Old & New Beeman Field Target Specials

How long has it been since you've bought the FTT's . The blue label has been discontinued for several years or more. The blue label FTT's are highly sought after by more than a few shooters. The blue label pellets were made by H&N but I'm sure the new ones are coming from a different die. Most of the Beeman pellets have dropped the tin count from 500 to 300.

Marksman was the one that originally labelled the H&N FTT as the Field Target Special and Imported the pellet to the USA from H&N. SR Industries owned Marksman as a subsidiary before they purchased the Beeman Precision Co. They had planned to discontinue the product after the Beeman acquisition but the consumer was adamant that is needed to be made available and there was a lot of demand from dealers. When they told me they were shutting it off I bought all they would let me have in all three calibers and all the other dealers who didn't get any were complaining like mad. When they reordered from H&N there was a miscommunication that had the batch that came also under the Marksman label. I bought all they could spare of those as well because I knew the price would not be the same under the Beeman Branding.
In the end they put the pellet under the Beeman label, made the tins smaller and put a perfume like markup on them. That haven't really changed much since they were introduced. They are super good in .20 cal out of the HW95/R10 & HW97 MKIII.

TimmyMac1

Marksman had put a considerable amount of stress on Beeman by offerring high grade pellets at a lower price than the standard offering from Beeman which was adequate but not really asking for the Premium grade. I had written an AMMO article for Guns & Ammo around 1987 which pointed out the superior specs the marksman lead had from a weight and dimensional perspective. The data was in a chart I had included which clearly showed Beeman was selling what H&N considered the base grade lead and Marksman was buying the top tier in the same configuration. So Marksman Mako was baracuda Match and Beemans Kodiak was Basic Baracuda.
Doc BB flipped out. He called his College Buddy(Peterson and Beeman went to Berkely) and got me fired from G&A. I got called into the Editors office like "get your A down here now" and was being asked "Does your second manuscript do the same thing to Doc BB?" My answer was "yes, the facts speak for themselves".; Red Bell threw me out of his office as I grabbed the second instalment out of the circular file. Doc BB & I were always at odds. His arrogance demanded a strong dose of reality from ME! Some of it didn't make it to print in G&A but it all got into print as it was the only weapon in my quiver. Garry James was a bigger AG NUT than Red Bell was and became editor of G&A around 1995 and I wrote for him in the G&A annual for four or five years after losing the Magazione gig. Garry gave me the opportunity to write "You've come a long way BB" in 1999 which was an airgun Feature article about mostly my stuff. The AG industry doesn't know how blessed they were to have two G&A editors that were Airgun Nuts and also went on to serve as Editors of the American Rifleman NRA Publication. I thank both of them every time I see them. They changed both the G&A's and NRA's attitude about Airguns and where they fit. Bottom line is they knew the Airgun thing was for people who loved to shoot a LOT. That would be us!

TimmyMac1

I always thought that the .20 cal fts were about the best ever pellet in that caliber. Didn't know that the marksman and Beeman versions were different, though, both shot pretty well in every .20 I had.