Page 5 - Beeman P1 Reviews

I like the HW45 better than this... and it was cheaper than the Beeman.

Sights are terrible, almost no range of adjustability. The recoil is pretty strong, but it IS a springer, so you should expect that. Beeman should not be allowed to ruin nice airguns the way they do, just to turn a quick buck.

This is a cheap copy of the HW45, and for some reason, costs MORE than the gun it is poorly imitating (??) Neither is a tack-driver, the accuracy of a spring-piston powered pistol (with no dampening engineering) is never going to compete with that of a pneumatic or a CO2 match pistol. This is meant to be a fun plinker, and it is, but the HW is the REAL deal, and it is - what? - like $100 cheaper?

It shoots quite accurately for a multi-purpose airgun. The .20'' caliber has enough power for pest control at short range. It nicely imitates the firearm recoil by moving the piston towards the shooter. A good device for at-home pistol training.

Although the barrel quality is superb, the assembly quality is terrible. My P1 has three pins moving back and forth in the rear part of the gun. Two of them are so loose that they only need a finger push to put them back in place. Good on the one hand, it makes them easy to loose on the other. I have to hammer the third pin back in place every now and then. They should had been made rivets, not pins. The safety lock broke down after a week of not-so-intensive use. To call Beeman's dealing with customers Customer Service is a joke. As my P1's safety lock broke down, I first tried to fix it myself without taking the gun apart. As the safety pin fell inside the body of the gun, I brought the gun back to Beeman. They told me that my warranty was jeopardized because I had tinkered with the gun myself. They charged me for fixing the safety. The quality of their work was so poor, that a week later the safety fell apart again. I opened the gun, fixed it, and it worked OK ever since. Had Weihrauch 45 LP been on the market at the time I was looking for an airgun, I would had purchased that one instead of Beeman. It looks similar, has more power in the .22'' caliber, and hopefully it's better made.

P1 is more of a hunting and firearm-imitating airgun than an airgun made for bull's eye precision. The barrel is capable of extremely sharp shots, but the sights aren't. At 10 yards, the front site completely covers the center of the Gamo paper target I use for home practice. You can still learn to hit it, but it takes a lot of practice. However, it pays off if the firearm you use is made for close quarters shooting, like the very popular Glock. The Glock sites are made for fast target acquisition, so the front is wide and the rear is low. If you try to hit a remote target with a Glock, you sometimes have to aim at something smaller in size than your front site. That's where your P1 practice comes handy. I am not a Glock fan myself, but it's a practical gun nevertheless, especially for self-defense.