HW45 .177 - Best Ammo?

[sevorg]

One thing I would add is that spring piston design guns 'prefer' lighter ammo so the likes of Hobbies seems a good choice. I say 'prefer' insofar as they tend to produce more FPE with lower weight pellets to a point (the PBA 4 grain rubbish won't do much) and in fact a 6.9 grain hobby might make 30% more muzzle energy than, say, a 10.65 grain Bisley Magnum. Combine that with the naturally loopier trajectory of a heavier pellet and it's easy to see why you should always go for pellets on the light side. A good domed pellet to start with would therefore be a Falcon Accuracy Plus or JSB Exact RS (both 7.33 grain).

It's worth noting that this result is the opposite to what happens with PCP and especially co2 guns where increasing the pellet weight has the tendency to add FPE. This happens a bit with PCPs but a lot with co2 guns.

Interestingly, all my airguns obey this general rule, except the 45 which makes a fairly consistent 5.25 ftlb with anything lead that is a good fit in the barrel whatever the weight! The FTT green (5.5gn) I bought for an experiment manage only 4.8 (at 628 ft/s) but these are a tight fit and are nowhere near as soft as lead based pellets.

JSB exacts and mosquito express do particularly well through the chrono and are a good fit for my barrel, as for accuracy I'm not a good enough shot with a pistol to tell the difference between the many brands of pellets I tend to put through them. RWS R10 produce extremely low variation shot to shot in the 45.

Forgot to add, if you are only using the 45 for plinking and informal target shooting the RWS Hobby and Geco flat heads are really cheap and surprisingly good. Only a tad over £4 from the site sponsor, JS Ramsbottom.