by Tom Gaylord
Writing as B.B. Pelletier
This report covers:
- Another failure!
- The test
- 499
- Discussion 1
- Haenel 310
- Discussion 2
- CZ75 P-07 Duty accuracy at 10 meters
- Summary
I put today’s report in the historical section because it relates to both the Haenel 310 and the Diana model 30 that we tested recently. In the comments to the Diana 30 test the question was raised about which would be more accurate at 10 meters — the Daisy 499 Challenger or the Haenel model 310. I said I thought the 310 would beat the 499 because it is rifled, but several readers wanted to see. So, today we see.
Another failure!
Before I get to the results of today’s test, let me fill you in on another irony. I was going to test the accuracy of the Benjamin 700 today and the gun jammed as I started to shoot. This one has a happy ending, because I got it unjammed and working again, but that was after today’s test. There is more sweet irony in the story that unfolded there, but I will hold off on that until we get to the report.
The test
This is a straightforward accuracy test from 10 meters. I shot both guns from a sandbag rest. Ten shots were fired from each airgun. I will note that the 499 has target sights, front and rear, while the 310 has sporting sights. Also the 310 loads from a magazine. Both things could make a small difference in favor of the 499, but we’ll see.
499
I shot Daisy Match Grade Precision Ground Shot in this gun, as it is made for that. The 499 put 10 BBs into a group measuring 0.683-inches between centers. It’s a smaller group than I expected, and it did land a little low and to the right.
At 10 meters the 499 put 10 Match Grade BBs into a group measuring 0.683-inches between centers.
Discussion 1
This group is smaller than I imagined it would be. Apparently the 499 can hang in there, even at 10 meters.
Haenel 310
Next up was the bolt action Haenel 310. This rifle feeds from a 6-round magazine that sits in the stock. A 12-round mag is also available, and I had one but it went away with my first 310.
I don’t like a magazine on a target rifle, but in the case of the 310 there is nothing I can do. All feeding is done inside the action, making it impossible to load a single ball, except via the magazine.
Now, I don’t have a problem with ammo for the 499. There is just one BB and I always use it. Anything else would be a waste. But the 310 is a 4.4mm lead ball shooter and that opens a whole can of worms. I recently discovered while testing the Diana model 30 that 4.4mm European lead balls are all over the place in size. Some are larger, some are smaller and some are vary greatly within the tin. I used the same ball I have always used, because I sure don’t want to get one stuck inside this powerplant. This is an airgun I have never taken apart, and I don’t want to start now.
The Haenel put 10 rounds into a 1.558-inch group at 10 meters. That is so much larger than the 499 group that it cannot be due to just the sights and magazine. The 499 is clearly much more accurate at 10 meters than the Haenel 310. That wasn’t my guess but that is a fact.
It wasn’t even close! At 10 meters the Haenel 310 rifle put 10 4.4mm lead balls into a group that measures 1.558-inches between centers.
Discussion 2
This test was decisive, in favor of the Daisy 499 at 10 meters. Yes, I see the 6 shots that are in a very tight group within the Haenel 10-shot group. As near as I can measure it, that group measures 0.35-inches between centers. With round balls it’s difficult to measure the group at times, and this is one of those times. If we go that route, the 499 put nine into 0.329-inches.
If you look at Part 3 of the Haenel 310 test I did in 2016, you can see the results of the
499 versus 310 at 5 meters. The relationship was the same there as here, only the difference is not as dramatic.
I still contend there is a distance at which the accuracy of any round ball breaks down and the rifled ball or bullet surpasses it. Maybe the shooters who shot the smoothbore rifles discovered this distance for their guns and stuck to the maximum accurate range.
CZ75 P-07 Duty accuracy at 10 meters
Now let’s shift gears and look at the CZ75 P-07 Duty one last time. Reader GunFun1 asked me to shoot a group at a farther distance with this pistol and the Hornady Black Diamond BBs it liked so much. Since I had the 10-meter range set up I decided to do it today.
I shot off the sandbag rest holding the pistol with both hands. This time I knew how the trigger worked and was able to squeeze it without discomfort.
Ten BBs went into 3.727-inches at 10 meters. At 5 meters the same BB went into a 0.897-inch group, so you can make the comparison. Obviously the CZ75 P-01 Duty is a 5-meter BB gun.
At 10 meters the CZ75 P-07 Duty put 10 Black Diamonds in 3.727-inches.
Summary
Today was a pickup day for me because an airgun I was going to test failed. That gave me the time and opportunity to check out some things you readers had asked.
Tomorrow I will have what I believe will be a real surprise. No, it isn’t the Sig ASP20. I’m still waiting for that one. This is something I have been asked to test several times over the past several years. I am as excited about testing it as I hope you will be reading about it.
B.B.,
Chalk up another one for the 499! Mine is the same, even before the spring modification. They are just simply amazing in what they can do.
Good Day to you and to all,…. Chris
BB
I think your statement here says it all.
“I still contend there is a distance at which the accuracy of any round ball breaks down and the rifled ball or bullet surpasses it. Maybe the shooters who shot the smoothbore rifles discovered this distance for their guns and stuck to the maximum accurate range.”
I think that’s true with any gun you shoot. Just like the pistol above was good at 5 meters but opened up at 10 meters. Maybe that pistol is good to say 7 yards. But that’s the things that needs to be tested to learn how your gun shoots. I think this was a good test today with all 3 guns.
Saturday afternoon a pack of feral soda cans met their demise at the hands of my grandson with his Daisy Buck and I with my Daisy 99.
Sunday late afternoon Kathy and I relaxed on the back porch, her with her crocheting and I with my 1906 BSA. She was making a doily for the oil lamp on the front porch and I was slowly shredding a feral soda can at 25 yards.
Ain’t life grand?
RR,
Fun stuff on a weekend!
I stuffed a couple of those 3 once plastic yogurt bottles with plastic bags and spent some time rolling them down the range with my granddaughter. She is getting to be a pretty good shot with the Maximus.
Hank
Hank,
I filled the feral soda cans with water so they would “bleed” when hit. When Blake graduates to pellet rifles I will have to collect feral soda bottles so that we can pressurize them to explode when hit.
B.B.,
I’m glad you were able to get your Benjamin working again,
yet it was fortuitous that’s its failure allowed this accuracy test.
I’ve never shot a 310, but it was interesting to see how the 499 stacked up against it.
The 499 I bought for our pastor’s son showed some good accuracy;
I sighted it in at home on the 5-meter range;
but we shot it behind the church at ~ 10 yards (10 of my long paces),
and it acquitted itself well against bottlecap-sized targets.
That was off-hand, so I shouldn’t be too surprised by the excellent group you got from a rest.
Overall, this is a most informative test; thank you!
take care & God bless,
dave
BB
I am quite impressed how accurate your 499 is at 10 meters. I’m guessing it is a laser if you shot it in a vacuum. The number of variables that determine accuracy just got more interesting. For instance, if a smooth bore Brown Bess had a barrel and balls that fit each other precisely, accuracy may reach out to 100 yards or more instead of 50 yards. Loading time may be so impractical that no effort was made to do it.
What say you?
Decksniper
Deck,
If you shot it in a vacuum the BB would never move. But you knew that. 😉
I have a smoothbore flintlock that I still haven’t tested with tight patched balls. I do know that with unpatched balls it won’t stay in 12=inches at 50 yards.
B.B.
B.B.,
But, cocked/fired in atmospheric conditions and then fired into a vacuum,…. ? The compressed air has to have some density,.. yes?
Chris
BB,
I wish you had a Crosman 340BB to test at 10 meters. I am pretty sure it would beat the two rifles you tested today. I had a 340bb for a while but sold it to pursue other dreams.
David Enoch
Sorry, it was a Benjamin 340BB, not a Crosman.
David Enoch
David,
Do you mean Daisy?
B.B.
Geo,
“Got your ears on?”,….. you are usually a daily poster. Miss ya’,…. 😉
Chris
Chris USA,
I have noticed Geo’s absence, too. I have his email and I’ll send him a shout out after I post this.
You were brought up as the authority on the subject of hop up mods on BB guns back on the blog about shooting round projectiles at high velocity, I think it was, the other day, so I assume you have some interest in the subject. The little professor in my head wouldn’t let me tear down my test rig on the MP40 stuff I did this weekend until I tried one more thing and that involved “hop up”, sort of.
All I know about hop up is what I have gleaned from discussions here, but if I understand correctly, it is something that is done with airsoft guns to get them to fire more accurately and involves putting backspin?? on the plastic ball? If not backspin then some sort of regular and predictable spin, at least. Well, that made me think about all the random sort of “spins” that might be imparted on a BB as it travels down a typical BB gun barrel ( actually, it may have been discussion on that very phenomenon on that blog that sparked this idea) and what would happen if you could make sure that all the BBs had NO spin as they went down range. Would that give a better result than many random spins?
Enter the little professor in my head. He thought that maybe if you put a sheet of printer paper in a frame of some sort and placed it about 1/2 in front of the muzzle of your BB gun, hitting said paper MIGHT stop any spinning that the BB was doing after it left the barrel. Doing a group without the paper screen then one with it, moving it after each shot to be sure that all 10 pierced the paper before going down range, MIGHT give some insight into round balls at low velocities, at least. The little guy wouldn’t leave me alone, so, crazy as it seems, I set up a platform to test his theory.
The first pic is of the test platform. I cut a slot in a really heavy piece of cardboard and clamped it to an angle bracket fastened to a movie camera tripod I bought as salvage from work a hundred years ago.( They used to film employees as they did these repetitive “piece work” jobs to find ways to shave a second or two from the manufacture of each “piece” so they could require the employee to make more of them each hour to make his “rate”. Of course, everybody just worked slower when the filming was going on.) I first shot 10 BBs from my MP40 through the slot, unimpeded. Next I tacked a piece of printer paper over the slot and placed it about 1/2″ in front of the muzzle and fired 10 more through the paper, cranking the post of the tripod down after each shot as you can see in the right half of the pic.
The next pic is the results. The sheets of paper were both placed 12.33 yards downrange. I was careful to pin up both sheets of paper into the same position on my pellet trap. The string fired through the paper screen had one BB that went way astray and I chose to call it a flyer, an anomaly. I was compelled to do the same for the string on the left as well, even though the circled BB was not as far out of the central group.
If you look closely you will see an arrow on each target paper pointing at a pin hole. I pushed a pin through what I estimated to be the center of the openly-fired group and then stacked the two pieces of paper on top of each other and transfered that hole to the paper that represented the BBs fired through the screen. The group fired through the screen clearly hit higher on the target paper and grouped just a tinsy bit tighter for the 9 shots that I counted for each string.
What do you think? Did the paper take the random spins off of the pellets? Did it just block some of the CO2 blasting out behind each BB, preventing a disruption of its flight path? Do the results mean anything? Something happened, but I’m not sure what.
By the way, this is the same gun that gave 3″, 50 shot groups at this distance. How informative is a 10 shot group in light of this?
I just noticed the hour and I know that you still work, so I expect you won’t see this until tomorrow morning, and I know you require a few cups of coffee before you do your best thinking, so ponder all this at lunch after you wake up some. 🙂
Half
Half,
Looks good. Interesting test. Well, whatever happened, the paper group did group higher. I will give it some thought. Interesting too was that the accuracy did not suffer.
I know little on the topic other than what I have read hear. I am sure that if you hit up some air soft blogs, that the hop up topic is well discussed,… perhaps even mods. and tweaks. Getting some extra distance by raising the arc has been my takeaway for air soft.
Chris
Here’s the results
I don’t see enough difference to draw any conclusions, but.. i does cause me to think. BB’s must be a loose fit in barrels even though it is potentially minimal. It seems to me that the line of departure will not always be concentric with the bore and that the gas behind the BB may have a varying effect on the direction of flight of the BB. This makes me think that an air stripper may cause an improvement in accuracy for BB guns.
Any thoughts?
Les Schaub,
I could see that being helpful. I was hoping that the screen in my experiment might provide a stripper of sorts by blocking the gas once the BB passed through it.
Half
Chris USA & Halfstep,
Yup, got my ears on 🙂 I read the blog each day and all the comments too. I even read the blogs that subject airguns that I’m not that interested in…like BB guns. I used BB guns as a youngster but then when I got a little older I got a Crosman multi-pump .177 pellet rifle and graduated from BB guns.
I have not had anything to contribute to the blogs of late. But when anyone posts anything about PCPs I become very interested. Like Gunfun1 has always stated “Only accurate guns are interesting”. To me, that accuracy has to be at least 25 yards. Also, like BB stated months ago, some of us only use the airgun as a tool to accomplish a task. I shoot on paper just to verify that my POI is still on the money and to insure my technique is still good. The Gamo Urban has been an ideal tool for me. I rarely miss a pest that I aim at with it. It still surprises me when I pull the trigger and the pest drops most every time. I just could not do that with my Diana 34P .22. With the Urban I am very confident in my shot placement, which is what I have strived for all along. Thanks to the guys on this blog, I now have the right tool for my needs.
Thanks guys for thinking of me…I’m still here everyday reading the blog and the comments.
Geo
Geo,
🙂 Good to hear from you. Each to their own, but I am sure that you would always have something to contribute of value. I find bb pistols to be my subject of least interest, but they are cool and I like to see the test and what is the latest and greatest ideas. Having been in QC, you also have a critical eye and thought on stuff.
Chris
Thanks Chris. I agree with you that even though some rifles / pistols are not my cup of tea, I still enjoy the reviews by B.B. and the comments everyone makes about them. Yes, you are correct in that I do have a very critical eye for quality. I worked for over 40 years as a mechanical inspector, quality technician, and Quality engineer. I do have some rather strong opinions on things and love to see quality workmanship, be it guns, cars, plumbing, electrical, and really anything manufactured.
Nice to be missed. Will try to make my presents seen here more often. I have been following your reports on the Red Wolf with much interest, even though I would never afford an airgun in that price range. It sure is a beauty, and like I said, I really appreciate quality workmanship. The Daystate line of airguns certainly fills that bill 🙂
Geo
Geo,
Hey,… even though you may have a few more miles on your odometer than me,… we all have to lookout and check in on one another now and again. This is just like another family in which everyone shares the same interest in air guns. The internet is what it is,… but family is family. 🙂
Chris
Geo
Have the pests been keeping your aim sharp? Or are they slowing down. Not very many starlings or sparrows showing up around here. Maybe they learned their lesson. Which is fine by me.
But I have been having a run in of feral 2 litre soda bottles and the smaller 16 oz ilk. They have a weird tendicy of blowing up when hit after sucking air from my tire pump. Guess that’s what happens when they have big blast caps on instead of regular caps. I’ll have to say they are a bit aggressive after being hit. 🙂
Hey GF1,
No, the pests have not been keeping my aim sharp. I shot over 20 starlings this spring and summer from my feeders but have not seen one in a couple of months. Very few sparrows around now. I did manage to shoot a gopher yesterday out in my back yard. He would only expose his head, but that was enough. Another Urban gopher eliminated. My bluebirds fledged two times this spring with NO harassing from sparrows. They were happy little birds this spring. I think you are correct, the sparrows must have learned not to perch on my bluebird nesting boxes. The finches must have had a good hatching this spring too, there are bunches of them coming to the feeders.
I have never been one to shoot at targets or bottles much. I only shoot on paper to verify my POI is still on the money, or to test a new pellet. Now my indoor target with duct seal backstop is failing and the pellets are exiting the back through the 1/2″ OSB. I have to rebuild my backstop with stronger material before I can shoot in my basement any more. I need to find a piece of 1/8″ steel plate for a backstop. I do like to go downstairs and shoot occasionally just to stay sharp as you say.
I keep thinking it would be fun to shoot some plastic bottles out back but the corn field now limits my range to maybe 50 yards. Also, it’s been to hot and humid to do much outside shooting and when we do get a nice day, I have other chores to get done outside…like mowing the grass.
Geo
George,
Look at this report. This target backstop is very cheap and easy to make.
/blog/2018/03/the-right-now-pellet-and-bb-trap/
B.B.
B.B.
Thank you. I did read that blog at the time and I just went back and re-read it again. It would only be cheap if I was able to find an old frying pan in the junk because a new one is expensive. My Urban with 24 fpe would require more than an aluminum pan, maybe a cast iron pan. I’m searching for a piece of 1/8″ sheet metal to use for the back. I can easily fabricate everything else.
George,
If you can’t find one, go to a second-hand store. They can’t be more than a dollar!
B.B.
Geo
Maybe you can find a scrap of something suitable at a junk yard . You might have to cut it down and square it up though.
tt
Geo
I’m about the same on distance now. And they planted soybean this year so I can see out in the feild nice compared to corn. But my long range shooting distance has to be adjusted. What I have to do is put a 2 litre bottle out at about 140 yards tied up in a tree on the tree line off the ground in the valley. Any closer I’m in the soybean feild.
And I been popping the pressirised bottles out around 40 yards. A safe distance but still close enough to make a precise hit to launch the bottle.
You should try. But it might be more noise than your buddy birds are use to. I can say the bottles filled with water are quieter if you hit towards the bottom of the bottle laying on it’s side.
And yes I know what you mean about cutting the grass. Time keeps moving and things to do keep stacking up.
BB,
Your report today gave me yet one more idea of things to test while I had my MP40 clamped up in its vise. I don’t know if you followed all the stuff I did this weekend or not ( as posted in the last HellBoy report’s comment section ), but on of the things I didn’t do was fire the gun at the more common 5 yard distance, since I don’t plan to ever shoot it from that close. I do, however, now have an interest in seeing just how much the BBs destabilize between the 12.33 yards that I shot at this weekend compared to 5 yards. I fired 50 rounds with a warm up between shots of 20 seconds and another 50 rounds on full auto. The time group was a smidge over 1″ but 48 BBs went into .795″ by my measure, and the full auto group was less than an inch at .955″. I’ll post the photos of these groups along with the 12.33 yard groups from this weekend.
Half
….and the 12.33 yard groups
Half,
Oh, oh! Are you trying to take my job? 😉
GOOD WORK!
B.B.
Halfstep, (aka,.. Mad Airgun Scientist in a clandestine shooting la-bor-a-tory)
Here is something I remembered that I had thought about several years ago,…….. Magnets at target to insure perfect accuracy. Since magnets can oppose one another,… why can’t they “force” a steel bb into perfect alignment as it passes through a series of magnets,… or a magnet ring at target? A “funnel” so to speak. While there was some discussion,.. as I remember,.. (disclaimer,.. this “discussion” may have occurred entirely with myself),… 😉 ,… I thought that the concept was an interesting one.
At any rate,… I thought that I would toss it out there since you are heavily into testing and do it so well. There is strong button magnets. There is flat, ring type magnets. While this probably (ok,…for sure) has no practical purpose in average air gun shooting ,… the concept is intriguing. An electrical coil maybe? Can it be done? Can a bb be “forced” to go through the same hole again and again by magnetic forces,… even if the aim is off a bit for each shot?
Chris
If you desire to pass or dismiss this entirely absurd concept,… I fully understand. 😉
BB,
No way, Dom! I’m just tryin’ ta earn my cred. Maybe serve as a Capo at your feet one day! I swear ona my mama’s lasagna!
Half
Half,
Hey, with work like that, yer made!
B.B.
BB,
I know you can’t see it, but I’m in a candlelit room and my palm is bleeding.
I’ll be a good earner, I swear on my Papa’s sweat stained wife beater !!
Half
B.B.,
Great report, and very interesting. Thank you!
Jim
BB,
You haven’t mentioned shaving lately, but I just ran across this video that I think you and the other readers that are into razors and sharpening may find interesting. I know I did, just because it is an interesting piece of home machinery.
Half
BB,
And now that I have piqued your interest I will actually post the link that I may or may not have forgotten to post in the previous comment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T9Q7XRzx0I
Halfwit
Half,
I have one of those! They work okay, but not great.
B.B.