Based on some recent comments and conversations, it seems that many airgunners expect a gun to come out of the box performing at its peak potential. I understand the idea of "I paid the premium for a high-end airgun, the very first 5 shot group at 100 yards out of the box should be submoa." Or, the "there's no excuse for a new $2, 3, 4k etc airgun to not be able to shoot starling eyes at 100 yards right after I sight it in." In these discussions, we even see the warranty claims folks jump in and be upset that their gun doesn't shoot as good as so and so's gun, so they should be eligible for replacement until it does. All of that is not in-line with reality. Outside of custom guns, built to a specific purpose, using a specific projectile, airguns simply don't come out of the box shooting to their highest potential.
And this is why.
- Airguns perform best at certain pressures. Each one is unique. Even regulated guns sometimes prefer that you stop shooting 20-30 bar above the reg pressure, or don't fill to the max working pressure. The only way to figure this out is to spend time shooting it.
- Airguns come out of the box with the adjustments at a certain configuration. The odds of THAT OEM configuration agreeing with whatever projectile you want to shoot from it are slim to none. And the odds of it performing its best with those configurations and your chosen projectile are even slimmer. And guess what....the pressures mentioned a second ago are likely to change when you figure out what projectile you want to shoot versus the projectile the barrel wants to shoot.
- The OEM regulator set pressure is likely to need changed from OEM to match your desires and purpose for the gun.
- The hammer spring tension will need to be figured out. High reg/low hammer tension? or low reg/high hammer tension? Only way to know what's best is to test it out and see. Sometimes what you're wanting to do will require a different hammer spring rate than the OEM spring.
- Barrel
- You can't change the twist rate of the barrel. And that twist rate is only appropriate for certain projectiles at certain speeds. The owners decision to shoot a projectile at xyz fps (or at any fps) that doesn't match the twist rate doesn't make the gun faulty, nor does it make a warranty claim.
- Choke/no choke, again, projectile choice versus the gun you chose to buy.
- How often do you need to clean the barrel? Gotta figure that out, cuz accuracy will go south when it needs cleaned. Warranty claim for a dirty barrel, hell no.
- What does the barrel clean entail to get back to good shooting? Gotta figure that out through trial and error. Is it the manufacturers responsibility to warranty a leaded up barrel after you decided to shoot cheap and hard high antimony content pellets through it for too long before you decided to address how leaded up it is? Nope.
- Yes, barrels can sometimes be coaxed into agreeing with what you want it to shoot from polishing, and/or lapping.
- Plenum size. You bought an airgun with a plenum too big for what you want to do. You bought an airgun with a plenum too small for what you want to do. Warranty claim? Nope. You should have researched your purchase better, ie, you bought the wrong gun for your intended purpose.
- Projectiles. You spend a couple weeks to a couple months figuring all of the above out, and have a sweet deal going. Your gun shoots like you want it to. Then the manufacturer changes the projectile slightly. Or discontinues it altogether.
In short, variables. Lots and lots of variables. To get peak performance, all of them need to be experimented with, studied, compared.
What we don't see when a guy wins a big competition, is all of the work that went into getting that gun to shoot the way it does. And occasionally somebody with rose-colored glasses will say they didn't do much to make it look like it was all the shooter and not the gun, but they did. They at least polished the barrel and spent some time vetting projectiles and settings to see what it shoots best and at what speeds. Massaged the trigger to suit them, played with various moderators, etc.
Achieving high performance (or being competitive if that's your thing) from/with an airgun is typically a long, drawn out process. It's not realistic to expect that paying more money means you get to skip all the steps.
Warranties cover defects. Paying for a gun with a good warranty doesn't equate to a shortcut to the winners circle or a short cut to sub-moa groups.
What paying for a high-end gun DOES get a guy, is a much more refined user experience. Paying for high-end gets you long term support for the gun. And of course, if there's a defect in the manufacture of a certain component of the gun, that's where the warranty kicks in. And, once you've worked through the necessary steps to figure out how to get the gun to shoot your chosen projectile, high-end is highly likely to outshoot budget guns.
As a parallel conversation....I have a gun that has been re-barreled 7 times. Sometimes the barrel a gun comes with simply doesn't want to do what you want the gun to do. That was the case here. The OEM barrel shot a low BC/low weight pellet extremely well. But I wanted a high BC/high weight pellet to shoot out of the gun, and I wanted it to shoot extremely well. Since my wants and the reality of the gun didn't match, I had to pay for barrels and machining until I found one that would shoot at a level that I wanted the gun to shoot. It also required swapping parts around, valve components, etc to get it to produce the fpe that I wanted. In short, the gun I bought didn't match what I wanted it to do, so I had to customize it to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
A picture is worth a thousand words...
Both of these pages were shot from the same gun, same barrel, same settings. But each is with a different batch of the supposedly same pellets. Left side is probably something like 2.5-3" average group size. The six groups on the right average 1.06", which is 1.015MOA. The pellets on the left will shoot like the one on the right, but the pellet on the left needs 25-30 more feet per second to do it. Because the pellet manufacturer changed the skirt slightly and shifted the center of gravity.
Without the investment of time to do the experimentation and a comparison, the owner of the gun responsible for the left side would be complaining to the manufacturer. While the owner of the gun on the left would be quite pleased. But we know these were both from the same gun. (Variables).
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