Airgun barrel maintenance is no more complicated than "how to pick up and seduce women".
Every woman... I mean,
barrel, is an individual; and may or may not react well, badly, or not at all to any given approach. Some react immediately, some slowly, and some never; regardless whether we're talking cheap women... I mean, cheap
airguns, expensive, beautiful, homely, or somewhere between. And of course that last part is a matter of individual interpretations and tastes. Matter of fact I've just experienced an excellent example of all the above.
A few months ago I purchased what many more 'evolved' airgunners on this forum might laugh off as cheap, ugly, rude, crude and downright off-putting! However I've often confessed "
I like slutty-looking women!" Behold...
BIG BERTHA-
If you're still with me, I assume you've picked yourself up off the floor. But like many (most) things I do, there is (and was) a method to my madness.
It having been a few years since I captured State and National Champion titles with airguns that sold brand-new for as little as $21.95 (that's 21 dollars and 95 cents, NOT $2,195.00), I saw the .30 caliber, 32" barreled,
$500, Chinese AEA Challenger bullpup as having potentials no-one less insane than me would (or probably
could) recognize. My intention with this purchase was to see if I could (again) turn water to wine by taking the cheapest, ugliest, rudest, crudest, and most off-putting (to sane folks) woman... I mean,
airgun, to the winner's circle (again); this time in long-range airgun competitions of Bench-Rest Silhouette and Extreme Field Target (both shot out to 100 yards). I well realized it would be quite a challenge to tame the savage, unregulated,
150 foot-pound beast enough to
avoid being laughed off the field in such cutting-edge airgun competitions.
The taming/sophistication process involved 1) Reducing the power level, OBSCENE COCKING EFFORT, AND EIGHT-POUND TRIGGER-PULL by replacing the extremely strong hammer-spring with a shorter, lighter Ace Hardware spring, 2) Moly lubing everything inside there, 3) Dressing the muzzle crown, 4) Polishing the bore, and, finally, yesterday, 5) Fabricating a simple, but effective, sear-engagement adjusting gizmo. And, 6) Shooting thousands of rounds in the course of chronograph and accuracy testing.
What kept me going through this process was each step producing positive results over the chronograph and on target. Each positive result was another step toward my admittedly LOFTY goal.
Last nights
still shooting conditions proved fabricating the sear-engagement adjuster to (probably) be the next to last step in achieving my goal. But given current pellet-availability issues, my usual accuracy-testing protocol of shooting
five (or more) consecutive five-shot groups to calculate AVERAGE accuracy capabilities has, by necessity, been amended to THREE consecutive five-shot groups; especially when sacrificing tins of relatively expensive .30 caliber pellets.
With BERTA'S trigger now breaking like glass at 32 ounces, with every shot I consciously reminded myself, "don't even get on the trigger until ready to break the shot'". Here are the first 2, five-shot groups at 100 yards-
The group in red measured 1.20" center-to-center,
the blue group just .59". In fact,
all ten shots went into 1.20" c-t-c. Though extremely tempted to stop there, my testing protocol demanded a third group; and I was both too lazy to put up a new target, and confident enough in the guns abilities, to shoot the third group on the same target in order to calculate
average group size.
Of course as expected, and contrary to my over-inflated confidence, the third group was not only the largest, but centered to a slightly different point-of-impact than the previous two. I've probably shot more bench-rested airgun groups than anyone on Earth, and the 1.06"
average group-size is the best I've ever achieved at 100 yards with an airgun. And the .59" group is among the five best I've ever gotten.
Mind you, this superb accuracy does not qualify as meeting my goal outlined above. However it's another step... correction- GIANT STEP towards that goal.
So you ask, "what's the last step alluded to earlier?" That would be the Huma regulator arriving next week; hopefully in time for the (quarterly) TEXtreme Field Target competition I'm hosting that weekend (September 4).
Though I'll shoot BIG BERTHA in the TFT competition even if the reg doesn't arrive in time, regulated-consistency would be another, and no small confidence builder in an extreme competition brutally punishing of any lack of confidence.
Depending on how it goes, I'll either post an update on this forum, or take a cue from the LOTFW... and
GO INTO HIDING!