It's my new (well, revisited) hobby, I know there are others on 'ere with it, so I'm going to stop posting about it elsewhere and get it on-topic in 'ere. I'll be talking airguns, 'cos that what I shoot, but if you're a powder-go-boom type there's no reason not to join in: it's all pointy-end-downrange, after all. I've a .22 Air Arms S410 Classic beech stock, pre-AT, with AA moderator and Hawke HD 3-9x40 scope. Going to be joining the local club next week, and I'll upload a few targets (unless they're terrible, in which case I'll hide my shame) for funsies. If I'm accepted as a full member, and if I can generate the funds by selling off my classic computer collection, I'll be looking at upgrading to this rather lovely Daystate Wolverine Type-C bundle. Aye, that's a lot of money - but how much does the average forumite spend on hardware that'll lose its value a lot faster than the rifle, eh? What do you have, and where do you shoot it?
I haven't done any shooting in a long time although I still have most of my kit. I have an AA S410 with options for both .177 and .22 (simple swap of barrel, bolt and magazine plus a quick power retune). I also have a very early model (serial number 29) AA S200 in .22 which needs a full strip down and restore as it has been somewhat neglected. I have the 10 shot magazine option. I have fairly recently sold my first 'proper' rifle which was a Rutten Winstar Mach 1 DE (now the Browning Winstar) which was a pretty massive dual spring underlever cocking beast. That was in .177 and kicked back far harder than you would have thought a sub 12ft/lb springer should do. I also have a few pistols, a couple of CO2 powered ppk pistols, great fun but you need to be all sorts of careful as they fire nice bouncy steel BBs. Got an early model Walther CP99 which has been tweaked a fair bit to improve the trigger and have a moderator fitted. Got an Umarex S&W 586 with the highly sought after 8" barrel, that thing's a monster but all sorts of fun. My pride and joy though has to be my Drulov DU10 Condor 5-shot semi auto target pistol. CO2 powered and soooooo accurate. Fires 5 shots from its inline magazine at the back of the barrel as fast as you can pull the trigger. Far too easy to turn fully automatic if you play with the trigger settings too much. I know that Drulov inside out and have done a lot of trigger work on it as well as refinishing the gorgeous French walnut grips that came as standard. Some day I would love to get the rifle version, the Eagle.
I haven't done any shooting for years but still have my Feinwerkbau 127 Sport (.177) fitted with a Tyrolean Walnut stock, scope and sling. I used to do 10 metre rifle shooting and my Feinwerkbau 300S is still at my parents. I have a CO2 Walther CP88 for plinking.
My father-in-law is a Fire Arms Dealer and clay-pigeon coach (he used to coach coaches), so I have had the opportunity to play with/fire quite a lot of guns; air-pistols up to full-on military sniper rifles... Its all I can do not to splash some cash just don't have the room/time to do it justice. Very jealous of you guys...
I bought a really cheap (£20) backpack-style rifle bag for taking mine to the range, 'cos I don't really want to be wandering the streets of Bradford with a bag that quite obviously contains a rifle, which arrived today. It's worse than I expected, and I have no confidence that the rifle won't fall out or the entire thing drop off my back. So, despite not really being able to afford it, I've pushed the boat out and bought a 5.11 Urban Sniper Bag. At 50", it's half a foot bigger than my rifle - but the next size down is 42", which is two inches too small. It's also crazy-expensive, and probably won't be here before my Monday appointment at the club. Still, £150 to keep a ~£600 rifle safe is justifiable, right? Just hope the wife sees it that way...
Most definitely, the 5.11 gear is pretty awesome. I'm a Maxpedition guy myself but I have played around with some 5.11 stuff just to see what it was like and it's proper solid stuff and something that I would be very tempted in if I did more shooting.
Happy days - and I've just got an email saying it'll be here tomorrow, giving me the weekend to play with it in the hopes of looking like I know what I'm doing when I get to the club on Monday evening!
I really miss my air rifles. I've had two Air Arms rifles (Pro Sport first, then, very recently, the TX200), and two Daystates, (custom X2 Sport in .20 caliber and the Air Ranger). This was my Air Ranger a couple years ago (I think) after I made a custom rifle rest for it. The scope is a Falcon Menace which I kept for a while after selling the Ranger. Next up, the TX200HC, absolutely sublime springer. As you can see, scope and mounts carried over from previous rifle. It's amazing what a beautiful rifle can do in the hands of a noob like me... (this was 40yds, not 20 as the paper says) Now I am rifle-less... all I have left is a really nice shooting glove and two tins of .22 pellets (Superfield and Superdome, both RWS). I just couldn't afford to keep the rifles because other expenses piled up and the rifles had to go. When the time comes for me to get a rifle again (eg. when I'm securely employed and preferably when we have moved house), I'll be going down the .20 route without question. I love the way it travels, faster than .22 but still hits hard, and it's nice to be that little bit different from the crowd. The X2 that I had previously was a custom order for a pest controller who decided not to buy the rifle after it had been delivered to the shop, so I took it in the blink of an eye. Edit: and I can vouch for Daystate, amazing rifles and amazing customer service. I only got the TX200 because I wanted a springer, and word around town is that it's hard to beat. If I could choose any rifle it would be the Daystate Red Ranger...drool. Actual, real, viscous drool.
Clay shooter over here. Mostly sporting birds but have done a bit of skeet as well. Don't like shooting live things, clays are more fun . I shot for a couple of years when I was 12/13 but packed it in until a few years ago. Now I'm out most every week. We've got a couple of nice local shoots, an invite shoot every few Saturdays and are members of a club just outside of London. Currently I'm using a 686 Silver Pigeon which is the most expensive gun I've ever owned, lovely bit of kit. Previous was a Bettinsoli that had a tendency to double discharge; scary at first but once you got used to it was kind of fun. If you were on target when it did it, there was NOTHING left . My dad also has a 410 Mossberg pump with a silencer (for keeping rabbits out of his fields)which is pretty fun to use on clays...takes a bit of a while to adjust to the massive silencer on the end and it's got a pretty tight choke on it but once you get used to it, it breaks the clays up nicely.
The guy I used to hunt with many moons ago had a .410 single-shot fully moderated Hushpower-or-similar shotgun. With the loads he used for squirrel and pigeon, it was about as loud as my moderated air rifle. Crazy stuff.
Yeah, most of the noise is the mechanism (sounds almost exactly like an air rifle) and then the echo of the impact. We were playing around with subsonic 2" shells and at targets in the air there was basically no noise. Well, until you have to pump it of course . I forgot that he has a 9mm bolt action shotgun that is also silenced/moderated as well. I've not actually used it myself but it has an effective range of about 6 feet or something daft. I can't actually remember why he got it, I think the claim was to keep squirrels and rats off of his bird feeders but I think it was just for funsies.
Never been much of a shotgun fan personally. Been on a fair few clay shoots and whilst I have had fun on them, I much prefer the precision of single shot rifle or pistol. I'll see if I can dig out a few pics of various bits and pieces of kit later tonight.
I was a pretty good shot with a slingshot back in the day . Wouldn't mind having a go with a bow of some kind at some point. Aparently there's a place not far from where I live that does archery and axe throwing which sounds like the best fun ever .
I use a Ruger 10/22 (semi-automatic) which I bought about 5 years ago. I was a little hesitant about getting a semi-auto, but after a year in the Finnish military where I was part of our company's competition shooting squad I wanted to keep the skills up after I finished my term of service. Nothing overly fancy, using stock components, despite the 10/22 being one of the most modable .22 rifles out there. Shame that all the parts are so expensive. Using a Hawke 3-9x40 scope, Harris telescopic bipod and a suppressor (I live on a deer farm, but do have neighbours, so plinking a few hundred rounds off does get annoying. Also, it doesn't frighten the deer as much). I also use a cheap airsoft red-dot sight for short-range shooting (~50m), but generally I shoot CCI 40 grain sub-sonics at a range of just over 100m. It's not as much fun as shooting an RK-62 at 150m, but it's good fun nonetheless. I just target shoot for the most part, but with the occasional bit of pest control as well. Over the years I've found that CCI is the best ammo for the rifle in comparison to Remington, Winchester or Eley (crappiest to not so crappy respectively) as I get next to no jamming or misfires. Remington is horrible to use and despite being 40 grain similar to the CCI, they tumble after about 60m and don't have the range of the CCI for distance shooting. I came just shy of third in the Naval Championships in 2006, 6th in Eastern Defence Forces Championships and my team came 12th in the National Military Championships and that was with very little dedicated competition shooting training. Generally we were hungover when shooting as we were allowed evening leave during the competitions, so we put our time to good use I absolutely loved shooting in the army (Marine Recon Company) and I miss my rifle. Oldest RK-62 in service at the barracks, but damn she shot straight! Always had it zeroed a little off-centre (zeroed to the bottom of the bullseye) as I found it much easier to nail the bullseye that way. We generally shot RK7 and RK5 trials. RK7 is 18 rounds, over 3 magazines. Turning targets at varying ranges. It's the primary shooting test that you do in Finland throughout training. RK5 was more competition-based. 15 rounds over 3 mags at 150m. 30 seconds for 5 rounds at 150m shooting from a standing position. Then 20 seconds for 5 rounds from a kneeling position at 150m and then 10 seconds for 5 rounds from a prone position. 15 seconds to change stance and load the next magazine. If you got all 15 rounds on-target, you generally got a good score, but the trick was getting those first 5 on-target. Great fun! I would love to get some time of automated target that I can program to rotate the target, but I don't think I do enough shooting to justify spending money on one.
As we're doing piccytures, here's mine. Apologies for the terrible quality - just a quick snap with my phone (and the Nexus 4's camera is pretty darn atrocious at the best of times. Also visible: the cheap rifle bag. Anyone want a really, *really* crappy rifle bag? It'd probably be fine for plastic airsoft stuff, but I wouldn't trust it to hold anything with any weight!
I bought a HW80 back in the day and had the insides changed a bit, i guess i had around 16 ft lbs energy / output. loved the random target shooting like tin cans, paper targets, bottles etc but also had permission to hunt on a local farmers land. I always remember the .22 Prometheus pellet would enter the parents wheelie bin at one side and exit the other leaving a chunk out of the outhouse wall Then progressed to SA80 GPMG LSW LAW L115A3 Sniper But that was the Armed Forces
Build one! Arduino, continuous rotation servo, two pulleys and a length of washing line. Code: <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< o===========================o | | | | | [ ] [ ] [X] [ ] [ ] o is a pulley, = is the washing-line, < represents direction of travel, [ ] is a hanging target and [X] the currently-active target. Targets start fully to the right with the left-most target at centre point; when the timer expires, the servo rotates, pulls the washing-line to which the targets are attached, and shifts the expired target to the left while moving the next target to the active position. It's wide, it's ugly, but it'd be *extremely* cheap.
Thanks for that Gareth! I was thinking more along the lines of a steel target that rotates 90° and then after say 15 seconds rotates back 90° to obscure the shot. Get that ooooooooh so satisfying "ping" as the round strikes
