Even more airgun fun

 I've really been digging my Daisy 853 although I keep calling it an 835...

This little guy showed up on Saturday and I finally got time to try it out today. The target stickers are 1 1/2" across, the metal bits are 1 11/16" When you shoot the lower targets they'll flip up and can be reset by shooting the top one.

What I found is that the 853 needs to hit the bottom targets below center to consistently get them to flip. I suppose I need to get out one of my .22 airguns to see if the issue is the 853 not having enough power or if its something about the targets. Anyway its challenging to get all 4 lower targets flipped in 4 shots. After some practice I could do it pretty reliably but not 100%. This is definitely good practice, its challenging but not impossible.

In my previous post I'd incorrectly mentioned that I was using Crossman pellets, they're actually Daisy. For cheap pellets they work really well. Dad uses Crossman zinc "lead free" pellets for shooting chipmunks and squirrels because he doesn't want to poison the crows that eat them. He reports that those zinc pellets shoot accurately as well but I think maybe not as good as I'm getting with the Daisy.

There is one problem I need to correct for, the pellets hit the targets and fall on the ground. The ones in the picture were previously lying in the grass. I *think* I got them all picked up but some had buried into the grass. I wouldn't be surprised if I missed some. I need to get some kind of small tray to catch them. I've got some pieces of gutter that would probably do the job. Another good reason to use zinc pellets I suppose.

Airgun fun

 What with the ongoing ammunition shortage anybody wanting to maintain their shooting skills needs to look to alternate methods. One idea for that is airguns.

A great place to pick up a cheap gun is from the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP), I recently ordered a couple Daisy 835s from them.

When I ordered there were both standard and monte carlo stock options, this is the standard, just about as I opened the box. You can see that no rear sight is installed, the little black box has a brand new peep sight, the little envelope contains different inserts for the front sight.

This is the monte carlo stock gun. With the rear sight installed it took maybe a dozen shots to get things dialed in. Here we're shooting at a range of 10 meters. The target is decidedly not correct for this range, I need to pick up some proper 10m airgun targets but the results were still pretty impressive.

This is my worst group of the day, about 3/4". I was shooting in a standard sitting position, knees bent, elbows on knees. I wasn't trying particularly hard, I'd put 5 pellets at a time into the top of the tin the pellets come in and load and fire fairly rapidly.

This is probably the best group of the batch, again 5 shots, now under 1/2". I think there is more accuracy to be had, the guns came with slings that would tighten up the front arm considerably. I also need to try some bench shooting and some more pellets. I've been using Crossman pellets that I bought some years ago. They were probably on sale at Wal-Mart. Airguns tend to be sensitive to ammunition so it is quite likely that using different pellets would result in greater accuracy.