Crappy die cast guns

[clueless]

RO72 and Panther Artillery carbines, I have three or four boxed in as new condition, loved mine back in the early eighties so bought them for nostalgic reasons

Utter crap to be honest, but seeing them at the back of my gun room and the occasional fondle (oo er) takes me right back to great childhood days.

Occasionally I fire one and it ruins the memory

[Jerry Cornelius]

I woouldn't have put a 717 in the same class as those other horrors myself.

[Hsing-ee]

Happy New Year Guy!

The RO guns were awful shite. And the plastic and alloy Crosman pumpers were indeed disposable - still are at a few dollars a throw.

Look at this thread where I argue against the Crosman 761XL - people love these flimsy pot-metal things!

http://www.airgunbbs.com/showthread....62#post5769162

A BSA Meteor can blow it out of the water and outlive generations of 760/761/766s!


I agree with Jerry though, the Daisy Powerline pistol is better than the others and shoots well too. Worth fixing up if you find a leaky one.

[Rickenbacker]

I had a Skiff pistol blow up in my hand. The bugger had a fresh co2 in it, and the crappy cast / monkey metal firing valve split in two.

Luckily the slide rails took most of the force, as it blew the slide off

::mutters like Mutley::

[p.m.h]

Ah, modern rubbish, not collectable rubbish!

Kind regards,



Phil

[Adam77K]

I still have my Manuarm, my first ever airgun and to be fair it has taken in its stride all the abuse a fourteen year old boy with a penchant for experimental ballistics could dish out!
Not bad for £20. I think a Gat in the basic box without all the corks and darts was about £8 at the same shop.

Anyone know the dimensions of the standard mainspring might be, and what other gun's springs might be equivalent? Mine got replaced by the gunsmith after the original broke but he used a thinner wire spring as he couldn't get a proper spare.

[p.m.h]

Poor quality indeed, but to a young lad in the 70s these were the things that dreams were made of, and got us into shooting.

I like the RO71 and RO72 for nostalgia, and have a few.

They are part of airgunning history, and heritage, and need preserving all the same.

Kind regards,



Phil

[ggggr]

I woouldn't have put a 717 in the same class as those other horrors myself.

I agree that it is a better pistol and better built than the others. It is capable of good accuracy and is only a single stroke pneumatic. My basic problem is that the material it is made from is crappy.
http://anotherairgunblog.blogspot.co...&by-date=false

If that link does not work I suppose someone else will put it up. The point trying to make here is that heard of quite a few of the 717's having the holes stretched in the castings because somebody has wound the piston up (or maybe it's done it it'self?). Yes ---I know Webley Hawks etc can have the cylinder pin holes stretched because some chimp has fitted a monster spring.

I reckon if you tried to buy a set of the Daisy frames from somebody over here that it would cost more than the 2nd hand price of the gun?

[Rob M]

I had a Daisy 717 for a while, nice fun gun, sadly I was forced to sell it so have no idea what they're like long term.

The only die-cast guns I own now are a Record Jumob and a Record Champion, which are both actually ok. There are two main faults with them, the metal gets brittle where it's stressed (the piston and breech are on the Jumbo for instance), and the alloy tends to corrode where it's in contact with steel parts, the screws that hold it together for instance. A reaction gets going where the alloy and steel touches which causes the alloy to turn into a white powder, threads in the threaded holes that the screws reside in can be corroded to nothing over a few years. Sadly I have seen a couple of Jumbos like this over the years. When I rebuilt my last Jumbo I was careful to apply a thread-sealing compound to the screws before refitting, and also keep it well-oiled and greased, which helps.

Some die-cast guns like the Record Jumbo and Champion are good fun and have unusual design quirks, it is the design endears them to me, the build quality is pretty good on the whole and, as long as you take care to stop the corrosion as mentioned above, and don't give them extra stress by firing them without pellets, they should last reasonably well. The steel parts are good, some of the alloy parts such as the piston have steel inserts where they are vulverable to wear, and the barrels are good on these too, with good but shallow rifling to make them as efficient as possible.