Well, after repeatedly viwing the sales thread for this http://www.airgunbbs.com/showthread....nham-HW80-.22; , I finally purchased Rogers HW80
This is an older 80, low 100`000 serial number, which has had a factory fitted stage 1 kit-trigger housing machined to accept a spring guide, short mainspring with machined guide and Venom piston seal.
The previous owner to Roger, sent this rifle to the BBS's spring-guru, Mr Bigtoe. Tony didn't want to copy Venoms Lazerglide, so he turned the piston down to true, then carried out his o-ring conversion and reassembled.
http://www.airguntech.com/?p=267
I had contacted Tony prior to purchasing the rifle, asking a few questions, he informed me that the rifle was nice to shoot and with a M.E circa 11.4.
The first thing I did when I got the rifle home, was to fire 30 shots into a backstop, then chrono the rifle. Using JSB Exacts, it was very consistently putting out 11.7 so it has obviously risen slightly.
SO-the million dollar question-how does the rifle shoot?? Well, when I travelled to Roger's to purchase it yesterday, the first thing that suprised me, was how lightweight the rifle felt, in the walnut tyrolean stock-more akin to a 95 than an 80. Personally, I prefer a heavy rifle-a product of shooting custom stocked Anschutz, Walther and Daystate pre-charged rifles for the last 8 years-"heavy is good, heavy is reliable"-to paraphrase our friend Boris-the-blade
Now, it may be that a lightweight, pointable 80k is manna-from-heaven to many shooters, personally I would prefer more "heft"-an extra pound or so would suit me fine. I have predominantly purchased the rifle to satiate my curiosity-how does a Bigtoe rifle feel-although this is not a full-on Bigtoe conversion, he has merely "breathed" on it to improve the firing cycle and consistency, if-and it is a big IF, I decide to keep it and use it in anger, I will probably change the stock-I fancy a cs1000 or GNIB FTno7, OR have a brass spacer made and fit a more target orientated butt-pad, also a muzzle weight-although to be fair, muzzle flip is negligible.
Cocking the rifle takes very little effort, Bigtoe's description of a short, sharp spring was about right. The trigger release is very nice-I imagine venom have polished the sears when they carried out the stage 1 conversion-no creep, nice first stage follows by a very positive release-a good example of the Rekord unit. The firing cycle was the SECOND thing that suprised me about this rifle-please be mindfull that the last hw80 I owned was over Twenty years ago, also a .22 calibre, I remember that was a fairly slow action, a predictable kerrr-dunk into the shoulder, with a little mechanical twang-as expected on a straight from the box 1980's HW. This is very different-it has a very, very fast lock time-feels more like a .177 HW77 than an 80. The action is silky smooth-very much like a Lazaglided rifle-maybe a little less refined, but this gun needs to be shot in-I imagine 2-3 tins of pellets and it will be on song
With daylight running out, I managed a quick session on my range, using the open sights. Once I got an Aim Point for 30 yards, I was consistenly knocking over a 40mm kill target-so obviously no accuracy issues
This is obviously a "first impressions" type of review-once I have had the opportunity to shoot it more extensively, I will report back
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