Gamo PT-85 Tactical Review

[Scupeli]

Hi, I just received this pistol today.

My prerequisites for a pistol when shopping were that it must be semi-automatic, and must load with a stick mag. The only two I could find that met these conditions were the PT-85 and the PX-4 Storm. After much research I decided to go for the PT-85 Tactical - mostly because of its availability, price and accessories, but also because it seemed to be a lot more powerful due to the extended barrel. My intended use for the pistol is general noodling around, plinking and some light target shooting.

I'll start with the negatives:

After an initial inspection I started attaching the accessories. I had only planned on using the scope and the laser. Firstly, the accessory mounting frame had a lot of movement in it - it doesn't attach to a particularly pliable section of the gun, but it flexes a lot. It was also quite significantly off-centre, and no matter how much I adjusted it, I couldn't get it sturdy or centred.

I attached the scope anyway, but due to the issue with the mounting frame, the scope was also off-centre to the left, and I could not fix this. It also added a lot of weight to the already heavy pistol, and the RGB dots weren't actually dots but an unattractive series of blurry dots that is obviously a design flaw and not an intended feature of the scope. I removed both the scope and the mounting frame at this point.

Thankfully, the mounting frame mounts on to a weaver mount built into the pistol frame, which offers a sturdy spot to mount the laser pointer or flashlight. I mounted the laser here and began calibrating it. The quality of the laser and the flashlight is pretty poor - they both have a cheap and shoddy appearance and are mechanically quite shoddy. The flashlight is an old bulb torch rather than an LED, and the laser, depending on how it's calibrated, also projects one or more addition smeared red marks around the dot.

I attached the pressure switch (peeling the back off of the self-adhesive velcro was tedious and the backing tore into two sheets, though this isn't a significant issue really...). The switch works fine.

I noticed at this point while calibrating the laser that the extended barrel is not straight. It points slightly left and slightly downward. I unscrewed the barrel shroud ("fake silencer") and the extended barrel actually wiggles around - both the bare metal barrel and the thread that it's mounted into. I haven't thought of a good way to correct this yet. The slide also wiggles quite far left and right, along with the iron sight notch attached to it. These things are obviously quite serious problems.

The pistol is quite heavy with just the barrel shroud and the laser equipped, and the recoil on the pistol renders the scope quite useless to me. The safety catch is also quite finicky to operate, and I ended up taking some skin off of my thumb. It has a decocker too but the operation of it is confusing, especially since the use of it isn't documented in the manual or anywhere else, though it definitely exists.

It's quite loud, and the barrel shroud and extended barrel means that you'd have to extend the length of the pistol to about 20 inches, add even more nose weight, and have to develop some kind of adapter to attach it to the shroud if you wanted to use a silencer.

The positives:

The general construction of the main pistol is nice. The pistol feels powerful - a chronograph test by a guy on YouTube using Rabbit Magnum II pellets and some pellet lube managed to get a reading which figured out to 5.78 ft/lbs, which seems pretty insane for a repeating co2 pistol. Loading with the stick mags is great - there's a rotary mag in each end and this package included two magazines, so you can let 32 pellets loose with very little reloading effort compared to the ordinary rotary mag loading of most co2 pistols. It's comfy in the hand.

If I could go back in time a week, I'd probably order the standard PT-85 without the extended barrel and tactical features, as the extended barrel and mounting frame are unstable, and the accessories are of poor quality.

I hope that this review helps somebody.

[Hairydavey]

It's in the wrong section mate

[Kennish]

Is the barrel rifled?.

[Two200's]

Rabbit magnums in a co2?
I would be amazed if they reached the end of the barrel.