I actually bought this some months ago, mainly as a curio I suppose and as a occasional plinker, and other than test firing it at the time and examining the mechanism, I’ve only now got round to actually trying it out at the club and seeing how well the thing actually shoots.

The gun comes in a rather flimsy plastic case, with some fairly thin foam top and bottom. The action is made largely from alloy, with a plastic rearsight, and sits in a plastic grip/frame. This is available in plain black or a brown woodgrain effect, which is just a coating on the exterior only of black plastic. Four screws – two on each side – secure the action, but with these removed the action does not just lift up and out of the grip; it is necessary to split the two halves of the grip, held together by a further nut and bolt, due to the shaping of the interior of the grip and the screw holes in the action. Unfortunately, this leaves a poor fit of the two halves, and the woodgrain pattern is not continuous across the join.

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With one half of the grip removed, the action can be then be seen and the semi-recoilless design becomes apparent. The air cylinder, with the trigger mechanism attached below, sits in – and can slide back in - two cradles (for want of a better word) to which the grips attach; at the rear of the gun, held in place only by the grips, is the large end cap which contains, not the mainspring and piston, but the recoil absorbing spring.

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Sliding the two cradles forward off the action reveals a removable plate forming the left-hand side of the trigger mechanism; once removed, this plate exposes the very simple trigger mechanism and the cocking link from the barrel which just slides back on grooves to push the piston back. (Please note that although the piston is cocked in this picture, the mainspring had already been removed.) It looks as though, in theory, the rearward movement of the cocking link will prevent the trigger from moving but if this is the intention it doesn’t quite happen in practice: I found it possible to uncock the gun, but the trigger just jammed back, wedged in place until the barrel is closed and the cocking link fully forward again. This may in fact be distorting the thin upper arms of the trigger blade – the sear sits between these – which is clearly far from ideal.

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The piston and mainspring are held in place by a simple end cap retained by a cross-pin, which are hidden inside the larger end cap once the gun is assembled. The piston is alloy, but has a short steel pin set into it for the sear to engage with. The barrel block has a conventional detent lock set in it, retained by a cross-pin, which is plated in the same way as the piston – for better wearing, perhaps? – although the shoulder it engages with below the transfer port appears to be just cast integrally with the air cylinder, and with the same gloss black finish. The cocking linkage, as mentioned above, just slides back into the action and doesn’t hook into the air cylinder, so with the barrel pivot removed the entire barrel and cocking link assembly can be removed from the gun.
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Rather unusually for a break-barrel pistol (although not, I believe, unique) the rearsight is atop the barrel block, adjustable but only in a rather crude manner. Elevation is controlled by sliding the sight up and down an inclined plane, locked into one of about six different positions by a button that has to be pushed back and forth from left and right. Windage is adjusted in a similar manner by sliding the notch across a dovetail, although the locking button is at least spring loaded in this case.
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Luckily, I found that shooting at 10 metres the rearsight could be left in its lowest – rearmost – position which also felt about the steadiest, which then gave me a group scattered around the black on a 10 metre pistol card; this is shooting one-handed, by the way, and not an out-and-out test of the gun’s accuracy. The short sight radius possibly doesn’t help, and the sight picture could be better: the foresight post is a good width, but the rearsight notch could be wider, and deeper.

The trigger, on the other hand, is quite nice and pleasant to use – certainly not at all stiff enough for the narrow blade to become uncomfortable. It is single stage, and having just a single spring on the sear doesn’t re-engage if pressure is relaxed – instead the trigger blade just goes loose and you are left with much less sear engagement. The grip is ambidextrous with a slight recess at the top, not quite a thumbrest but more of a clearance for the trigger finger. While a little slab sided it is not uncomfortable, although the end of the bolt holding the two halves of the grip together nearly is. The join between the two halves is obvious, with a seam that can easily be felt running a fingernail across it for example, but there are no sharp edges.

Overall then it is a perfectly acceptable plinker, fairly pleasant to handle and fire but let down somewhat by its sights – and bear in mind there is no scope for fitting a red-dot sight or anything else in their place. I prefer to be able to decock springers, which isn’t really possible on this gun although I can appreciate the reasons for this; personally I prefer – and think it safer when loading – to have access to the breech with the barrel just broken open, but that isn’t possible either. The quality is what you pay for: alloy with a gloss black finish – paint? – and plastic grips that may well crack over time: while an interesting little pistol, one perhaps best kept for only occasional use.

Iain

A couple of final links, firstly the exploded diagram from the instruction leaflet:

http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/n...%20H01/009.jpg

German website with more pictures, of both the black and woodgrain effect versions.
http://www.muzzle.de/N7/Druckluft/Vo..._blow_h01.html