Quote Originally Posted by tinbum View Post
I bought a tatty 97 on Friday, and this afternoon I got a chance to have a play with it. On the outside its not great, wear and speckling to the bluing, dings in the wood and an inexpertly fitted adjustable butt pad.
I opened it up to the usual sight of excessive grease, poorly finished spring and badly fitting rear guide.
I heated and finished the spring, degreased everything, polished the piston and fitted a 8mm short stroke extension and new HW seal. A snug set of guides were made for the spring, and finally I opened the TP out to 3.9mm to improve the SCR.
I fired a few test shots and it felt nice, but underpowered. Refinishing the spring must've taken too much out of it. Bum!
Ran it over the chrono to be sure and.... 13.6!!! Oops! 1 1/2 coils off, refinished and 11.1 ft/lb. and when I say 11.1 I mean 11.1! I was getting variation of less than 1fps for 80% of the shots.
Now I have a 97 that shoots superbly, but looks terrible.

The temptation is to get it blacked and buy a custom stock, but by the time I've done that I could buy a new one. The wise thing to do would be keep it as is, but what fun would that be?
Maybe no fun, but I'd be tempted to leave the cosmetics. Like a "sleeper", beautiful shooting and accurate and something you'll not get too precious over.

One of my 77s is a Mark 1 in .22 which was given to be in '09. The chap just wanted it out of his mischievous teenage son's way. He boasted that he and his mate had fired it with loads of combustibles behind the pellets to get it to go "crack" - petrol, diesel etc.

When I stripped it I feared the worst. But this bulletproof Teutonic accuracy machine was totally perfect inside. A little polishing and a V-Mach kit and it's beautiful to shoot. In fact it's the one that you and the boys clubbed together and bought me the synthetic stock for. Many have shot it at the Bash and declare it being "very nice". And a rather nice Bash attendee received the stock as a good karma gesture.