GAMO being sold

J

johnwilliamson062

Moderator
I made the final decision today. I am selling my GAMO rifle. Put it up on a few boards already. I just haven't found it does anything well enough that I feel comfortable or productive using it.

I still want a pellet gun though.
I am considering buying a target style air gun, preferably not a springer, immediatelyish and a PCP down the road. Probably .177 I can shoot it in my basement. Not super excited about CO2 cartridges either.

OR

just waiting on the PCP. It seems the cheapest are about $500 and I would prefer to wait to get a decent one. Would like a .38, so it may make sense to get a .177 to target shoot with anyways.
 
haha, you are right, that is a little misleading. i guess I need to take this to a specialty forum though. A few people know a little about air guns here, but not a lot.
 
just waiting on the PCP. It seems the cheapest are about $500 and I would prefer to wait to get a decent one.
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Don't forget, you'll also need "support equipment" for a PCP. Either a fill tank or some kind of pump.

If you're going to be shooting in your basement for marksmanship practice and recreation, I'd HIGHLY recommend sticking with .177. You'll get a lot more shots per fill than with a larger caliber like a .38, ammo will be a lot cheaper, your target backstop will be a lot simpler to construct and will last a lot longer and the airgun will likely be much quieter to shoot.
 
just waiting on the PCP. It seems the cheapest are about $500 and I would prefer to wait to get a decent one.
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There's the main problem with air rifles. Air rifles are just as complicated as firearms, the parts need to be machined just as precisely, the pretty wood costs just as much, yet we expect a quality air rifle to only cost a hundred bucks or so.
We demand cheap air rifles and cheap is exactly what we get. Horrible triggers with a mile of creep, cheap chintzy plastic sights, stamped steel parts, etc etc.


Have you considered a recoilless springer like the RWS 54. These work like a howitzer where the barrel and action slide on rails in the stock and as a result they are extremely accurate. No matter whether you hold the stock tight against your shoulder or hold it real loose or even put it on sandbags, the action is allowed to free recoil during the firing cycle.
And you don't need the support equipment of a PCP.

Also, pneumatics, precharged or pump up have a hard time matching the power of a springer.
That's because the upper bounds of velocity of an air rifle is the speed of sound. If you release compressed air, it can only accelerate itself to the speed of sound. Increasing the pressure gives the compressed air more energy but it also increases the mass of the air that has been compressed so you are right back where you started.

Compressing the air very fast right at the time of firing causes a large increase in the air's temperature, high enough to ignite the lube oil if you use the wrong airgun lube. The speed of sound is higher in hot air than cold air so spingers can actually shoot supersonic.

Of course, you could precharge a PCP with helium if you want supersonic velocities. I think the speed of sound in helium is something like 2700 fps.
 
Air rifles are just as complicated as firearms...
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In my experience, they're generally more complicated. The reason is that a firearm doesn't do any of the work of propelling the projectile--it's all done by the stored energy in the gunpowder. An airgun has to provide the means to store and/or generate energy to actually do the work of propelling the projectile and that means added mechanisms and more complexity.
Also, pneumatics, precharged or pump up have a hard time matching the power of a springer.
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True, with the exception of the precharged pneumatics which can easily match or exceed the power of a springer. Since they can store a tremendous amount of energy in the form of a considerable volume of compressed air, they can rival the power of black-powder firearms with large, heavy projectiles while even the most powerful springers tend to top out at around 35ft/lbs.
 
I was looking at the velocity issue and that is why I was leaning towards a 38 for hunting. Maybe I should ask around and see if anyone has an RWS Beeman I can try. Maybe I should pick-up my Red Ryder from my parents. I don't remember it being so bad.

I do do realize they are complicated, but the regulations surrounding them are not nearly as complicated as those for firearms. Do they have the 11% excise tax firearms do?

The trigger doesn't bother me much. Actually no triggers do. If I were trying to shoot sub-MOA groups at 100 yards off a bench it probably would, but I shoot almost entirely from field positions. Prone I might see some significant benefit, but I don't shoot it prone much. I would much rather all my triggers be exactly the same than any of them light/crisp. An over travel adjustment would be nice on some.
 
What would you expect a used Gamo Shadow to sell for? It seems no one is interested at $100, so I may just give it to someone with a kid about the age they might enjoy it.
 
Well looking into this some more and a few questions came up about the PCP guns:

How many pumps does it take to fill some of these rifles? 50, 100, 200? I read 5 minutes for a full charge on the web. That isn't so bad.

Can I hand pump a tank and then fill from that? I could pump while watching TV or something ahead of time that way.

Can I store the rifle charged?

Can i use a scuba tank, but once the pressure drops top it off with a pump?

Any problem if I "dry fire" these? Not chronically, but maybe it happens once in a while.
 
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Filling a conventional PCP with a pump, from empty, is a lot of work. It can take several hundred pumps. It's not possible to say how many without knowing which rifle and which pump are involved.

The good news is that you never fully exhaust a tank when shooting because you stop shooting and refill when the pressure falls low enough that the velocity starts to alter significantly. So refilling with a pump takes a lot fewer pump strokes than starting from empty does.

Theoretically you could charge a fill tank with a manual pump, but I can't recall ever hearing of anyone doing such a thing. A tank holds a LOT of air and they are often charged to higher pressures than the airguns they are used to refill, so you may not be able to fully recharge a tank with a pump if the tank pressure is higher than what the pump can manage, and it will take a long time even if you can.

There's another problem with manual pumps, and that is that when you compress ambient air, you end up with a surprising amount of water also pumped into the tank since there's a good bit of moisture in the air. A professionally filled tank will have dry air in it. That will be better for both the fill tank and the gun it's used to recharge.

If you're not interested in having your fill tanks charged by a pro (or if it's not feasible) then fill tanks probably aren't going to be a good option for you and you'll be limited to a manual pump.

If you start leaning toward a manual pump, you might look into the Benjamin Discovery which is designed to operate at much lower pressures than most PCP airguns and which is therefore much easier and faster to fill with a manual pump. You can even purchase the gun as a package with a manual pump, usually for about $400.

Dryfiring a PCP occasionally, usually isn't a problem. The manual will probably have instructions specific to the gun.

It is my understanding that you can store most PCP rifles charged.
 
Fire department no longer refills tanks. $7 and 25 minute drive to the nearest place I can find that does refill SCUBA tanks.

I really like the looks of the Eun Jin Sumatra series rifles. 6-8 shot lever repeaters.


I think I found a dirty secret:
My unit # 198 has a little over 600 hours on it so far. And I haven’t had any issues at all with it yet, also only rebuild three times so far.
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http://shoeboxcompressor.com/new-options.html
From their site it seems fully filling a tank takes 24 hours. so, if it needs to rebuilt every 200 hours that is only 8 fills. Not sure how many top offs it would be after the first fill. The site seems to say a top off only take 3.5 hours, but that seems really strange. Filling the last thirs would have to be almost 3 times as fast as filling the first 2/3 for their numbers to work out.
 
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