way to tracer burnout? And what drives change? That’s what I want to talk about today.

I will present several factors that influence change. These are listed in no particular order and their significance increases or decreases as circumstances change.

1. Technology — back then

The first change driver is technology. Airguns of the past were made on manual production machinery like lathes and mills. They had to be designed to suit that machinery.

Tolerances were held as close as possible without spending too much time so costs didn’t rise too high. Labor was cheap in comparison to the large capital expenditures needed for production machinery. Therefore the time spent on the machines was the biggest cost. And the time it took to set up those machines to run a job was time when they weren’t producing, so designers took that into account.

The results were designs that changed very little over the years. Airguns shared parts to a large extent. But because the machines that made those parts often left rough surfaces with tool marks, a lot more hand finishing had to be done.

The tolerances held by the machines tended to change over time as their cutting tools wore out. Some hand fitting was necessary to assemble the guns. The person doing the assembly was also helping check for finish flaws, which improved the final result.

Both wood and steel finishes have evolved greatly with time. In the past, bluing, which usually meant applying a process called black oxide, was the number one way to finish steel. This finish was thin, tough and tended to show any marks that were left on the metal, so more hand finishing was done to correct it.

Wood finishes of the past were those that had existed for hundreds of years. They were oil-based and soaked into the wood grain where they achieved good depth.

Technology — now

Today we have single machines that can do many times more machining jobs on a part than in the past. They are driven by computers, so changing the design during production doesn’t impact the schedule like it once did. Software does the changing and once the tools are loaded and the system is checked, the machines take over. These same machines can change their tooling automatically when they detect wear, so the tolerances they maintain from part to part are much closer than in the past. Far less hand fitting is required during assembly. In fact less human involvement of any kind is necessary.

Hand finishing is becoming a thing of the past. The tools of today leave smoother finishes than in the past and automated finishing processes take over from there. Of course the mirror finish on steel is no longer achieved, but the material is often a metal other than steel anyway. And the finishes that are applied are in-step with the rest of the manufacturing processes.

Modern manufacturers uses materials like aluminum and engineering plastics in applications where they are best suited. Many times shooters complain, but if they look at law enforcement and military firearms, they have been moving in the same direction for decades. This is a fact of life in the 21st century. It’s always possible to get a job done by hand using the classic materials but the price is steep. Little red wagons are not often made of steel anymore!

German Diana 34P is a best-selling modern spring rifle. The metal is matte and the stock is synthetic, and it will put 10 pellets into one inch at 50 yards.

Molybdenum disulfide, or moly for short, is a high-tech lubricant that reduces friction and adheres to the material it’s applied to. It has been the lubricant of choice for custom tuners for decades. Now we are starting to see manufacturers use it on their new guns.

Wood finishes are now sprayed on to form a tough topical coating. Or they are applied by a process of dipping the stock into a tank where they adhere to the surface. Either way, they are topical, only.

O-rings have been used to seal CO2 guns since they were first introduced in the 1940s, but in the past they were soft and absorbed gas. Today we see manufacturers looking at more advanced materials for their dynamic seals like o-rings. Things like durometer ratings of o-rings and other seal materials that were once just a specification are now being applied to make modern gas guns virtually leak-proof.

2. Understanding the principles — back then

As time has passed, our understanding of how airguns work has grown. In the past manufacturers were content just to get airguns to work. Guns that didn’t leak when fired and guns that were both safe and reliable were the goal. Velocity and accuracy were secondary in those days. Maybe people didn’t think that way, but in retrospect we see that is what happened.

Understanding the principles — now

Today we know much more about what makes an airgun work well than ever before. We know that a piston with a long stroke will generate greater power than one that is shorter. We understand that the tightness of fit at the breech of a breakbarrel spring rifle is paramount to accuracy, just as a free-floated barrel works best in a pneumatic. We understand that the fit of the piston seal to the compression chamber and the size and length of the air transfer port have a huge impact on how an airgun performs. And that is just the beginning.

We now know how to remove almost all of the wasteful vibration of a spring gun powerplant — turning it into more power with a smoother shot cycle as a benefit. Twenty years ago things like tight-fitting spring guides and buttoned pistons were the bread and butter of custom tuners, but today we see them being built right into the airguns at the factory! What’s more — modern manufacturers are using advanced materials to enhance the products they make.

The USFT rifle is made in low numbers by Mac-1 Airguns. It takes a 1650 psi fill and gets 55 powerful shots that will all hit a quarter at 50 yards. This rifle breaks new ground in several pneumatic principles.

And pneumatic guns are taking off like a rocket — pardon the pun! Things as simple as barrel length are now understood to boost power in guns with no additional investment or changes. Valve timing, de-bounce devices (to let the valve stay closed when the gun fires) and balanced striker springs to lower fill pressures are all advancing the world of the pneumatic airgun faster than anything else. Yes, technology has advanced the modern airgun greatly.

3. Company staff and leadership — back then

In the past airgun companies had workers who spent their entire lives in the same job. They were managed by leadership that emerged from the same workforce. To say the people in such companies lived and breathed airguns is not an exaggeration.

Company staff and leadership — now

Today’s companies are often managed by professional businessmen and -women. They understand the financial side of the operation quite well, but often they are not shooters and do not understand nor use the products they make. Consequently business decisions are made using only the information they do understand — creating a company that’s run by a spreadsheet.

Workers are hired for their age and their wage requirements. They are then trained in-house by the workers who were previously hired and trained in the same fashion. In time this becomes a workforce of the blind leading the blind.

Boards of directors are also just interested in the bottom line — not in the future health of the company, so they press for and often get short-term solutions. Imagine a cheesemaker who doesn’t actually make cheese, but buys it from another source. From time to time they slice a thin sliver off the top of an existing block to expose the fresh cheese underneath. At some point there won’t be any more cheese to slice — to say nothing about creating cheeses that haven’t been in their inventory in the past.

A few airgun companies are staffed with people who actually do understand and appreciate airguns. They tend to be the younger companies, although under the right leadership any company can thrive. These are the companies that bring the lion’s share of innovations to market.

4. Market trends — then and now

You might think that the consumer dictates what comes to market, and if we were talking about cars, movies or television programs you’d be right. But the airgun market is such a narrow niche, even within the shooting sports, that the customers are often the last people to be heard. Fortunately there is a strong base of boutique airgun makers at the grassroots level who turn out the guns and products they know serious airgunners want.

Smart companies spend time on the chat forums, looking at what’s being discussed by active airgunners. But the chat forums are home to less than one percent of all the airgun buyers.

Most airgun buyers know little or nothing about the airguns they buy. Sometimes they know less than nothing, because what they think they know is wrong. These are the customers for whom the major manufactures are producing.

You will notice I’m discussing this topic all together — no past and present. That’s because little has changed in the world of airgun consumers and marketing over the past 100 years. Accuracy that once ruled has been displaced by velocity as the primary sales feature, but that is because of the low cost of a chronograph. And the paramilitary look is in, not because buyers want it as much as because it’s one of the few things a modern staffer with no shooting experience can appreciate. If it looks like a gun to them, they reason, it must be right. And most of the time, they are right, because buyers often know as little about guns as the staff members.

Summary

I have told you a lot about how and why modern airguns got to be the way that they are. In several cases I haven’t suggested what can be done about it. That’s because this is a hard market to understand and an even harder one to crack. But at least now you have some insight into why “they” don’t always do the things you think they should.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• What is an air cane?
• What was their purpose?
• Air cane styles
• One special air cane
• Shooting air canes
• Fascinating hobby

This report was requested by several readers after seeing a cased air cane in an earlier history report.

In the 19th century, the airgun world developed many curiosities, but none made more of an impression on today’s collectors than the pneumatic walking stick, or air cane, as it has come to be known. They survive by the thousands and fascinate all who see them. Today I’d like to examine the air cane!

Here we see a complete simple straight cane disassembled. From the left the parts are: the lower outer shell, the upper outer shell that is also the reservoir, the smoothbore barrel and lock, with the firing valve removed from the reservoir, the rifled barrel insert and the ramrod that doubles as the cane’s outer tip for walking.

What is an air cane?

An air cane is a large-caliber single-shot pneumatic gun that fires many times on one charge of air. Most are muzzleloaders, but there are a few breechloaders that employ loading taps. There is no standard design, but the most common canes are straight smoothbore guns of about .43 caliber with a rifled insert barrel of .28 to .33 caliber. The lock and firing mechanism is completely hidden inside a two-piece smooth metal shell that looks like a thick walking stick. A male key is inserted into a square socket in the side of the cane to cock the lock for each shot, and when the lock is cocked a small metal button pops out to serve as the trigger.

Here you see the air cane’s cocking socket. A square-shaped clock key is inserted and turned to cock the lock. I have cocked the lock for this photo and the firing button (the trigger) has popped out on the cane’s body at the upper left.

The air cane lock is unique, but bears more than a passing resemblance to a percussion lock of the same period. The cane is divided in two sections, with the top section being the air reservoir and firing valve and the bottom section housing the lock and barrel. Look at the photo of the disassembled cane to see these parts.

Canes can fire at least 10 shots from a single fill of air, and as many as 40 shots have been recorded from some of the largest examples. The first few shots (on CO2) will propel a 121-grain .43-caliber lead ball at about 650 f.p.s., which is lethal. On air you can expect another 100 f.p.s.

What was their purpose?

The popular myth is that air canes were 19th century defensive weapons. Most advanced collectors believe this is untrue, because it takes a lot of work to make a muzzleloading air cane ready to fire. Perhaps, if you knew you were about to go in harm’s way, you might have time to make the weapon ready, but a derringer or even a good knife would be better. Using an air cane for self-defense would be the equivalent of holding up a liquor store with a flintlock — not the thing a thoughtful person would do. I think sword canes are much more capable defensive weapons, and people have probably extrapolated the defense role to air canes because of their similar appearance.

Many collectors believe the principal attraction to air canes was simply their existence. They were portable science experiments one could use to amaze both family and friends.

They were not used as walking sticks. The end of the ramrod did have a brass tip that could be put on the ground, but it was too fragile to serve as a walking support. It was more for show than for go.

Air cane styles

Pneumatic canes were produced by some large makers, who used their own workers plus the collective output of many cottage industries. They brought all the parts together in a design that did not vary over many years. Hence, there are common types of canes, yet each cane is also a unique, handmade object.

A lockmaker fashioned the locks to fit inside the housings used by his principal customer, the cane maker. He was therefore motivated to work within the envelope, so to speak. A barrel maker probably knew very little about making a reservoir or a valve, and only at the cane-making house, whose name sometimes graces the lock, did all the components come together.

The straight cane shown at the beginning and end of this report is by far the most commonly encountered style. It could be purchased as a smoothbore alone, a smoothbore with a rifled insert barrel or with all the tools and the necessary hand pump, cased together in an attractive display box. Sometimes there was an additional reservoir shaped like a shotgun butt, so the cane could be converted to a more sporting use.

One level of sophistication above the straight cane is the bent cane, whose steel reservoir is curved gracefully to showcase the maker’s craft. Bent canes were often sold as cased sets, and sometimes they also came with an additional shotgun-style reservoir butt to replace the bent reservoir when the owner wished to shoot it for sport. It wasn’t a very practical sporter with the button trigger, but no one seemed to care.

A bent cane is similar to a straight one, but demonstrats the cane maker’s skill at bending a steel reservoir this gracefully.

Beyond the bent cane, there was the shillelagh. It was a straight cane, but the exterior steel or brass casing was covered with spot-welds or lumps of braze that were filed and smoothed to look like the nodules of blackthorn wood — just like a traditional shillelagh. All that most of these canes lack is the traditional shillelagh cudgel, made from the root of the branch. This style cane is quite scarce in the U.S. Of the 200 or so air canes I have examined, only two have been shillelaghs. They command about twice the price of a nice cased bent cane with the pump and all the accessories, which sells for about $2,000 to $4,500.

One special air cane

The air cane came into its own after the ball reservoir airgun had left the scene, sometime around the year 1800, plus or minus. That’s not surprising because having a ball reservoir hanging off an air cane sort of defeats the purpose of looking like a walking stick. However, I saw the one exception. It was a rare shillelagh air cane with a brass reservoir that served as the cudgel.

This shillelagh air cane uses the brass reservoir as the stick’s cudgel. This is the only shillelagh air cane I have ever seen that had a cudgel. This can be called a cane with a ball reservoir! It isn’t exactly ball-shaped, but the ball reservoir design comes through very clearly. And it is a fine air cane in all other respects!

The cudgel/reservoir has been removed to show the inner workings. The small pin in the center of the cane (on the right) is powered by the mainspring to hit the large steel button in the center of the reservoir on the left. That larger button is actually the firing valve’s stem.

Where traditional shillelagh air canes are built of spot-welded steel or brazed brass to simulate the look of an Irish blackthorn branch, this particular cane is housed within a genuine blackthorn outer sheath! The wood was carefully hollowed out to accept the cane’s action and barrel, a difficult feat in the days before Dremel tools! The brass air reservoir is fashioned to look exactly like a genuine blackthorn root cudgel that might be found on a real shillelagh fighting stick.

Shooting air canes

Many air cane owners shoot their guns regularly. The original air valve was sealed with a piece of animal horn, lapped into an airtight seal by turning it against the valve seat under pressure. Common chalk and oil were used as a cutting and lapping  compound, and the valve maker knew when to stop by the squealing sound made when the seal was perfect.

But perfect is a relative term. That animal horn was porous and did leak over time. So a lubricant like whale oil was applied to the horn seal, to enhance its airtight nature. That is the purpose of the small oil bottle often seen with cased specimens.

When a cane is prepared for use today a modern Delrin valve face is substituted for the animal horn valve face, but all the other original parts are retained. Delrin is non-permeable, so the whale oil is no longer needed to seal the cane.

The operating pressure of an antique cane is in the 500 to 650 psi region, so the modern owner can either fill it with air to that pressure level or substitute CO2 gas in its place. Because CO2 operates at around 850 psi at 70 degrees F, the cane’s reservoir should be hydrostatically tested before filling.

Once the cane’s reservoir is filled, you will get no less than 10 and often as many as 20 powerful shots before a refill is required. There are even more shots than that, but the final few will be so weak that they’re not worth the effort. Each cane is unique and requires the shooter to learn its characteristics.

The smoothbore barrel of a typical straight cane will accept an unpatched round ball of about .433 caliber. A greased or oiled patch does not improve accuracy nor velocity, as long as the ball fits the bore reasonably well when dry.

The ball is rammed to the bottom of the barrel. Then the lock is cocked, causing the button trigger to pop out of the cane’s side. On every cane I have examined, this button has been positioned for release by thumb pressure of the left hand (for a right-handed shooter).

David Yost shoots my air cane (I bought it from him) at the St. Louis airgun show around 1997.

The top knob of the cane is held to the tip of the shooter’s nose so the tiny open sights (yes, these canes do have tiny open sights) can be seen. Once the sight picture is right, the button trigger is pressed and the cane fires with a loud, deep bellow. You feel a rocket-like push from the recoil that is approximately equal to a .32 S&W Long cartridge fired in a medium-weight revolver.

I’ve shot several smoothbore canes that were accurate enough to hit a soda can every time at 20 yards, so there is an element of close-range marksmanship to them. When a 121-grain .43-caliber lead ball connects with a full soda can at 600 f.p.s., everyone in the vicinity knows it!

Fascinating hobby

Air canes are a strange, yet fascinating niche within airgunning. They are the pneumatic equivalent of a primitive flintlock rifle. Their owners travel life in the slow lane with the windows rolled down, enjoying airguns that almost defy classification.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• How powerful were antique big bores?
• How were they filled?
• No one knew
• Hand pumps of antiquity
• Empirical testing
• Early rapper
• Single-stage pump tradeoff
• But wait — there’s more!
• Summary

Dennis Quackenbush has always been helpful when it comes to the difficult questions about airguns. Over the years, he and I have experimented with several fundamental questions; the most recent being the $100 PCP. I should have an update on that one for you in a couple weeks.

How powerful were antique big bores?

Back in the 1990s — the days when I was still writing The Airgun Letter and Airgun Revue magazine — I had a prolonged discussion with Dennis about the performance of big bore airguns of antiquity. He had just come out with the .375-caliber Brigand that was about to start the airgun world on its modern journey toward big bores, and there was a lot of interest in them.

This report is not about big bore power, but the hand pumps that were used to fill them. I did write a blog about the power of big bore of the past that can be seen here.

How were they filled?

I wondered how powerful those old airguns were, and also how they were filled with compressed air. On Monday of this week I published the report on the air cane and one of our readers wondered the same thing. How could anyone fill an antique big bore airgun with air compressed high enough to launch a lead bullet with lethal force? There were no scuba tanks and no shoebox compressors back in those days (1600s-1900s). Indeed, there weren’t many devices that could compress air at all, to say nothing of the relatively high levels that were required by an airgun!

They didn’t even call them air compressors back in the 1600s. They were called condensing syringes, and compressed air was called condensed air. The terminology had yet to be established.

No one knew

It seems strange today with all that we know about big bore airguns, but in 1997 almost nobody knew how fast these old guns shot or what sort of pressure they used. I read all sorts of guesstimates of velocities up to 1,000 f.p.s. for the antique big bores.

Eventually splatology (the determination of terminal velocity by the shape of a deformed lead ball after hitting a hard surface) was developed by Gary Barnes, but Barnes came to the party in the late 1990s, and these questions were being asked several years earlier.

Hand pumps of antiquity

One thing we did know about the vintage big bores, though, is what their hand pumps looked like. Many of them survived along with the guns, and they were usually in better condition than the guns themselves.

I had examined antique hand pumps several times at airgun shows. They always operated very smoothly, like their pistons had been lapped. I saw the insides of a couple pumps and neither of them had a piston seal. They had a flat iron piston head on the end of the pump rod. A light to medium weight oil (like 3 in 1) was squirted into the pump before it was put into operation. Oil on the compression chamber walls did all the sealing — similar to how it works in an automobile engine.

I have read several accounts of hand pumps that have leather piston seals. They were either a single leather seal covering the end of the piston, or they were a stack of leather washers fastened together at the end of the piston. These presumably work the same way as the plain metal pistons, plus the leather helps keep oil on the walls of the compression chamber. I only know about the stacked washer type from reading Air Guns by Eldon Wolff. He admits that the leather washer type is much rarer than the plain piston type. But how effective were they? What sort of pressure could they generate?

Empirical testing

I asked Dennis how much pressure a common single stage hand pump could generate. He’s been making replica hand pumps for vintage big bore guns for several years. Dennis’ pumps are true to the old designs, except that they use synthetic pump seals. He suggested that we test some pumps and find out.

Before we conducted the tests, it seemed to both of us that neither vintage pump design (plain piston or one with a leather seal) could equal one with a modern synthetic seal. Whatever pressure could be achieved with a modern replica would probably represent the absolute maximum for any vintage pump of the same physical specifications. That turned out to be an incorrect assumption.

Early rapper

We both agreed that the practical limit to the force that could be applied had to be the weight of the person doing the pumping. These early pumps had no mechanical advantage beyond that which is inherent in a single-stage mechanism. Although it would be possible to generate more force than one’s weight by pulling the base of the pump toward oneself, it isn’t practical — and would be very hard to do on a continuing basis. Jumping on the pump handle, however, is actually a method that was used sometimes. It was called rapping, but it’s very hard on the hands, wrists and arm joints and you can’t do it very long.

Single-stage pump tradeoff

Okay — remember when Mr. Conners, your 8th-grade math teacher, told you that one day you would need to know geometry? Today is that day. A single-stage air pump works by means of a piston that moves up and down (could also be side to side) inside a cylinder. It admits air into the compression chamber at the top of the stroke and forces it out the exhaust valve or port as the piston moves down. The larger the diameter of the piston, the more air is inside the compression chamber to be compressed. The longer the piston stroke, the more volume inside the compression chamber, as well. So those two things determine the amount of air that gets compressed — the diameter of the piston/compression chamber and the length of the piston stroke.

As the air is compressed, its pressure rises. This is felt as resistance on the pump handle. The higher the compression, the greater the resistance. Small diameter piston = lower compression/resistance. Larger diameter piston = greater compression/resistance. Therefore you can compress more air with a large-diameter pump piston, but the resistance will build up faster. And a smaller-diameter pump piston lets you compress air to higher pressure, though less air is compressed with each stroke.

The question is, to what pressure do you want to compress the air and the answer is another question — how much do you weigh? Because when you reach your weight, it isn’t easy to pump any more.

But wait — there’s more!

Hold on, B.B. You said that the length of the pump stroke also determines how much air gets compressed. Couldn’t the pump have a very small piston with a really long pump stroke, and therefore compress a lot of air to a high pressure? Why, yes it could! Mr. Conners would be proud of you.

So — how tall are you? You see, when the pump stroke gets longer than you can conveniently pump, all the fancy science stuff doesn’t matter. A hand pump with a 5-foot (1.5-meter) pump stroke isn’t very useful, is it? Not only is it hard to carry, it’s also difficult to operate when the pump handle comes up over your head on the up stroke! You need that handle to be low enough that you can lean on it on the down stroke. It really matters when the air pressure/resistance rises beyond a certain point. That point is determined by your height and weight.

Mechanical advantage is possible, and some vintage pumps use it, but they’re rare compared to the bulk of the pumps we know about. The single-stage manual pump I have described today is the most common design encountered in vintage airgun equipment.

Dennis saw where I wanted to go with this experiment, and he took up the challenge enthusiastically. He used two different vintage-type pumps of his own manufacture, plus the modern Axsor pump to check efficiency. He also made a 9 cubic-inch air reservoir with a built-in pressure gauge.

The test fixture Quackenbush made to ascertain pump efficiency. The pump that’s attached to the test reservoir in this photo is the smaller one with the 5/8″ piston head. The reservoir holds 9 cubic inches (about 147.5 cc) of air. Wit this setup the operator stands on the pump handle (left) and pumps the air reservoir up and down (right).

This is an antique hand pump. The reservoir — a ball in this case — is screwed onto the top of the pump between the handles (left). The operator stands on the pump base (right) and pumps up and down several hundred times to fill the ball.

Summary

That’s where I will leave it for today. In the next installment I’ll tell you the results of our testing, and also why the three-stage hand pump is so good.

Don’t forget that this work was done to discover the potential power of antique big bores. We are concentrating on the hand pumps, but that was just part of what we were exploring.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

Part 1

This report covers:

• Air intake and outlet valves
• The key to the test
• That’s not all
• I tested one, too
• More questions answered
• Maintaining consistency
• Three-stage hand pumps
• Summary

Today I will hopefully answer all your questions about the hand pump test that Dennis Quackenbush and I did many years ago. Remember — we were trying to determine how powerful the old big bore airguns had been. One part of that was knowing what kind of air pressure they used, and that is all we are looking at in this report.

Air intake and outlet valves

First I want to address a question from reader GunFun1. He asked about the pump’s air inlet valve. I told him there was no inlet valve. There is an air hole located at the top of the pump cylinder, and when the pump piston head rises past it, air is sucked into the cylinder — exactly the same as a conventional piston port 2-stroke engine. No valve is required. When the piston head drops below the air hole, the cylinder is sealed again and the piston is able to compress the air that’s now trapped inside.

But get this — there is also no outlet valve! The single stage hand pumps of antiquity have no valves of any kind. They rely on the firing valve in the airgun’s reservoir to serve as an inlet valve, which also doubles as their outlet valve. Once the air is forced inside the reservoir, that valve traps it.

Since the hand pump is tightly connected to the reservoir, this works well and is very simple to build. The airgun valve in the reservoir is the only valve in the entire system, and the air pressures are so (relatively) low that it doesn’t have to be high-tech. In its day, though, I’m sure it was regarded as magic.

The key to the test

What we are testing is how much pressure a single-stage hand pump can generate. Remember your math teacher I talked about in Part 1? Well, he taught you that the surface area of a cylinder/piston (circle) grows rapidly as the diameter increases.The formula is A(area) = π r². Dennis made 2 pumps to test. One had a piston diameter of 5/8-inch. The other had a piston diameter of 3/4-inch. Dennis weighed about 220 lbs. at the time the test was conducted. Here is the math.

The first chart is a record of Dennis pumping the test reservoir with both hand pumps. Notice that he also filled the reservoir with a modern three-stage Axxor hand pump.

What Dennis’ math shows is how much pressure can be generated by a piston of a given size, when the force (his weight) is constant.

These are two of the hand pumps Dennis Quackenbush built for this test. Both pumps have a synthetic piston seal. They are different sizes to fit cased airguns better. The larger pump has a 3/4-inch diameter piston and is sized for a long air gun or air rifle. The smaller pump has a 5/8-inch piston and is made for an air cane.

Dennis worked out the math for you, and you can see that the results fall in line with the predictions. And bear in mind that the small gauge Dennis used on the reservoir isn’t entirely accurate. So, his findings are ballpark — not exact. I would say we have good correlation with what the math predicts, the weight of the pumper and the end results.

That’s not all

Dennis used synthetic piston seals in both his hand pumps because he always makes his pumps that way. He and I both believed they would seal better than just a close-fitted piston that was oiled. I mentioned that in Part 1. In the interest of knowing the truth, however, Dennis also made another hand pump with a close-fitted 5/8-inch piston that had no seal other than the oil he used with it. To his surprise, that pump achieved almost exactly the same pressure as the pump of the same size with the synthetic piston seal. And the number of pump strokes was about the same.

He also tried “rapping” the 5/8-inch pump. Rapping means jumping on the pump handle to force in more air. He reported that he was able to get the pressure up to 810 psi that way — a 90 psi increase over normal pumping, but the cost was great. Rapping injured his wrists and hands to such an extent that he doesn’t recommend it to anyone.

I tested one, too

Dennis shipped me the 5/8-inch hand pump with the synthetic seal so I could test it. He had not told me any of his results before sending it, to keep the bias under control. I did two things. First I pumped it as high as I could. I got exactly 840 psi. I actually did “rap” in some air at the end. I weighed 240 lbs. at the time I tested the pump. I lost track of the pump strokes because the rapping was so painful. I know the count was something over 200 strokes.

Then I emptied the reservoir and pumped it back up to 500 psi. I left it at that pressure for 4 months, just to see how long the reservoir would hold. Four months later, no pressure had been lost!

I was able to pump to 840 psi with the 5/8-inch pump (right). Then I left the reservoir charged to 500 psi for 4 months and it held perfectly (left).

More questions answered

What the data shows is that it’s possible to calculate the maximum pressure for any single-stage air pump by simply dividing the weight of the pump operator by the area of the piston head. There should be some loss of efficiency due to friction in the pump, but this is most probably offset by some imprecision in determining the person’s body weight, the gauge error and also from small differences in effort each time the pump is used (i.e. not every person applies the same force, even when they may weigh the same).

220 lbs. divided by .3068 = 717.08 psi

This allows us to test a “theoretical pump” that can generate whatever pressure we desire within the limits of physical laws. For example:

250-lb. operator using a pump with a 1/2″ piston
250 lbs. divided by .19635 = 1,273.24 psi

150-lb. operator using a pump with a 1/2″ piston
150 lbs. divided by .19635 = 763.94 psi

Notice that the length of the piston stroke does not enter into this calculation. That’s because the length of the stroke determines only how much air is being compressed. It doesn’t affect the highest pressure that can be achieved by that piston. A longer stroke will compress a greater volume of air; a small-diameter piston will allow it to build to higher pressure.

Maintaining consistency

Reader Bruce, whose handle is BBB, asked how the airgunners of old were able to fill their guns to the same consistent pressure when they lacked gauges of any kind. Well, Bruce, I bet you have guessed the answer by this time.

Airgunners of old regulated their fill pressure in the same way Harley Davidson cycle owners of the 1930s controlled the torque they put on the various nuts and bolts on their motorcycles — they tightened/pumped as much as they could every time. Does this mean that a heavy owner could compress air more than a light owner? It sure does! Just as a strong motorcycle owner can apply more torque than a weaker one when both use the same wrench.

Consider the level of technology we are discussing. These old big bores are not that sophisticated. “About” and “close enough” are all they need. As long as you try to fill an old big bore with a hand pump of the period you won’t get into too much trouble — [Note: That statement only applies when everything is new. An airgun that is old has to be examined before anything else is done to it, because metal fatigues over time. The same thing is true for the old Harley.]

Three-stage hand pumps

Now that you understand the physics of hand pumps, it’s time to dream. If a small piston head allows you to compress air to high levels, what would a REALLY SMALL HEAD DO? What if the piston head were only 1/8-inch in diameter? Wow! You could get a lot more pressure with that! Let’s use Quackenbush’s formula and see. That would be the radius of a 0.125-inch circle (0.0625-inches) times pi (3.14159) and square the result. I get 0.03855 square inches as the area of a 1./8-inch circle.

250 divided by 0.03855 = 6484.57 psi

But you would have to pump all day! It would take many thousands of pump strokes to fill a 9 cubic inch reservoir with a 1/8-inch piston. Wait a moment — what about increasing the length of the stroke to get a greater volume of air in each stroke? Brilliant!

And that, dear readers, is how you get a three-stage hand pump. Instead of an 8-foot long pump cylinder, someone (namely Fredrik Axelsson of FX Airguns) folded it into three sections. The first section compresses a lot of air to a relatively low pressure. On the next stroke, the air that was compressed in stage one flows into a second section that takes it from low pressure to a moderately high pressure. On the third stroke the air in the second stage flows into the final stage where the very small piston compresses it the rest of the way — to anywhere from 3,000 all the way up to nearly 4,500 psi! Of course as the air flows from section/stage to section/stage, all stages are at work. So the process of air compression is continuous.

But the formula says we can go up to almost 6500 psi, doesn’t it? Yes, but the formula is looking at a single stage pump — it doesn’t take into account the effort required to compress air for stages one and two. That effort has to be added in, and that is what determines the top pressure that can be achieved by a 3-stage hand pump.

Summary

That’s it, kids. That’s how the hand pumps of antiquity work, and now you know where the three-stage hand pump comes from.

Someone jokingly asked if a 4-stage hand pump was possible. Of course it is, but as more stages are added, the pump cylinder gets fatter, and the interior volume may be reduced — in an effort to keep the pump cylinder thin. I think we have it pretty good with what exists today. The only thing I would add is the butterfly pump linkage that reduces the pump effort.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• Smallbore calibers
• Confusing lines
• Other calibers
• .12 caliber
• .175 caliber
• .180 caliber
• .21 caliber
• .21-1/2 caliber
• A couple really odd sizes
• Summary

Before we begin, I am leaving for Las Vegas and the 2016 SHOT Show today. I will have limited time to answer questions from readers, so I’m asking the veteran readers to help out until I return to following Saturday.

Smallbore calibers

We know there are 4 popular smallbore airgun calibers in use today. These 4 are not mandated by any regulation, nor controlled by any specification. Nothing makes them smallbores, except for the existence of big bores. In other words, they are smallbores by default — because they aren’t big bores.

The 4 smallbore pellet calibers we know today are .177 (4.5mm), .20 (5mm), .22 (5.5mm) and .25 (6.35mm). The round ball calibers are steel BB, which is .171-.173 (4.3-4.4mm). Anything larger than .25 caliber is commonly called a big bore, though there are no hard and fast rules about it. In fact, there are .25 caliber guns that qualify as smallbores and other .25 caliber guns that qualify as big bores. Confused?

Confusing lines

If a .25 caliber airgun is made primarily to shoot diabolo pellets, we call it a smallbore. But if it is made to shoot .25 caliber rifle bullets, we refer to it as a big bore. Some people call the big bore .25 a .257, but that’s the size of both the pellets and bullets, so the definition is muddled.

Other calibers

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, what other smallbore airgun calibers have existed? I’m excluding big bores from this discussion because a big bore can be any size you want. The Vesuvius dynamite cruiser had big bore airguns of a huge caliber! Let’s just stick with smallbores for today.

.12 caliber

There have been many .12 caliber airguns. The true caliber is .118, but we commonly round it up to .12. These are the guns that shoot number 6 bird shot and also the .12-caliber copper-plated steel BBs that Daisy once made for their early Targeteer pistol.

The Kruger single shot pistol made by Wamo, the Hula Hoop people, used toy caps to propel a .12 caliber lead ball.

The Daisy Targeteer was perhaps the most prolific and best-known of the .12 caliber airguns. It evolved into a BB pistol in the 1950s, but until then it fired copper-plated .118-caliber steel shot. The gun is better-known today than the shot it fired, which is seldom seen outside an airgun show.

This Targeteer came packaged with a plastic shooting gallery. Two red, white and blue metal tubes of shot fit inside the gallery feet to keep it stable.

Real Targeteer shot is seldom seen today.

Besides the Targeteer and Wamo guns, this caliber also was used in the Bullseye and Sharpshooter line of catapult guns that lasted from 1923 until the mid-1980s. Those guns are low-powered, so having a very light projectile is quite an advantage.

.175 Caliber

In the early part of the 20th century, Daisy decided to reduce the size of their lead BB shot from 0.180 to 0.175-inches. It saved lead, which matters when you are making and selling millions of shots a year. It also sped up the guns, which meant Daisy could reduce the size of the mainspring and make the cocking effort easier.

There is a range of BB guns made from about 1900 to 1925 that should be using this size shot. Of all the odd sizes, this is the most difficult size to find today. If you fins and Air Rifle Shot of the3 right size, it’s collectible and too valuable to shoot. Everyone uses 4.4mm lead balls in these guns today.

.180 caliber

This is the original BB-gun caliber. It started out as shotgun bird shot, size BB (smaller than size B and larger than size BBB). Seventy years ago shot in that size was still pretty easy to come by, but it has gone out of favor among shotgunners of today, to the best of my knowledge. Original air rifle shot in this size is a collector’s item.

.21 caliber

Both Quackenbush and Crosman made .21 caliber airguns and ammunition. Quackenbsh made lead slugs of both the burred type (wider lip at the base) and also felted (piece of felt glued to the base) variety. Indeed, many Quackenbush airguns were .21 caliber. Even their darts came in this odd size.

Crosman made their model 121 GC (compressed gas) target rifle in .210 caliber. That was presumably so they would be the only supplier of the ammo for the indoor target ranges they were selling to companies.

This Crosman CG is a .22 caliber, but the model 121 CG that was provided in Crosman’s shooting galleries of the 1940s looked identical. Sadly, many of those guns have now been converted to .22 caliber — just to solve the ammunition problem.

.21-1/2 caliber

What? Twenty-one and one-half caliber? Yes. Quackenbush made a combination gun that was both an air rifle and a .22 rimfire rifle. The firing pin was carried in a compartment in the wooden stock. While it fired regular .22 rimfire cartridges when set up as a firearm, it shot .215-caliber burred or felted slugs. This was never a popular pellet size, though it was produced from the 1880s until the 1920s.

A couple really odd sizes

I have heard that Jim Maccari experimented with a .14-caliber pellet rifle. I don’t know how many he made or what he did for ammunition. Fourteen caliber has been suggested by others in recent times. It would be a way to reduce the amount of lead in a pellet, which is becoming a cost concern, plus it would give some advantages in the velocity department. Rifling a .14-caliber barrel might prove tricky, though with modern rifling methods it might be more possible today than ever before.

I’ve also heard of experiments with a 6mm (.243 caliber) pellet. It’s so close to a .25 that there doesn’t seem to be much room for this caliber, but sometimes all it takes is a new caliber to stimulate the market.

Summary

Well, there you have it — all the smallbore calibers that airguns have come in since they started in 1886. There are other calibers, such as .28 that a lot of 19th century gallery guns were made in, but because that is larger than the .25 caliber upper limit I established, I decided to stop here.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

This report covers:

• Media Day
• Only Crosman
• Pioneer
• Regulated
• Was I impressed?
• Shotguns

Media Day

Every year the SHOT Show holds Media Day at the Range, an all-day event at a huge range sounth of Las Vegas. Over a hundred businesses and more than a thousand media professionals are involved. It’s the place that allows the gun writers to say, “I shot that at the SHOT Show” — something no one else can say, because no functional guns or any kind are permitted at the show. Only security guards have functional guns.

The ranges stretch to the top of the hill on the left and as far again beyond. Media Day is big!

Only Crosman

Out of all that, how many airgun companies showed up? One. Just Crosman, who brought their new Pioneer airbow that everyone was talking about. They were my first stop.

Pioneer

The Pioneer is built on the Benjamin Bulldog chassis, but the valving is completely different. There is no way a Bulldog could be turned into a Pioneer without a lot of engineering. But you crossbow shooters should take note, because this bow weighs several pounds less than most bows, and this one is more powerful than any of them. And it cocks with a single finger!

The 375-grain shafts are hollow and slip over a tube that protrudes from the front of the airbow. When I loaded an arrow it tried to pop back out on me because I was compressing air inside the tube.

Crosman’s Chip Hunnicutt explains how the Pioneer works.

Regulated

They filled it for me, and the filler is a probe that fits in the side of the reservoir instead of a Foster fitting that attaches at the front. I think that’s a safety issue, so you don’t get in front of a very lethal crossbow. I “watched” many arrows go downrange and only caught a glimpse of one of them. They move out at 450 f.p.s. and are still going 400 f.p.s.

The gun is regulated and Hunnicutt told me they are getting 8 good shots per fill. For a hunter that’s more than enough.

Once the Pioneer was filled they let me take over. I got to load it, cock it and of course shoot it several times.

The airbow is loaded by sliding a hollow arrow over the tube in the gun. You feel for the seal of the shaft at the end of loading.

The bow is cocked by lifting a lever on top of the stock. It can be manually uncocked, too!

And then I shot. I noticed the arrow seemed to go high on the target, so I took a second shot. That’s when I learned how accurate the Pioneer is! My second arrow nearly touched the first one at 30 yards.

The only way to get closer is to put one inside the other.

Which someone else did! Arrow inside arrow.

Was I impressed?

I didn’t know what to think before testing the Pioneer. Now I wonder how they’re going to make enough of them. Crosman has another winner on their hands, I think.

The rest of Media Day was just me shooting firearms. In know, it’s a lousy job, but somebody has to do it — right? One more anecdote for the day, though.

Shotguns

People who know me well know that I am not a shotgunner. I’ve only been able to hit birds with one shotgun and my buddy, Otho won’t sell that one to me. Well, I may have found another at Media Day. At the Benelli booth I was handed a 28-gauge semiauto that’s chambered for 3-inch shells. Yes, it’s the only one in the world, becvause the 28-gauge 3-inch shell is brand new.

For some reason I was able to hit with this gun about half the clay pigeons thrown. It weighs about 5 pounds and if I had the money I’d buy one!

I did pretty good (great for me) with a new Benelli semiauto shotgun.

There was more Media Day, but no more airguns. I had to leave early to get back and write this blog.

Today I am at the first day of the SHOT Show itself, so there will be more new guns coming tomorrow.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

This report covers:

• Best SHOT ever!
• Crosman
• Maximus
• AirForce
• Hatsan
• Hercules
• Hatsan regulator

Before we begin, I have a sad announcement. Ron Sauls, whom many readers knew and dealt with at Bryan and Associates, passed away yesterday. Ron will be remembered fondly by the airgun community for all he did to further our hobby.

Best SHOT ever!

Holy cow! I’ve covered SHOT Shows for the past 20 years, but this one tops them all. My day was so fantastic that I will only be able to give you an overview of it. I will return several times and give you more of what’s happening. Today, just the major things I saw on day one, and not all of those!

Crosman

I stopped by Crosman’s booth just to see what they had. It wasn’t on my list of booths to visit today. I stayed close to an hour!

Maximus

Yes, they have the $100 PCP, only it isn’t $100. It’s just under $200, which reads $199.95 in my book. It’s built on the Discovery frame but with fewer frills.

The Maximus looks similar to the Benjamin Discovery and will retail for under $200. A complete package with a pump and pellets will retail for about $350.

AirForce

I stopped by the AirForce booth after the show opened and people were packed inside. Two new big bores this year are their .30 caliber and a .357. I have it on good authority the .30 delivers 300 foot-pounds and the .357 breaks 400 foot-pounds. In today’s world those are serious power levels! I might have to take one coyote hunting.

AirForce had two new Texans in their booth. A .30 caliber on top and a .357 in the center. Rick Ward, an old Texan, is in the background in the hat.

Hatsan

I thought Hatsan’s big new product was going to be the new breakbarrel .30-caliber big bore. It’s called a Carnivore .30 and it’s built on the 135 frame, so the cocking will be stout. Hatsan’s president, Blaine Manifold, told me it gets 550 f.p.s with a 40-something grain pellet. That’s ain’t bad! I will definitely try it out.

Blaine Manifold holds Hatsan’s new .30-caliber big bore springer.

Hercules

Like I said, I thought that breakbarrel big bore was the news, until Manifold showed me the Hercules! Ever hear of a repeating PCP that accepts 6 different calibers? It can be .177, .22, .25, .30, .35 and .45 — you decide. It has a 1000 cc air supply! Think how many shots you’ll get from almost double the air of the next-largest PCP! They are still working on the .45 caliber, so this rifle may take a little longer to hit the streets.

Blaine Manifold holds Hatsan’s Hercules. This big PCP can be one of 6 different calibers — your choice.

The Hercules has a 500cc bottle up front and another one tucked in the butt!

Hatsan regulator

So now I think I’m done with Hatsan and they show me one final thing. They are building their own in-house regulator for some of their PCPs! And get this — they will fit existing airguns like the BT65! And they are user tweakable (adjustable). Will wonders never cease? I think that is the biggest news of all from the Hatsan camp.

This cutaway shows the new Hatsan reservoir installed in a BT65 reservoir.

Regulator out of the reservoir.

Yes the reg comes apart for OWNER adjustment!

Well, that’s enough sweet things for today. Any more and I’ll ruin your appetites. Plus I’m a diabetic, and this report is giving me a sugar rush.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about some cool new things from Leapers. Otho Henderson — listen up, ’cause you are in this! I’ll also cover those new Rooskie airguns from Pyramyd Air, and there’s just a lot more stuff from day one to cover!

by Tom Gaylord

Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

How powerful were the big bore airguns of the past?: Part 1

• My knowledge base
• Quackenbush Brigand
• Air cane
• Farco air shotgun
• Splatology
• Powerful enough to kill?
• Conclusions

This report is for reader Zebra who asked me last week about the power of the antique big bore airguns. He said he read that some were used in battle and had the power to kill soldiers. I answered him and gave a link to the very first report of this airgun history series (Part 1, linked above). It was done way back on August 21, 2015 when this section was started. But I read that report and discovered that it really didn’t answer his question. I had explained how big bore airgun power was determined, but not how powerful the guns actually were. So I’m adding this Part 2 to get to the heart of the question.

My knowledge base

Before I start throwing numbers around, let me first tell you that today’s report is based on my actual experience. It’s not based on what I think or on mathmatical calculations.

Quackenbush Brigand

My first experience with a big bore airgun was with a .375-caliber Brigand — the first big bore made by Dennis Quackenbush. He had made a replica kit of parts before that for people to build their own Paul air shotguns, but he didn’t sell them as completed guns. So 1996 when the Brigand came out was when things got real for me.

The Brigand operated on bulk CO2. A fill was good for 10-12 powerful shots as I recall. And the velocity for a 84-grain lead ball was 600-650 f.p.s. There, Zebra. That’s your first big bore velocity and my first teaching point.

After I experimented with my Brigand for awhile, I wondered how it would perform on air. Dennis made it strong enough to hold more pressure, so after checking with him I filled mine to 1,200 psi from a hand pump and got that same lead ball up to over 800 f.p.s. That’s my second data point/teaching point. CO2 may have the same pressure as air was compressed in the antique airguns, but the CO2 molecule is larger than the separate atoms in air, and therefore it flows slower through a valve. So — more velocity on air at the same pressure.

Yes, I do know that 1,200 psi is more pressure than CO2 commonly reaches. That would be 850 psi at 70 degrees F. But there wasn’t that much difference in velocity from air compressed to the two pressures (1,200 psi and 850 psi). As long as it was always air, the bullet went faster than it did on CO2.

Air cane

Then I bought an antique air cane. It came with a smoothbore barrel only and that was .43 caliber. I operated that cane on CO2 exclusively because that was what my fill adaptor was set up to work with. I got velocities of about 625 f.p.s. from that cane running on CO2. Do you see the parallel, here? The cane was a larger caliber and shot a heavier lead ball (120 grains versus 84 grains) but it still made about the same velocity as the Brigand. The cane was smoothbore and the Brigand was rifled. But they had barrels of about the same lengths and they shot at roughly the same velocities. I’m being very loose with the facts in this explanation, but the numbers really were that close. Guess what that told me? The antique big bores (the cane was from the late 19th century) all perform similarly.

Farco air shotgun

Okay, let’s look at another big bore that’s modern and runs on CO2. The Farco air shotgun from the Philippines fires a 28-gauge shot cup (.51 caliber) of shot, but a .43 caliber lead ball can also be used. The balls are lighter than the shot charge and they average about 500 f.p.s. That’s slower than the Brigand and air cane, but it’s still in the same general region. But listen to this. When it shot a charge of shot that weighed 245 grains, it went out at 450 f.p.s. That’s just 50 f.p.s. less than the ball that weighed half as much! So the velocity was pretty much based on the gun, rather than on the projectile. There’s another teaching point, Zebra.

Big bore velocities vary more gun-to-gun than they do projectile-to-projectile — as long as we are just talking about simple non-adjustable firing valves. You asked about antique big bores and that’s what I’m talking about today. Throw in an AirForce Texan and everything changes. The Texan has the technology to change velocities, unlike the antique guns.

Splatology

In Part 1 we learned about the science of splatology, which is the phenomenon where a lead ball of any size flattens the same amount when it hits a hard target at the same speed. So a .375 lead ball that hits an anvil at 350 f.p.s. flattens just as much as a .60 caliber lead ball doing the same thing. The splat that the larger ball leaves behind is wider across, of course, but the lead splats from the two different calibers appear identical. That means we can determine the impact velocity of a lead ball that that has struck a hard target just by examining the splat it left behind. In turn that means we can know what velocity a lead ball was traveling two centuries ago, just by examining a drawing of the splat it left behind.

There isn’t a lot of splatology data to examine, but what we have points to many antique big bore airguns shooting in the 500-650 f.p.s. range. Curious, isn’t it? No matter how we look at this, the velocity of antique big bore airguns always seems to fall within a narrow range. And that is another teaching point.

Powerful enough to kill?

Zebra also asks if the antique airguns he has read about were really powerful enough to kill a human. Where they used in war, as he has read?

At least one of them was. A 21-shot repeater called a Girardoni, after its inventor, shot a .47-caliber lead ball with enough force to kill a man at a distance of 100 yards. In the book, Smith’s Standard Encyclopedia of Gas, Air and Spring guns of the World, the author, W.H.B. Smith, reports of one instance where this happened. It was sometime in the late 1700s when an orderly sergeant was killed by a ball while standing next to a group of officers. The shot was not heard and no smoke from the powder was seen, but they were facing Austrian troops and they knew the Austrians had no fewer than 500 rifled repeating airguns.

If a .47 caliber ball hit a man at 400 f.p.s. it would have had enough energy to kill him if a vital organ was hit. While we tend to think of 400 f.p.s. as too slow to do much damage, we are thinking in terms of pellets. It’s very different when it’s a lead ball of considerable size. Elmer Keith slaughtered cows in the stockyards in Chicago with muzzleloading cap and ball revolvers that shot smaller balls just a little faster than that, and those balls would often pass through the animal from front to rear.

Conclusions

Zebra, and anyone else who was wondering about the power of the antique big bores, that’s about all I can tell you. You now know:

1. They mostly shot from 500-650 f.p.s. at the muzzle.
2. We can determine their terminal velocity from forensic evidence if a drawing of the splat remains.
3. We know the air pressure at which they operated (from Part 1) and that also tells us how powerful these older big bores were.
4. To get greater power they used larger, heavier balls.

When you think about it, we know a lot about the power of the old big bores.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

• The 15th century
• Why?
• Gallery guns were weak
• Airguns and galleries
• Different ammo
• Repeaters
• What killed the airgun?
• Feltman

Shooting galleries have been a major influence in the shooting sports for close to a century and a half, and airguns have had their day in galleries. Reb, our most outspoken reader, once ran a traveling shooting gallery that featured the popular “Shoot out the Red Star” game. I’ll discuss that at the end of the report, but right now I’m going back to the beginning of shooting galleries.

The 15th century

And, who can really say when that was? We know from documents and from tapestries that shooting events were popular in Europe in the 1400s. But those were sporting events that came and went — they weren’t the galleries I am discussing today. The crossbows and guns that were used at those events belonged to the shooters. They were not rented by the gallery to the general public.

The first public gallery

The first shooting gallery I can document opened right after the American Civil War — around the year 1866. That probably means that galleries existed long before that time, but I can find no documentation of them. All I find are organized shooting events not that dissimilar from the earliest contests mentioned before.

Archery as a social pastime probably predates the shooting galleries by many years. I don’t consider archery to be the same as a shooting gallery, but if you do then my dates are way too late.

Why?

I have read that galleries prospered and grew right after the Civil War because American men had recently been forced to learn to shoot. This is mostly talking about men from the northern states, because the southern men were generally very familiar with shooting when the Civil War began.

But an entire generation of (northern) men became used to the idea of shooting and found it both challenging and rewarding. They wanted to share what they had learned with the women in their lives for several different social reasons (it was fun, it showcased the male ability to shoot, etc.).

Gallery guns were weak

These gallery guns I’m describing were very weak, compared to regular firearms. In the 1840s people discovered that the priming charge from a percussion cap, alone, could propel a small lead ball with enough accuracy to make things interesting at close range. The noise made when the cap fired was small compared to a firearm discharge. The smoke from the gunpowder (black powder) of the day was not as prevalent when just a percussion cap was used. These two very important things — lower noise and less smoke — made shooting indoors viable for the first time.

Shortly following the discovery of the indoor use of the percussion cap, several key things happened in short order. First, percussion caps were shaped more conveniently (they got a rim and soon became known as rimfire) for handling and loading. Second, breechloading mechanisms were becoming more popular, making the loading of guns easier for those who were unfamiliar with firearms. Finally the percussion caps received a captive bullet (lead ball) in their end, creating the first self-contained cartridge. All of these things played into the birth of the public shooting gallery. In 1856 the firm of Smith & Wesson patented the cartridge known today as the .22 short — a cartridge that lasted in shooting galleries for as long as they operated.

Airguns and galleries

It wasn’t long before airguns came into the galleries. The earliest guns that were capable of withstanding repeated use and abuse from many different hands came about in the 1850s. By the late 1860s, when the galleries really took off there were gallery airguns to go with them. I have already done two parts of a report on a gallery airgun I own that was made in the late 1860s by David Lurch of New York. We can know the approximate date of manufacture by the address stamped into the barrel.

David Lurch gallery gun was made around 1866.

David Lurch gallery gun uses a geared crank to pull a toothed piston rod back to compress two volute mainsprings.

The address on the barrel pins down the date of manufacture.

Different ammo

Some of these early gallery airguns shot darts and others shot clay pellets that operated reactive targets or left a splat on a painted surface. Very few were powerful enough to shoot lead balls, and lead pellets were not yet fully developed. Their calibers ranged from .25 up to over .30, with .28 being a common size.

Repeaters

There were even repeating gallery airguns. They had to be cocked for every shot, but had many projectiles in a magazine — as many as 56 rounds in the cylinder of a Bunge airgun.

What killed the airgun?

Airgun shooting galleries never died completely. We ran one at Frontier Village, a western-themed amusement park in San Jose, California, where I worked in the 1960s. We had either 10 or 12 guns tethered to a source of air and we loaded them with lead balls of about .22 caliber. Our gallery was about 20 feet deep and 20 feet wide and all the targets, both moving and still, were painted with a non-drying lead paint. That showed the splatter of the balls the best. We repainted the targets every few days, depending on traffic.

Shooting gallery at Frontier Village, San Jose, California.

Cost was the main reason we ran airguns instead of firearms. We collected the spent lead balls, shipped them back to the ammo supplier who credited us for the lead when they cast new ammunition. Maintenance was a second good feature. Airguns never need cleaning the way firearms do. We saved many manhours by not having to clean our guns.

Airgun galleries still exist in some places in Europe and the UK. But in the U.S. the rise in popularity of the rimfire cartridge, plus the invention of slide-action rifles made the slower airgun seem less thrilling in comparison. However, there was one exception. Remember the red star?

Feltman

There is an airgun that looks like an oversized Thompson sub-machinegun. It runs on shop air and shoots 100 number 2 lead shot in what appears to be a fully automatic mode. The distance it shoots is very limited — the gallery that uses it is housed inside a trailer and the range is measured in a few feet. The object is to obliterate a red star on a paper target, which is almost impossible to do.

The Feltman gallery gun was used to shoot out the red star.

These guns have been operating for many decades at carnivals and local fairs, where they offer stuffed animal prizes for success. The fun is in the shooting, because almost no one ever succeeds in shooting the star completely away.

One of the makers of the guns over the years was Feltman, a name that sort of stuck with the gun.

I will now defer to Reb, who has operated this game around the country. Take it away, Reb.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

Hatsan 85 Mossy Oak Break Up rifle.

Part 1

This report covers:

• Hatsan has potential
• Hatsan is conservative
• RWS Superdomes
• H&N Baracuda Match
• Crosman SSP pellets
• Trigger pull
• Cocking effort
• Scope base
• Summary

Man, did I ever bump the beehive with this report! Part 1 certainly got a rise out of a lot of you. And you said what was on your mind. I bet you are the kind of guys who would tell me that my dog is ugly, too.

Okay, I’m rooting for the Hatsan 85 Mossy Oak Break Up rifle that I’m testing. Why? Because according to the advertised specs, it puts out a little more power than an RWS 34 (remember — we aren’t calling them Dianas any longer), yet sells in this combo package for 50 dollars less than just an RWS 34P, by itself. If this rifle is accurate, we have a potential world-beater on our hands.

Hatsan has potential

I know that Hatsan is conservative with their advertised velocities. And, from shooting their precharged rifles, I also know they can be quite accurate. What has never come together for me is power and accuracy in the same Hatsan spring rifle. PCPs, yes, but never springers. At least not for me — yet.

The other thing I haven’t seen until this test is a Quattro trigger in a springer that was smooth, crisp and light. I reported to you in Part 1 that this one is very nice, and today we will find out just what that means.

Today is velocity day, and I want to get to it. I also want to show you the scope dovetails and scope stop that’s built into this rifle, because someone asked about it. I won’t get to the scope until a later report, because this rifle does have open sights that I plan on testing in the first accuracy test., but I can at least show you the base.

Hatsan is conservative

Hatsan advertises this model at 1,000 f.p.s. in the .177 caliber I am testing. If this were any other maker I would expect to see that with the lightest pellets, only, but Hatsan USA CEO, Blaine Manifold (I still think that is the perfect name for somebody in the airgun business!) told me they test their guns with real-world pellets. So we can expect to see more than 1,000 f.p.s. with some of the super-lightweights. I will test a full span of pellet weights.

RWS Superdomes

I chose RWS Superdome pellets to represent the middle weight range. The first shot out of the rifle went 1091 f.p.s., but it was an obvious detonation. After that 10 more Superdomes averaged 984 f.p.s. The low was 967 and the high was 1002 f.p.s.. The spread was 35 f.p.s. And by the way, the Superdome is a medium-wight pellet, so Hatsan is being conservative about the power once again.

At the average velocity this 8.3-grain pellet generates 17.85 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. That’s right where we want this airgun to be, because it’s not too overpowered to hurt accuracy.

H&N Baracuda Match

Next up was the H&N Baracuda Match pellet with the 4.50mm head. These averaged 865 f.p.s. for an energy of 17.70 foot-pounds. The low was 855 f.p.s, and the high was 870 f.p.s,. The spread was 15 f.p.s. This just might be a good pellet for this rifle.

Crosman SSP pellets

Last to be tested were some Crosman SSP hollowpoint pellets. At just 4 grains I knew they were going supersonic, but I didn’t plan on the crack they would make. I had to wear hearing protection in the office to test these pellets.

They averaged 1297 f.p.s. with a spread from 1281 f.p.s to 1319 f.p.s. The spread was 38 f.p.s. At that speed they generate 14.94 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. Normally lighter pellets generate more energy than heavier pellets in a spring-piston gun, but this Hatsan is just backwards of that. That tells me the piston is probably on the heavy side, and heavier pellets are going to be better.

Trigger pull

I measured the trigger pull next. No matter where it is I plan to leave it as I found it because it is adjusted just the way I like it. I discovered a quirk in this trigger. The effort varies greatly, depending on how it is pulled. If you pull straight back it measures 5.lbs. 14 oz. But if you pull up as you pull back it drops to a very consistent 3 lbs. 13 oz. Obviously that was what I was feeling before.

Cocking effort

What does it take to cock the 85? Well, I was doing it with one arm, so I knew it had to be something under 40 lbs. Turned out to be 32 lbs., and I can feel that a couple of those pounds will go away as the rifle breaks in. Once again my decision to test this rifle is justified.

One thing I will mention is during cocking that little bend in the cocking link (look at the SAS picture in Part 1) sometimes peeks out of the cocking slot and disrupts my efforts to move the barrel. It happens as I am closing the barrel more than when I am cocking it.

Scope base

The last thing I will do today is show you the 11mm dovetails that are machined directly into the spring tube.

The scope base is a parallel set of dovetails cut into the spring tube. The scope stop is a block that can be repositioned for best effect.

Summary

I like what I see so far. The Hatsan 85 is powerful, but not raw as so many super-powered springs are these days. The power is good for hunting and the trigger is light and crisp. Let’s just hope the accuracy is there, too.

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• Pioneer airbow
• Rifling
• Hop-Up
• Projectile finish
• Summary

I’m writing this from my hospital bed on Saturday, though I hope to be discharged later today. I would like to thank Val Gamerman for covering the blog for me last week. I was unable to do much of anything, and my thanks to all of you for keeping things going. This will be short, because of my situation. Let’s talk about airgun projectile stability today.

Pioneer airbow

When I shot the Benjamin Pioneer airbow at the SHOT Show this year I was amazed by the accuracy it gave. Not just when I shot it, but also there were two cases where one arrow went inside another one at 30 yards. Television’s Mythbusters proved that a regular longbow cannot do that because the arrow is constantly flexing as it flies, but the Pioneer pushes the arrow from the tip (it’s hollow inside) rather than from the back end and it doesn’t flex in flight. That got me thinking about what has been done about airgun projectile stability and what remains to be done.

Rifling

Most people know that rifling spins the pellet and stabilizes it while it flies. But there is a lot that hasn’t been done in this arena. Most airguns are rifled with a 1:16″ twist rate that seems to work pretty well. There have been some barrels with a different twist rate, but more research needs to be done. I did a huge test on barrels with 3 different twist rates that you may want to review. I was not able to match the pellet to the twist rate in my test, but that’s a place when more could be done.

The Smooth Twist barrel from FX and also from the earlier Swedish Excellent is another place to be considered. Has the optimum combination of rifling length, twist rate and rifling depth been found? And has it been paired with an optimum projectile yet?

Another place to consider is the gain twist rifling. I don’t believe anything has been done with that in an airgun. Would a gain twist that starts at no twist and increazses to 1:16: be better that a straight barrel? Would it act more like a Smooth Twist barrel?

Hop Up

We saw a pretty dramatic example of what Hop-Up can do for an airsoft BB last week. Hop-Up puts a backspin on the ball before it leaves the barrel. Would it even be possible to put a Hop-Up on a gun that shoots steel BBs? A number of readers have asked this and a couple are experimenting with it.

Projectile finish

One area that has been left alone is the surface finish of a pellet or BB. We know that golf balls fly better because of the dimples on their surface. Would that also held BBs in flight? Would the BBs have to be spinning for it to help? What would the indents (or protrusions) have to look like? How deep/high would they need to be?

Would changing the surface finish of a diabolo pellet have any affect on stability? Where would the finish go?

Summary

These are a few of my thoughts on the stability of projectiles in flight. Other thoughts might include darts, conicals bullets in big bore airguns and more. What have I forgotten?

by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier

A history of airguns

This report covers:

• Accuracy taken for granted
• Crosman 160 opened my eyes!
• In the beginning
• The ball or bullet
• Smaller calibers
• Pellet shape
• Birth of the diabolo
• A long way to go

Accuracy taken for granted

I was speaking with a group of very advanced airgunners recently and found myself amazed by what we all took for granted. The subject was airgun accuracy and topics like distance, powerplants and pellet shapes came up, but no one in the group seemed to remember the time when none of those things made any difference. They didn’t because there weren’t any pellets on the market that took advantage of them. Until around the 1960s, accuracy with airguns was iffy, at best. The problem was not the guns — it was the ammunition!

Crosman 160 opened my eyes!

I remember buying a new-old-stock Crosman 160 target rifle that had been produced and sold to the U.S. Air Force. The rifle hadn’t been fired since Crosman tested it with CO2 at the factory some time in the 1970s. The Air Force bought an unknown number of 160s that came with slings and the Crosman S331 rear peep sight. Presumedly there was a plan to use these rifle for some type of training, but that must never have happened, because hundreds of them were found in a military warehouse in the 1990s in unused condition. When I opened the gas reservoir to install 2 fresh CO2 cartridges, I found the original cartridges Crosman had used to test the gun before packaging in the 1970s! The rifle was brand new, as were hundreds of others just like it!

When I installed 2 fresh cartridges (with Crosman Pellgunoil on the tips of each), and started shooting it at 10 meters on my basement range, I was flabbergasted by the accuracy. This rifle was a tackdriver! But that was not always the case. When the airgun was new it was only accurate to the level of it’s day. A 5-shot group at 25 feet might measure three-quarters of an inch. Some were better, of course, but others were worst. But when I loaded the then-new Crosman Premiers, I could put 5 into a quarter-inch with ease. Better yet, it was very repeatable.

So, the gun remained the same but the pellets got better. Much better! That opened my eyes to a part of airgun history that has not always been visible, but has always lead the pace of advancement.

In the beginning

One early airgun projectile was a dart, but most airgunners don’t know that because they have never been exposed to an early dart gun. They were not powerful, and they were certainly all smoothbores, but the tail that created high drag as the dart flew to the target also made it a very consistent projectile whose performance could easily be predicted. And, when you know where something will go you can adjust the sights to move the impact wherever you want it. The most common term for that is accuracy.

Yes, the early (circa 17th century) dart guns were accurate at short range (40 feet?), but they were also very costly. Their price put them out of reach for all but the wealthiest shooters. So they never really caught on. Remember too, we are talking about airguns at a time when even firearms were considered exotic. Airguns in those days were unheard-of, though we now know they existed.

The ball or bullet

The lead ball was the first airgun projectile that was commonly known. In those days, again the 16th and 17th centuries, balls were called bullets. The conical-shaped bullet (longer than it is wide) was unknown. So the first airguns shot balls. Those guns were what we call big bore airguns today, because the smaller calibers (.17 through .25) just didn’t exist.

Smaller calibers

Around the year 1840 people started shooting lead balls using just the force of a percussion cap. Because there isn’t much force, the balls had to be made much smaller, and the smallbore calibers were born. This is where the .22 caliber Flobert (in Europe it was 6mm) and the 4.5mm calibers came into existence.

Airguns of the time didn’t immediately adopt these calibers. They were made in slightly larger calibers like .25 and even .28, but the idea of the smallbore airgun was definitely on everyone’s mind. By the 1870s the projectiles used by airguns had become as small as .21 caliber, and in 1886 the Markham company brought out the first true BB gun that shot lead shot on the size BB, which is nominally .18 caliber.

Pellet shape

At this time (the 1880s) some airguns were able to use so-called “cat” slugs that were simple lead cylinders only slightly longer than their width. Then someone got the idea to glue a small felt pad to the base of one of these slugs, and the first intentionally high-drag airgun projectile was created. I say the first, but it really was not the first, since the darts that had already existed for centuries were also high drag. But the darts were reuseable, where the felted slugs were a one-time use. I touched on this in another historical report titled, Other airgun calibers.

Birth of the diabolo

It wasn’t until the dawn of the 20th century that the pellet shape we call diabolo was first seen. Diabolo refers to a juggling apparatus that is also made as a toy. Popular in Europe and elsewhere, it was also seen in the U.S., but never gained the popularity here that it had elsewhere. The diabolo is an exaggerated hourglass shape with a wasp waist that balances on a string when the device is spun rapidly. I actually bought one a few years ago, just to be able to photograph it, because I often talk about the device and I wanted my readers to see what I was referring to.

A diabolo is a juggling device that has also been sold as a toy. More popular in Europe than in the U.S.

Diabolo pellet shares the fundamental shape of its juggling namesake.

Eley Wasps have the classic diabolo pellet characteristics.

Diabolo pellets changed the airgun scene forever. Air rifles went from being extremely short range toys to fairly accurate guns overnight. Now the importance of rifled barrels became obvious, and the development of modern spring-piston airgiuns took off.

A long way to go

As good as the diabolo shape was, though, it still had a long way to go. It would be over half a century before things began to resolve into what we know today. But that is a tale for another time.