opinions on an air pistol i have bought

[Mark D]

Invest in some lightweight proper shooting glasses and insist on anyone shooting or watching wears them 👍

At any clubs or shoots I have attended it's mandatory to wear eye protection. Doing so at home will prevent a visit to A&E or your GP.

Steel plate is fine to shoot at with lead pellets, even at 3ftlbs they will flatten and drop.

Enjoy your time with the kids

[Gary88]

yes i will get some glasses sorted does it sound about right that the pistol will not penetrate a plastic bottle or could this pistol be underpowered i have no other experience with pistols so i am unsure on what the power should be like? Also its not that accurate but i am putting that down to the pellets as i have looked and certain pellets do not seat correctly if that makes sense so i am assuming this would be causing the pellet to fly off a certain way as some of the pellets shot dead straight?

[Gary88]

i have been in touch with pellpax and i should have the air rifle this weekend so hopefully the rifle is a lot safer using metal targets and me and the kids can use the pistol just for shooting balloons in the middle of the garden it does that pretty good mind i am using extra large balloons

[Adam77K]

I learnt as a teenager that you need either very soft or very hard things to stop pellets safely, from my extensive experimentation. Thankfully without injury. Hard things like concrete slabs or steel plate let the pellet flatten and drop away. Soft things like boxes of rags catch them. Wood is very bad as you've found, as it's resilient. Springy; you can make bows out of it.

The easiest pellet trap is a big cardboard box full of rags: old t-shirts, towels, sheets whatever. Just tape a new front on once the original starts falling apart. Pellets can eventually chew through the middle so keep checking and rearrange the rags occasionally or stuff more in.

Pistols aren't necessarily "more miss than hit" but they are harder to shoot accurately, and cheap ones are more likely to be less accurate in the first place.

The Gamo website give a velocity of 105m/s (345 fps) for the P900, which equates to between 1.8 and 2.2 ft.lbs with the typical range of plinking pellets. That would penetrate a coke can but not a bean tin so it sounds about right.

[Geezer]

I learnt as a teenager that you need either very soft or very hard things to stop pellets safely, from my extensive experimentation. Thankfully without injury. Hard things like concrete slabs or steel plate let the pellet flatten and drop away. Soft things like boxes of rags catch them. Wood is very bad as you've found, as it's resilient. Springy; you can make bows out of it.

The easiest pellet trap is a big cardboard box full of rags: old t-shirts, towels, sheets whatever. Just tape a new front on once the original starts falling apart. Pellets can eventually chew through the middle so keep checking and rearrange the rags occasionally or stuff more in.

Pistols aren't necessarily "more miss than hit" but they are harder to shoot accurately, and cheap ones are more likely to be less accurate in the first place.

The Gamo website give a velocity of 105m/s (345 fps) for the P900, which equates to between 1.8 and 2.2 ft.lbs with the typical range of plinking pellets. That would penetrate a coke can but not a bean tin so it sounds about right.

This.

I have spent decades shooting at targets mounted on big cardboard boxes stuffed full with other bits of cardboard, paper, spam mailings, catalogues, phone directories (do they still exist?), old socks with holes in them, worn-out t-shirts, etc. Almost anything soft, basically. And backed with either a lump of hardwood (old chopping board?) or metal (baking tray?). Ideally placed in front of something else resistant like a brick wall or a tree stump, preferably a decaying one.

And never a shot-through or a ricochet.

[Gary88]

Thanks for all your input guys with me been new to air rifles and pistols i was unsure on power but yes you are right this p900 i think is the cheapest pistol so maybe i was expecting too much the pistol (p900) and the rifle (Remington express) are only for the odd occasion for me and my boys to do something together this is making me sound older than i am my eldest is 12 but i thought it would be great for us all to do something different together what does not involve the playstation something more hands on i would of loved to have bought the 97kt rifle but thats way out of my budget but i bet there is no comparison between that and the express hopefully if we enjoy it i could look at getting a second hand one.

I did originally buy both the p900 and the express in .177 but after shooting the p900 and it not penetrating the bottle i thought it maybe also down to the pellet size so luckily i managed to get the express changed to a .22 but after all your comments and a bit of reading i dont think that will really be an issue especially the distance we will be shooting.

[brucieboy]

Do you realise that you have put only two full stops in the above ?
No matter what shooting you'll do, you will learn valuable lessons,ie not to use wood as a backstop, holding the gun, aiming, breathing control, there's more but the most important lesson will be safety !
With kids, who loose interest very easily if they don't hit the target, make a game to play. A piece of paper pinned on cardboard with numbers on, who gets the highest amount out of three shots. The paper makes a bigger target so it's easier to air and hit for all.
Don't worry about better guns, use what you've got and then decide whether shootings is for you.

Loose for lose,easier to air,whatever that means,shootings is for you etc.If you're going to correct others it's best to make sure your reply is perfect first.