Friday Pointless Ramble

Work and the children prevented me from doing anything airgun related this half of the week. I did receive an order of pellets from Pyramyd Air today though. It's pretty easy to spend $70.00 on pellets.
I bought:
250 Gamo .177 Round Balls. (lead)
500 RWS .177 Hobby
500 RWS .177 Meisterkugeln Rifle
500 RWS .177 Meisterkugeln Pistol
1250 Crosman .177 Premier Light
125 Eun Jin .22 Domed
300 JSB .22 Diabolo Jumbo Match
500 RWS .22 Hobby
So 3925 pellets for $71.89 with Pyramyd's buy 3 get one free, and a 10% off discount code.
That's an average of 1.83 cents a pellet, or 54.6 pellets to the dollar.

The Gamo balls were to see if they perform well in some of the CO2 bb pistols I have. I can state that they do not function well in my Crosman 451. Then again BB's don't either...it's a real beater.

The .22 JSB and .22 Hobby were as a replacement for .22 Crosman wadcutters in my Crosman 400 rifle. For some reason you can't find the Crosman .22 wadcutters anymore. The JSB's jammed in the repeating mechanism, but the RWS Hobbys feed better than the Crosmans did.
I'll shoot the JSBs in my other .22 pellet guns.

The Meisterkugelns are for my "match" guns, should I ever relax enough to do more 10M shooting.

The EunJin's are basically for fun, and as part of my general embrace of Korean culture. They are extremely heavy and large pellets intended for hunting. Not that I hunt, but you never know.

I got out the Chronograph and the Eunjins and Hobbys.

The Eunjins are long pellets!

I shot both types through my Benjamin 342.

I only did 3 shots of each type, at 8 pumps.
The Hobbys at 11.9 grains, averaged 654 fps. for 11.3 ft/lbs of energy
The Eunjins at 28.4 grains, averaged 467 fps. for 13.76 ft/lb of energy

It's worth noting that the Original (Diana) 45 that I wrote about earlier averaged 840 fps w/ 7.9 grain pellets for 12.38 ft/lbs. So probably an easier gun to shoot should I need to dispatch a watermelon.

Oh, and here's a post about the Original 45 that I missed before I wrote about it.

The 1377 Project, A Trigger Job

As I slowly make my way from the front to the back of the 1377 Carbine conversion, the next items was to tweak the trigger/sear a bit. Out of the box it isn't bad, but a bit heavy, and there are some inefficiencies.

The slot both the sear and trigger ride in is rather wide, so they use a spring washer to keep the trigger straight.

The poor sear gets no such spring and can wobble and wiggle all it wants.

Looks simple from outside...

And it is. That round thing at the upper corner is a magnet I use to hold all the little parts to keep them from getting lost.

The trigger and sear derive their force from the same spring. It's rather hefty and the end just pushes against the edge of the sear.

I turned down some delrin to make a spring guide/bearing for the sear.

Parted it off.

I chamfered the edge and then filed it to a gentle radius.

I installed a shorter, somewhat lighter spring from my cache of random springs.

To solve the wobble of the sear and trigger I used thin washers on either side to take up any play. I was going to make some but found perfect stock ones in my drawer of tiny washers.

I found the end of the guide inside the spring dragged a little, so it got a quick chamfer as well.

Finally I replaced the undersized and soft Crosman pins (R) with dowel pins (L). I lubed everything and put it back together. The trigger is now somewhat lighter and less "clicky" if that makes sense. I cocked the gun and did the standard drop/hit/wiggle/smack test to make sure the sear still would stay engaged. It did. So one more step on the road is finished.

A Longer Barrel for the Crosman 357

Since I had the 357 apart for the hammer repair, I decided to turn down the spare 1377 barrel I had on hand to fit the revolver.

The 1377 barrel above the stock one.

I gained a lot of respect for Crosman that day, as the steel they use for the 1377 barrels is some sort of profoundly hard and wear resistant alloy. Even with carbide tools I couldn't take a heavy cut.

So I just took pass after pass to get it down to the major OD of the 357 barrel.

It's a lathe, it's a gun, it's a lathe gun! That is, I tested for fit.

I turned down the minor diameter and filed it a bit. I got a terrible surface finish. I would probably have benefitted from using a follow rest, alas I don't have one. I cut off the bit left in the chuck as it had a perpendicular hole for the 1377 transfer port.

Using a 60 deg. center drill to make the lead in for the pellet.

All done.

I installed the new barrel in the revolver and somehow it looked a little skimpy...

So I took a length of black acetal (Delrin) and drilled it to be a push fit on the barrel OD.

Is it cool, or lame? I don't know, what do you want for a $10.00 gun?

I chronied it using Crosman Premier Lights (7.9 gr.) and it got between 394 and 320 fps. over a course of 40 shots from a fresh CO2 cartridge, with the majority being in the 340-360 range. So did it improve the pistol at all? Probably not that much...

I much prefer the 38T's I own.