Some of you may remember me discussing trying to get 50 fpe from my 25 caliber P35 before. I have done it but inevitably the next time I go to shoot the gun the regulator is too high for the hammer to open the valve so fpe is a lot lower. So I give up and tune it for mid 40s and enjoy it. Until the bug for more power strikes again.
I was gifted a P35X recently that I still do not have working right. Power was lower than my P35-25 (both are 25 caliber). The barrel port was way too small, appropriate for a 22 caliber, and I thought the rest of the passages in the gun would be too. But they turned out to be reasonably OK. I still drilled them out to 85% of bore diameter. But that gun still doesn't shoot right. I turned the reg down trying to get a nice 30 fpe 25 out of it and it seemed to work, until it stopped working.
Long way of saying the parts of the P35X which do work, the longer barrel and hammer spring are now on my P35-25. But it's regulator seems to have decided not to work now and new O-rings has not fixed it yet. But I noticed the velocity and thus fpe was significantly greater when it fell off the regulator.
So today I pulled the regulator, took it out of the gun entirely. I aired it up initially to 170bar and got 852 fps on 34 grain JSBs. Velocity rose as pressure fell reaching a maximum of 912 fps at a little over 140 bar. That was with the hammer spring at maximum. So I started turning it down. It is now at 1.5 turns less than maximum. That has reduced velocity some but no more than about 25 fps.
With a 140bar fill I got a string of 867 to 888 back to 867 over 1 magazine of 8 shots. And it is accurate. One hole groups at 30 yards. There is a fairly loud ping but I may find a bottle brush that will help with that. If I wanted or needed more shots I could fill a little higher, like 150 bar, and shoot down a little further. ES would go up but the POI would not change a whole lot. 867fps on 34 grain pellets equates to about 57 fpe. 888 is about 60 fpe.
My role for this gun is mainly to thump something like a mature raccoon, coyote or a pesky muskrat pretty hard. I am not likely to need more than 8 shots for this (if I do I deserve to be unsuccessful). So for now I am leaving it set up this way.
I was gifted a P35X recently that I still do not have working right. Power was lower than my P35-25 (both are 25 caliber). The barrel port was way too small, appropriate for a 22 caliber, and I thought the rest of the passages in the gun would be too. But they turned out to be reasonably OK. I still drilled them out to 85% of bore diameter. But that gun still doesn't shoot right. I turned the reg down trying to get a nice 30 fpe 25 out of it and it seemed to work, until it stopped working.
Long way of saying the parts of the P35X which do work, the longer barrel and hammer spring are now on my P35-25. But it's regulator seems to have decided not to work now and new O-rings has not fixed it yet. But I noticed the velocity and thus fpe was significantly greater when it fell off the regulator.
So today I pulled the regulator, took it out of the gun entirely. I aired it up initially to 170bar and got 852 fps on 34 grain JSBs. Velocity rose as pressure fell reaching a maximum of 912 fps at a little over 140 bar. That was with the hammer spring at maximum. So I started turning it down. It is now at 1.5 turns less than maximum. That has reduced velocity some but no more than about 25 fps.
With a 140bar fill I got a string of 867 to 888 back to 867 over 1 magazine of 8 shots. And it is accurate. One hole groups at 30 yards. There is a fairly loud ping but I may find a bottle brush that will help with that. If I wanted or needed more shots I could fill a little higher, like 150 bar, and shoot down a little further. ES would go up but the POI would not change a whole lot. 867fps on 34 grain pellets equates to about 57 fpe. 888 is about 60 fpe.
My role for this gun is mainly to thump something like a mature raccoon, coyote or a pesky muskrat pretty hard. I am not likely to need more than 8 shots for this (if I do I deserve to be unsuccessful). So for now I am leaving it set up this way.
