MY AIRGUNS

My interest in airguns goes back as far as I can remember, as a child one of the toys I vividly remember is a wooden pop-gun, then as I grew a little older I played with the other boys at war games but my guns were a de-activated Diana smooth bore rifle, held shut with a jubilee clip and a Diana Model 2 pistol with the spring removed.

I still have the pistol, it has a new spring. I just wish I had kept the rifle as well.

MY INTRODUCTION TO AIR RIFLES

Then when I became a teenager I got my first proper air rifle, a DIANA Model 25 (.177) I practiced with that in my garden having set up a proper back stop.

Having proved myself trustworthy I was given for my 14th birthday a BSA Meteor-Super (.22)

The following year my school youth club set up a shooting club using, would you believe, BSA Meteor air rifles. The club was set up in doors and the Meteors came with both rifled and smooth barrels. The smooth barrels were fitted and airgun darts were used for the club competitions. By the end of the year I had the second highest individual score and was a member of the winning team, gaining a prize at prize day.

AIRGUN EDUCATION

All this time I continued to shoot in my back garden and became aware that one of my neighbours and his son were also shooting in their garden. I was told that he was a bit of an expert and if I wanted to know anything about airguns I should ask him. His daughter became one of my circle of friends and through her I was introduced to non other than Mr Gerald Cardew and his son Mike Cardew.

I took my BSA Meteor-Super round for them to look at as it was a new version (Mark IV I think), and was taken up to their attic workshop / range. Gerald commented that BSA had substituted plastic for metal in just the right places i.e. nothing critical, they then tested it on their home made chronometer. He was surprised that it was producing just over 11ft/lb when about 10ft/lb was all that was expected. I had a go on their home made shooting range, which included a line of targets that flipped round at random for just a few seconds, to reveal moth balls held in spring clips - great fun! They showed me all their testing equipment, and the rigs used for the research for the first book Trigger to Muzzle.

And also some of the on-going research for the book they were still writing at the time Trigger to Target. I saw their collection of Airguns and Victorian Air Canes and their home made moulds for different shaped pellets, and lead ball - it was a wonderous place. Sadly I lost contact with them when I left school, went on to college and then work and moved away from the area. However the experience had fuelled my continued interest in airguns.

I managed to make contact with him many years later and we wrote to each other and he sent me some of his unpublished research which I have put here on my web site for all to see, but sadly he passed away before I could build up all the information he was sorting out to send me, a sad loss to all the airgunning community.

MODERN AIR RIFLES

Eventually I got a place of my own, and at about the same time I got a job that included training as a Pest Control Officer for the NHS. Well I now had a place to shoot and through the Pest Control training a new purpose. My old BSA Meteor-super served me well to start with, but I looked in the magazines and saw that airgun technology had moved on apace and the choice available was amazing. After a bit of research and trolling round the local gun shops I picked up a second hand Air Arms TX200 MkI(.22) This gun totally transformed my shooting experience and I was hooked again.

Pest Control became a second job in the evenings and at weekends and a friend and I soon had regular clients wanting rabbit numbers reducing on their land. The TX200 received the addition of a sling and a Hushpower silencer but I was finding it a bit on the heavy side so it was joined by a TX200HC which I found easier to handle in the field. This gun also received silencing attention, and I had fitted a home made muzzle insert long before Air Arms brought out their version.

As I now had two .22 TX200's I decided to send the original one back to Air Arms to have it converted to .177, they fitted a new barrel and piston assembly to get the correct power setting. It was like a completely new gun and I found I could accurately hit targets out to 50 yards with the right shooting technique.

I then got to hear about a Brocock Predator for sale (my brother-in-law's workmate's cousin) so having had my appetite wetted I bought it. I soon found out the benefits and disadvantages of using an air cartridge gun, its light weight, recoilless, looks and handles superbly and you can spend ages on your hands and knees in the long grass looking for your cartridges in the middle of a field at dusk if you don't take care when working the action.

However it introduced me to the qualities of recoilless precharged guns so I soon went looking at those to see what I could get. I settled for a Falcon FN19-SB and part exchanged the TX200HC for it. The disadvantage of a precharge gun is the need to fill it with compressed air but my shooting partner who by then had a Titan precharge gun had a spare 3ltr cylinder that I bought for my gun. I got the combined quickfill adapter and silencer with my gun which both work well, the silencer is so effective you only hear the twang of the hammer spring. This gun has served me well over the past three or so years and has been the one I have used for most of my pest control work in that time.

I had always wanted a Theoben gas ram rifle, ever since I first heard about them, but the price has always been a stumbling block. How ever I recently managed to sell the TX200 and the Predator just as a second hand Theoben Sirocco 2000 came up for sale. The Sirocco 2000 is Theobens latest break barrel gas ram gun and I jumped at the chance to get it.

It has an Ambidextrous walnut stock and a full length bull barrel silencer, its superbly accurate once you get used to the gas ram's recoil, the first couple of times I fired it I realized that I had got into bad habits shooting a precharge gun and had to pay close attention to my shooting technique to get the best out of the gun.

PISTOLS

I mentioned that I grew up playing with a Diana Model 2 pop out air pistol as a toy then as I got older and realised what it really was (friends had HARRINGTON GAT'S) I purchased a spring for it and found I had the best of the bunch - brass barrel and real wood grips! and whilst I couldn't fire corks from mine I had the most powerful and accurate dart gun on the block. Cheap dart boards used to come with bulls-eye targets on the back, and we had hours of fun holding shooting competitions in friends bedrooms. I even had a GAT for a while but prefered the Diana, so I sold the GAT on.

After my interest in airguns was rekindled I purchased a number of other pistols, first a DAISY 717 POWERLINE an extremely accurate single stroke (.177) pneumatic target pistol

however my eye sight isn't good enough to do the pistol justice with open sights only. I then picked up some second hand pistols. First a

WEBLEY TEMPEST spring pistol (.177) Then a

CROSMAN 1322 MEDALLIST pump up pistol (.22)

and a GAMO PR-45 pneumatic pistol (.177) The Tempest needed a total rebuild and I also fitted a Webley AIM-BRACE (shoulder stock) to it.

It is very interesting seeing the change in the point of impact when shooting the Tempest with and without the Aim-brace. I have recently obtained another Webley Tempest (.22) so now have Tempest's in both calibres. The .22 has brown grips whilst the .177 has standard black grips

OTHERS

Along with the pistols I also have a couple of rifles just for fun and experimentation, I bought a Chinese B5-3 pump up 12 shot repeater, whilst it is reasonably accurate, the trigger and valve mechanism is agricultural and it needed a bit of smoothing to make it consistant.

I may try and make a different stock and other alterations. I was also given an old RELUM RIFLE, well just the action from one, which I have been working on as a test bed/trial piece rather than ruining a good gun with my experiments.

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