I have just been making a long overdue sort out of my airgun collection and paraphernalia and came across a few pistols that had found their way to the back of a drawer and long forgotten about. Usually these are things that have needed a bit of repair, have bits missing or are duplicates, but sometimes they are unusual items that I couldn’t find an immediate place for in my main collection and which then got misplaced. One such “find” which deserves to be brought out into the light of day is an example of the rarely seen Gamo Falcon 20R repeater. These are so rare there isn’t a picture of one in Danny’s Gallery (at the present time) or in the Encyclopedia of Spring Air Pistols, although it does get a mention there.

The Gamo repeater is one of those guns which I can never understand didn’t become more commercial. The design involves a very simple modification of the Gamo single shot Falcon that converts it to a very effective 20-shot repeater for ball ammo. The magazine is just a tube along the left side of the barrel which holds the ball shot under spring pressure. These pictures show how it compares with the standard Falcon.







When the loading gate is swung open manually in the usual way for the single shot Falcon, a ball is automatically fed into the gate. The gate then is then returned manually. Not a true automatic repeater of course, but pleasant to use and the feed mechanism is extremely reliable as there is virtually nothing that can go wrong. As the feeder mechanism is restricted to round shot only, the pistol could never aspire to being a serious target pistol which is probably why El Gamo only made the Falcon version rather than a more upmarket Center version.

I have never seen any advertising literature for the Falcon 20R and can’t date it accurately, so if anyone can provide any additional information I would be very grateful.

This one is definitely coming out of the drawer into my main collection and is going to get some use as well.