Video: Episode 3 - PCP Airguns 101:How to fill your PCP Airgun

Tyler shows us how to fill your PCP airgun using the most popular methods: handpumps, carbon fiber air tanks, or the Air Venturi 4500psi Compressor.

PCP Airguns 101: How to Fill your PCP Airgun Video Transcript:

Welcome to the Pyramyd Insyder PCP 101 series. Last time we showed you guys all of our various fill types, we got hand pumps, tanks, and we even showed you guys a compressor. Today we're gonna take all of those and show you how to actually fill the rifles with them. Let's check it out. 

So our first fill method that we're gonna show you is gonna be with the G6 hand pump here from Air Venturi. Now we got our Benjamin Wildfire here. Selfishly I chose the Wildfire because it only fills to 2,000 PSI. I really don't have any intention of filling a gun all the way to 3,000. But filling procedure with this, in terms of hooking it up is pretty simple, we're just gonna take our end cap off, exposing our male quick disconnect fitting, and the G6 comes with a female fitting on it, so we're just gonna go ahead, hook those up right here, snap that over. You want to make sure the collar is locked into place, and then we're gonna go ahead take it to the ground and fill it. Alright guys so we're bout ready start pumping, now the guns got about a thousand PSI in it, so these first couple pump strokes are gonna be purely just filling the hose with air to get it up to that thousand mark. Now you notice I'm bending my knees, I'm not just bending at the waist like this, it's considerably easier when you put your full weight into the pump stroke. But now I gotta pump, so we're gonna speed this up for you guys. All right so it looks like we're at about 2,000 PSI on our pump gauge. Now let's double check with the gun. Yeah sure enough right in about 2,000 PSI. Now we're gonna go ahead and bleed the line, so we're just gonna grab a hold of our bleeder and twist counterclockwise. That's all, the air pressure’s out. You know it's good, you just simply detach your quick disconnect fitting and you're all good to go. I'd be honest with youm these pumps man they're not, not easy. That was just 2,000 PSI by the way, I don't know how many strokes that was, feels like a lot, feel it in my arms, not a pleasurable experience, certainly doable. If you guys have to do it you know if you don't have somewhere that can feel close to you, certainly a pump is an option, but no it comes at a physical expense, and that's not what air gunning is all about. So my preferred option, let's check out how to fill from a tank. Alright guys so real quick before we go ahead and fill this Crawl, punch or breaker with our tank here. Just to familiarize you guys a little bit with the anatomy of the tank just a bit more. So again, we still have our same female quick disconnect fitting on the end here. We do have a gauge up front, now this is an output gauge, this is gonna tell you what's going out of the tank into your gun when you open this valve. So the valve is very simple, on off and you throttle it just like you would a motorcycle, dirt bike, whatever. So you've got to have a little bit of feel when you open that up, and you obviously got to pay attention to the gauge, and we'll show you guys just exactly how that process works. And lastly we have our bleeder here on the side so when you are full and ready to go, you simply open that up and you're gonna bleed and exhaust all the air in the in the line, so you can go ahead and disconnect it. Now our Crawl here already has about 150 BAR in it, but we want to go ahead and top it up to 200. So we're gonna go ahead and insert our fill probe into the fill port there, and then we're gonna take our female quick disconnect to pull back that lip, and then attach it over the male end and then snap it forward. Now you always want to make sure this is snapped forward, and that there's not really any give in that fitting itself. Just like we did with our pump, we're gonna come over and make sure our bleed valve is nice and tight. Now what you guys are gonna see as we go ahead and open this valve is that gauge, is that needle there, is gonna spike. What that's doing is just filling the line with air, we're gonna see it stop and equalize out once we actually equalize the pressure in the line with the pressure that's currently in the tank. So we should see it about 150 BAR here. I'm just gonna nice and easy slowly open that valve, and there you go. You see it equalized out there and that's why it starts to slow down. And then we just go ahead and give it a little bit more. Get it right up to about 200 BAR. It's normal to see a little bit of fall-off here and it's okay just to leave it connected there, just get a little bit more in. Maximize your fill there, then we're just going to go ahead like we did with our pump and bleed the line. Disconnect our fitting here. You can actually pull out the fill probe with it, two separate pieces again now. We're good to go shoot. So we've got our Air Venturi compressor here. Now you can fill tanks or guns directly, we're gonna fill this Air Arms S510 here with it. And go ahead and take our hose here with the female quick disconnect fitting, hook it right up to the adapter on the Air Arms. Now the gun has about 150 BAR left in it so this fill should go really really quick. Just like with our tank and our pump we're gonna go ahead and make sure the bleed valve’s closed. Next step is gonna be to adjust our output pressure. Now you can adjust anywhere from zero to 4500 PSI with this unit. Now really realistically it's 2,000 for your lower fill pressure guns and then about 4,350 for your higher pressure or 4,500 for your tanks. But we're gonna go ahead and adjust the gauge to 200 bar which is the max fill on the S510. And then we're gonna go ahead and switch our cooling system on. Now this is gonna operate the fan and the water pump as well. You'll hear that come to life here. Once that's up and running, we're going to go ahead and flick our compressor switch on, and that's when our fill is going to start. 

All right, so shut off automatically, 200 BAR about 2,900 psi. First thing we're gonna do, we're gonna go ahead and flip our compressor switch to the off position. Very important. Next thing we're going to do is bleed the line in the hose. So does take quite a bit and there is a little bit of moisture that's gonna be expelled, so put a little piece of, you know cardboard or paper or something there just to catch that. Go ahead and open the bleed valve, it's gonna be a little loud. All right, and the gauge and everything's returned back to zero. So we're gonna go ahead disconnect the gun. All right. And with the gun disconnected now and our temperatures back in a reasonable range, we can go ahead, shut the compressor cooling system off. We're good to go, it's that simple. So now that we showed you guys how to fill the guns, the various methods, next episode we're going to talk about some of the advantages PCP air rifles have over the various other types of air rifles that are on the market.