Hi everyone, thanks for all your input. And sorry I dropped off the radar after making this post. The weather here in Central New York was absolutely phenomenal this past weekend!
I need to say that I made this post asking about MKI vs MKII pellets after seeing the Tyler20 coupon. I was going to make a quick PA order based on feedback here but then got busy/distracted. This cricket has been a bit of a project gun, but I have it shooting well now and the stars finally lined up on Saturday to do some accuracy comparisons between pellets. I found a clear preference for MKI in my cricket. So I'm actually that I held off on my order!
>> In fact, I probably shot the best 50-yard group with them during this testing
Here's my 1st target. MKIs on top and MKIIs on the bottom. I started at the top-left and worked my way across and then down. I'm shocked the 1st group was as good as it was... I recently picked up a used Diana 54 and have not shot the cricket in a month or more so I was not real clear how I left it. I found the shots were slow (800 fps) so I cranked up HS a bit and then 6 shots in blew an o-ring. I found that I must not have tightened the barrel down as much as I should have and it slid forward just enough to blow air out around the forward barrel o-ring. Anyway, I fix that and in the process determined that I must not have aligned the barrel just right because my next shots were up in the 845-850 fps range.
I repeated this same test one more time. Like the previous target, these are all six-shot groups. Again, the MKIs are simply tighter.
Checkout the second shot in the top row.
The view through the scope (swfa ss 16x):
Oh, I should also mention that my daughter's boyfriend printed me a single shot tray and this was my first time using it. It worked perfectly.
Oh, I almost forgot... I did one more target with the first (top-left) group being the MK1s and the rest of the groups being standard kings. By this point the wind had picked up a bit, so it's not really a fair comparison to the earlier targets. I was also bring down the HS across the groups to see how that might affect things.
Looking back at the day, I should have spent a little more time after fixing the barrel o-ring... My air consumption was pretty high doing the MK1 / MKII testing. I'm pretty sure I could have turned back my HS another 1 or 2 turns and not lost too much velocity. I'm not sure if wasted air might have affected accuracy...
I think I'll be ordering MK1s and normal Kings in the future