Airgun Myths and outrageous claims

[martinmoreton]

striking a match head and lighting it at 60 yards.

[keith66]

When i was at college a mate bought one of those .177 Zip pistols, brand new out of the box three of us were shooting it down the harbour at Falmouth, he had about 20 shots & eventually passed it to me for a shot. the beer can he was shooting at was by now about 30 yards out drifting away. I put a pellet in, Cocked it & fired from the hip, i scored a direct hit & the tin promptly sank.
I blew across the barrel & casually remarked "Good pistol that" I know you lot aint gonna beleive it but i had two witnesses so there

[mallyally]

i shot a starling over a river on a house roof / about 70 yards when i was a kid with a webley premier pistol aimed about seven feet over it but i did mean to hit it ( mates went wild ) when it dropped like a stone
still smile when i pass that way

[I. J.]

In the Shooting Times on the 28th October a reader asked for info on a Relum tornado he owned.
John Knibbs replied & i quote "Unfortunately the company no longer supplies air rifles, it is a very well made & robust air rifle with a fixed barrel, a loading tap and is cocked by an underlever, it was only produced in .22 calibre and, when well maintained, is very powerful producing energy slightly under the british legal limit of 12ftlds".
I couldnt resist posting it here

I remember someone once boasting they could HIT a milk bottle using a Relum Tornado (aka The Hungarian Swamp Donkey - thanks H.S ).

ATB
Ian

[barryeye]

Back in the 60s I decided to experiment with some rolls of caps as used in kid’s cap guns. I carefully cut out and glued some to the heads of some .22 air rifle pellets and yes they did go CRACK on impact. Then (I had just read an article in Guns and Ammo about a Daisy rifle that used compressed air to ignite an explosive compound behind a small slug) I tried sticking the cut out caps inside the pellet skirt. If memory serves me well the caps did ignite but I observed no obvious benefit to this and the powder residue made a (corrosive) mess in my Webley MKIII.
When bored I was known to stick a second pellet head first in the muzzle of my MKIII and fire it in the air. The result was a noise not too dissimilar to a Hollywood ricochet.
Oh the folly of youth.

Barry

[le frelon]

Yup, me too!
Still got some old .22 pellets with a cap glued on them, and some rolls of caps.
( can you still buy caps? ) Great fun, especially when we were shooting at night. A good Webley Premier could 'lob' a pellet and awfully long way. Aim high and wait for the flash.
You could, in the 30's I think, buy some ready made called 'BANGO' and there is a picture in Airguns and Airpistols by Lesley Wesley of one 'detonating on impact with a brick wall'.
I was fortunate to live not too far from LW's shop in East Molesey and would hang about on the pretext of wanting to buy something but really it was just to soak up the atmosphere and hang about with the older boys.
LW didn't suffer fools gladly but once he knew you had a genuine interest in the old stuff he could show off a bit.
Imagine today shooting 1/2" lead balls from an antique pump up out the back of the shop into the old outside brick toilet at whatever target could be found of interest!
Happy days.