Quote Originally Posted by Prone Shooter View Post

Finally the Rohms (the fact that there have been very few replies might be worth considering). Great for general shooting and fun but they have two major draw backs for serious 10m which are a fiddly single shot magazine and a slow lock time due to the hammer having to strike the release valve. Neither of these are helpful in competition.
I own a Rohm Top, albeit modified for pistol FT, and I've never shot 10m properly, just the odd offhand plink at paper targets at a club and shooting the UBC 6yds comp, so I can't really comment about its use for 10m.

I would tend to agree with the comment about the single shot mag. A slightly fiddly loading cycle but you get used to it quickly.

However this thing about lock time. Has the lock time of the Rohm pistols been actually measured vs. other pistols? Yes the hammer has to snap forwards before the valve gets opened but once the trigger breaks the hammer doesn't hang about! What mechanism for opening the valve do other pistols use, and what kind of time advantage do they bring? Certainly most PCP rifles use a spring loaded hammer to knock open a valve so it must be popular in pistols too, being so cheap and simple to make (talking about cheap to mid range guns here, not top end). Unless we're talking about solenoids and other electrickery, the valve must be opened by spring pressure.

I'd be surprised if there was more than a few milliseconds between the different mechanisms which would be negligible compared to the time from the brain issuing the command to fire and the finger moving the trigger.

These days I'm increasingly of the opinion that the search for quickest lock time in airguns is a red herring, and furthermore that the only benefit of lightning lock times is to (attempt to) mask poor technique.