This afternoon, my tinkering task was to remove the scope from my HE Sirocco, and replace it with a newly-acquired second-hand Leupold 6x42 AO TT.

So it needed sighting in on my 10M cellar range.

Which prompted me to pull a few others out of the cabinet and shoot a few 5-shot groups.

I found it really interesting to compare some of my older springers in this way. It only took an hour, including another rescoping (putting an old Leupold 6x32 on my Webley Tomahawk).

The results, which probably will not surprise:

HE Sirocco: very fast, punchy shot cycle. Very accurate. Trigger is both a touch too heavy, and vague around the release point.

HW85: just very nice, but twangier than I had expected/remembered. Needs a rebuild.

Diana 52: huge, and lazy shot cycle. Easy to cock, and, at least at 10M, very accurate. But just huge. By shot five I was bored with it.

1960s Diana 35. Lovely. Partly because it is in superb condition and brilliantly made. Nothing outstanding, but a lovely balanced mix of looks, handling, trigger. No twang. Easy to cock.

Airsporter Mk5. You can see and feel the 1970s cost-cutting. The trigger is heavy and very single-stage. You let the sight picture settle, then start pressing, and at some point it just fires. It's slammy. But it's not inaccurate.

Webley Tomahawk. Absolutely standard early beech model with the lazy 12 ft/lbs standard stroke innards and 15" Webley barrel. I had forgotten how good this is. Great stock, excellent trigger, and even if it has a slow action, it shoots very small groups, reliably and easily.

I could easily have spent an hour shooting one gun. But rapidly shifting between half a dozen (including two scope swaps and re-zeroing) seemed to make their characteristics and differences more apparent. I recommend this, at least occasionally.