Sunday, January 31, 2010

The inspiration I needed

From this post this morning, I got a comment from Nancy R. from Excels at Nothing about shooting a little airsoft while stuck in the house. While I don't have any airsoft, that comment did spark an interest in the ol' Daisy PowerLine 880 that sits in the corner of the man cave.

The wife and I had decided that since the kids had stopped coughing this morning, and that the noses weren't running after nap, we would go to the mall to let them unwind for awhile. Walking around there I got the comment on my BlackBerry, and the chain reaction in my several brain cells told me that I needed some 1" rings so that I can replace that crappy no-powered plastic thing on top of the Daisy referred to as an "optic," and in its place put the crappy Daisy PowerLine 3-9 that I had laying around.

The difference is tremendous. It's like putting a freakin' Nightforce on the thing.

Here's a before and after:




I shoot the thing in my basement, and my backstop is the PASGT vest from my Ballistic Vest Live Fire Test; but that's just to stop pellets from hitting the drywall. Behind that is eight inches of concrete and fifty feet of dirt:



The distance is 33':



Once I got the beast sighted in with BBs (2nd dot from the bottom), I fired one pellet at full power at the 2nd dot from the top, and then clicked the crosshairs over to the shot hole. The best 5-shot group I had with the plastic optic like tube was 1.053" CTC, and after the swap the first and only 5-shot group measured .740", all inside the 2nd dot from the top. The top dot was me fiddling around with the clicks:



So I basically trimmed a quarter of an inch or better off a ten yard group by buying a $7.99 pair of Simmons airgun rings. Can't beat that!

Next up is to Pimp my Pellet Gun! I've been wanting to Duracoat the 308 for some time now, and I'm not about to test my artistic skills on it until I know what I'm doing. Haven't used an airbrush for awhile, but I intend to get ahold of one soon. Some paint on the Daisy should work great to test it out. Then the neighborhood starlings won't see me coming!

3 comments:

Michael W. said...

Good job!

Ms. Nancy is a handy one, isn't she?

Nancy R. said...

OPTICS? I'm still working on sights.

dehakal said...

Have you seen the article and discussion on pellet variance at

http://www.pyramydair.com/blog/

The article Air Force Edge part 7 comments goes into quite a bit of detail on pellet variance and accuracy