Hi Bob

[Apologies to the OP for long thread hijack!]

Just want to say I'm not fighting the Rohm's corner as the gun to get for 10m by any means. I like mine but wouldn't buy a new one. I'd put that money toward a 2nd hand Steyr LP50

I'd agree with the points about entry level straight to quality if you're serious, but that's not really the issue. My issue is with lock time being some sort of holy grail. People constantly spout stuff about gun A having a "quicker" lock time than gun B, but how much quicker? Where are the figures?

I don't doubt that your high end rifles are better than your lesser ones, but is that solely down to lock time? I doubt it very much.

Your EV2 for instance is designed for FT. Trigger pull, adjustments, stock etc all add to the whole package. It's bound to help scores in FT vs a standard sporter. I shoot FT with my HW100 and my scores on kneelers and standers improved hugely just by putting a GinB FT stock on it. I've tried Steyrs and Dommies though not an EV2 and I've noticed no earth shattering difference in lock time over my HW. The Walther trigger is quite a bit better but that's to be expected.

Fair enough point about the trigger on the Rohm, it's certainly not in the same league as my FWB 65 for example, but that's irrelevant to lock time which starts when the trigger breaks.

My position is, all other things being equal, lock time does not make as much difference as people think. In fact I'd go so far as to say it's virtually negligible, and the only benefit of it is a form of "placebo effect" where if people are likely to have more confidence in gun A than gun B.

Let's take a simple example. Imagine your crosshairs sweep across a 40mm kill zone in quarter of a second (so 160mm/sec). You break the trigger when the crosshair is in the centre of the kill zone. Imagine your rifle has a lock time of 8ms. The pellet will leave the muzzle when the crosshair is 1.28mm off centre. Imagine then a rifle with a lock time of 13ms* (a difference of 5ms). The crosshair will have moved 2.08mm, a difference of 0.8mm!

Actually I suspected the differences would be small but I'm actually surprised how small!

* Source: Cardew, The Airgun from Trigger to Target. He quotes typical lock time of a PCP as 8.6ms and a springer as 13ms.