Why a .177 over a .22 for Hunting Rabbits?

Bpaul wrote in a comment recently:

I'd be curious on the numbers your gun is putting out if you get a chance to shoot it over a chrony.

Also, your decision to go .177 from .22 -- did you blog about that? Be curious to hear why...

Hi Bpaul,

I went for all this, basically, because the opportunity presented itself and the argument about the flatter trajectory of the .177 finally convinced me. With the roller-coaster trajectory of the .22 at 12ftlb there's the constant difficulty of trying to estimate where the pellet will be in its arc when it reaches its target point.

If you zero at 35 yards with a .22 there's a variation over, say, 40 yards of about three inches up and down through an imaginary line from the end of the scope to the target. The pellet starts two inches below this line, climbs up to about an inch above it and then immediately after 35 yards drops below it again in its downwards fall. So there's a three-inch margin for error depending on where the target is and constant adjustments up and down need to be made in the reticule to accommodate this while aiming. (The graphs below are from ChairGun Pro available free here.)

With the .177 at 12ftlbs however, the arc of the lighter pellet will stay within one inch from about 10 right the way out to about 40 yards (.177 RWS Superdomes weight only 8.3 grains against the 14.66 grains of .22 H&N Field Targets). So in theory that means that if you can judge that the rabbit is at a distance anywhere between 10 and 40 yards then you can be fairly confident that a shot at the intersection of the scope's cross-hairs will result in a pellet hitting the target area. If you compare the length of the different pink kill zones on the two graphs you can see that they do bear this out.

My distance estimation is not so great but even I can tell if a rabbit is between 10 and 40 yards; so purely on the basis of this there's a much stronger case for going with a .177 for fieldwork.

To get the pellets out at anything up close to 12ftlb a .177 needs a spring with a few more coils on it than one in a .22 - and you can feel the greater effort needed to cock the rifle now. (The rifle was of course chronographed before leaving the shop and it was doing a healthy and legal 11.78ftlbs with the RWS Superdomes I'm using.) I've heard it said from people commenting here that with this stronger spring the increased release vibration in a .177 would act against any gain that the flatter trajectory could provide. This did seem to make sense to me but (and I can only speak about my rifle, of course) thanks to Tony at Sandwell Field Sports, if anything the gun now fires with perceptibly less spring judder than it did before the work was done.

My damn cold is still hanging around so I suspect I won't be going out today to see if all this theory on paper translates into a greater incidence of rabbit on the table - but I'm hopeful for the future.

Cheers,

HH
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Tags: accuracy, 177, air rifles, pellet, sandwell field sports, shooting, Springer, hunting, trajectory

Epitaph for year one.

I've been posting here a year now.

I'll not be going shooting for a little while since my rifle's currently being worked on at Sandwell Field Sports. Its action was described to me, prior to going in for treatment, as sounding 'like a skeleton masturbating in a biscuit tin'.

So on that note, I'll start the second year of the Rabbit Stew Blog.

Cheers all,

HH

The Penkridge Air Rifle Club

After strapping a hefty Weihrauch to my back and huffing and puffing up the A449 on my push-bike, I spent a lovely Sunday morning recently at the Penkridge Air Rifle Club. It's a field target set-up and, after a little while on the plinking range, I walked and fired the 18-shot course, happily chatting and comparing shots the whole time with a young, fellow springer-using chap who'd just finished a game-keeper training at the nearby Rodbaston Agricultural College. It's a great pleasure to meet folk who are also interested and involved in the shooting world and it's a double joy to share with them the challenge of shooting fiendishly positioned little metal replicas of rats, rabbits and pigeons.

The targets are set out and around a fine old stand of trees on the shoulder of a little hill which overlooks a gently twisting stretch of the pike, chub and perch-laden river Penk. The targets on this day ranged between ten and fifty yards; some more or less on the flat but the majority down varying slopes towards the water. It's a real work-out for your distance estimation and trajectory judgement - like a visit to the gym for your air rifle skills. By the time I'd finished the course I felt like my shooting had really improved, a great feeling - and it was a lot of fun, too: hugely enjoyable, in fact.

It's a tremendously laid back and friendly club; there's not a trace of any who's-got-the-most-expensive-gun mentality among the varied crowd of shooters; safety is certainly taken seriously but this doesn't mean that there's a culture of humourless regimentation in everything; there are cups of tea to hand down at the wood-stove-heated portacabin clubhouse and giant sausage and bacon butties being produced on a barbecue just outside - little short of heaven for air rifle folk, in other words.

One of the other great pleasures of meeting a crowd of fellow air-gun-heads is the chance to look at and chat about the huge variety of different shooting set-ups that people bring to the course. I got a chance to look for the first time through a really good quality Nikon 3-9x40 ProStaff scope. I'd never seen one of these before and I was genuinely startled by the luminously precise clarity of the patch of riverbank that it revealed to me; I really had no idea that scopes could be this good, that the quality of a set of lenses could make so great a difference to the sight picture; it was unbelievable, really - like stepping out of the optician's office for the first time in a pair of long-overdue new glasses. This particular scope, I was told, costs about £170 and, while that's about 165 quid beyond my pocket right now, I'm definitely going to put one of these on my wish-list for second-hand acquisition in the future.

I also got to handle a new, Birmingham-made, BSA Ultra Multishot which was a remarkably light and compact little pre-charged pneumatic. Almost a rifle in miniature, it nonetheless had a very stylish and determined air to it and I felt a pang of real reluctance handing the gorgeous thing back.

All-in-all a fine and fun day out: I pedalled back down the A449 with a smile on my face and I'll surely be returning soon.
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Tags: Field target shooting, shooting, air guns, air rifles, UK, guns, rifles

Tuning the HW80k - Sandwell Field Sports

In terms of performance the HW80k was a completely different class of air rifle to the Crosman Ratcatcher. I'd been doing target practise at 30 yards on a half-inch-thick piece of damp chipboard with the Ratcatcher. From that distance, the .22 pellets would gather in a fairly tight group around the bullseye, penetrate the card of the target and embed themselves to a depth of about half their length in the surface of the chipboard beneath.

I fired the HW80k at a target on the same panel of chipboard and when I took it off to see how the pellets had fared I saw to my surprise that this group of pellets had not embedded themselves at all - they had instead blasted clear through the board. The difference between 7ftlbs and 12ftlbs could not have been more clear.

I hadn't given a thought to recoil when using the Ratcatcher - it didn't really have any. But the absence of recoil on the Ratty only really became clear to me retrospectively when I'd fired the Weihrauch - because this gun had recoil a-plenty. It was quite a shock at first; when I squeezed the trigger on the Ratty I'd be bracing myself for a recoil which never really came; with the Weihrauch, however, I did give out a genuine yelp of surprise when the thing went off the first time: it really did have a kick.

But not only did it kick, it was heavy. The Ratty weighed nothing - but this thing weighed a ton: nearly eleven pounds, all told, with scope and sound moderator. Standing, if I took more than a couple of breaths to stabilise the waving of the gun while I aimed, I found that I'd start to wobble again at the sheer effort of keeping the thing horizontal.

Learning to fire a springer, so I had read, took some time - and I could see why. I was, at first, overwhelmed by the size, weight, and recoil of the gun. But beyond this, after I'd done some more target practise, I also began to suspect that the recoil itself was not as well-behaved as it might have been. I began to notice that when I fired the rifle - in addition to a recoil along the axis of the direction in which it was pointing there was a discernible side-to-side recoil as well.

I began to look around on the net for information about tuning air rifles - and of course, there's a stack of it. A lot of it is devoted to techniques for home-tuning and the merits and demerits of the various tuning kits, lubricants, springs, spring hats and guides - seemingly endless - that you can buy and then apply yourself. The rest of the material on home tuning - at least in the U.K - is devoted to stern warnings concerning the length of time that you can expect to stay in prison if your home-improved rifle ends up straying a whit above the 12ftlb mark (five years!).

Stuff all this, I thought, I'll just have to pay someone to tune it for me. I looked around a bit and eventually took it to Sandwell Field Sports in Birmingham. Tony Wall there agreed to give the gun a "First Stage Tuning" for me for which would cost £60 and take a week.

When I went to get the gun (and after I'd finished the coffee and biscuits that always seem to be on offer at the shop) I spoke to Tony about maintenance, "What do I need to do in terms of oil and stuff?" I asked him. "Nothing," he said, "Absolutely nothing. Just leave it alone, it doesn't need a thing."

The tuned rifle was was simply transformed. The very noticeable boing! of the spring and wobble when fired had completely disappeared. It was replaced with a businesslike thock! and a recoil which was at once more discrete but also more positive - which is to say completely along the axis of the gun's orientation and without a trace of the old side-to-side wobble. Once scoped up and zero'd in, a practise batch of pellets through the newly-tuned rifle delivered the tightest groups I'd ever fired. My first foray into the field that evening gave me a rabbit - my first - on the very first shot.