Quote Originally Posted by Hsing-ee View Post
I remember the adverts for them in AGW in the 1970s, something about 'the pellet leaves the barrel before the reduced recoil is felt' which must have been hogwash even though the rifles were nearly as accurate as the recoilless rifles.
An interesting detail of older HW rifles is that the breech end of the barrel has a slight flare to it--this was a deliberate extra manufacturing step, done by tapping in a tapered mandrel. This does tend to make pellets "stick" less there, as you can well imagine, and may have something to do with the odd advertising claim that you mention!

These barrels can be quite particular in pellet preferences. Generally they go for ammo with larger skirt diameters. RWS pellets have about the largest skirts of any brand and are what I use pretty much exclusively in these guns.

In the late 70's Weihrauch decided this was not worth the trouble and stopped doing it.