How the BW Carbine came about...
Frankly, I'm not a fan of looooonnnggggg guns. And the BW with the SubMOA barrels was nearly 50 inches long, after the 7inch moderator it needed to tame down the report at high power, and that gets us to another personal preference....I'm not a huge fan of high volume shooting of anything over about 35-40fpe....too loud, too much air usage, price/shot, blows through the back of my pellet traps,. etc. Just a personal preference. But that personal preference meant the BW hasn't been getting shot much for the last couple weeks.
A couple weeks ago I was texting with
@Arzrover about all of that, and I threw the idea out there about going a different direction with the BW. What I had in mind was to make it short enough to be enjoyable, and to run pellets in the 13-18grain range through it, MAYBE going up into the 20-22grain range. Basically, to bring the power and length way down. He responded that he had a couple short blanks that might fit the project and we worked out the details for him to machine it for me. In conversation we concluded that we needed a barrel length of 15" to clear the bottle, in case I want to run a large diameter moderator and not hit the bottle with it.
And here we are....Blackwolf Chassis Carbine.
As an aside, I've found that quite a large percentage of my airgunning has been figuring out the best (or sometimes the two best) projectiles for a given gun/barrel at a particular power level, and setting up the gun that way and leaving it there. That projectile matched to gun matched to a certain power level is often competition-based, like the 20fpe limit for field target, or the 12fpe limit for pistol field target. This trend is so prevalent in my modest pile of airguns, that I even have specific lots of a pellet mated to a particular gun.
I currently don't have anything that's a 18-40fpe .22 pellet generalist though. And I've got all these "orphan" pellets with no gun set up to shoot them.
So that's the plan, work through the orphan pellet pile, using the BW Carbine as a general use, mid-weight pellet shooter. The BW certainly has the adjustability of this concept. And on that note, a tuning kit came off
@Arzrover's lathe as well. Various sizes of transfer ports. They fit into the transfer port of the breech, resting on the valve ledge below, and sandwiched by the barrel above. They don't even require degassing to swap to a different size. The small washer-looking items on the left side of the image are various thicknesses of hammer spring shim, to further yet open the tuning possibilities.
And this is how it looks when dropped into a different stock option...
Bobby sent me the above photo, with it in a wood-stocked rifle, the same evening that
@Dairyboy posted about his new RAW Mini Hunter, and I realized we had recreated a Daystate version of that RAW...essentially a traditional, non-bullpup rifle, with a bullpup-like OAL. I joked with Dillon about this being the Daystate Mini.
When comparing the BW Carbine to the SubMOA barrels...
That's an instant weight savings of 2.325lbs and a length reduction of 9.5 inches. So, once I decide on which shroud or moderator to run, I'm looking at a length of 36-37.5 inches, versus nearly 50 inches.
It REALLY changes the general impression of the gun. Much less bench-howitzer now, and much more, I wanna pick that thing up and shoot it a bunch!
This short barrel and the prospect of some enjoyable low-power shooting from a conveniently sized gun has me excited for the BW project again.
