HR81 Parts

[ogilkes]

Just been reading The Sterling Years by James Edmiston, the guy who owned the company in the 70s-80s. Here I his acocunt of the development of the HR81. Before they got to the HR81 they apparently considered aircartridges and German style recoiless actions. Anyway for enthusiasts:

‘Another approach to Sterling was from John Whiscombe, a computer expert with an interest in airguns and a clear understanding of trends in airgun developments. He had cleverly adapted the German GISS system — a spring recoilless system — for an airgun, although he was adrift on the cost of manufacture. But it was felt that this was too sophisticated for Sterling to make as a first-off airgun, and it would be too expensive for the market that we were aiming at. We devoted more time to consideration of a design put forward by two personable engineers, David Theobald and Ben Taylor, who had formed the Theoben Company in Huntingdon. However, their idea involved a barrel-cocking airgun and when we consulted the gun trade we found them unanimously of the opinion that barrel-cocking airguns were on the way out. I have since learned to pay less heed to what the gun trade says. Too many people can list their likes and dislikes, particularly the latter; but, when it comes to buying a product that they themselves have encouraged, they rarely put their money where their mouth is.

But we finally found what we were looking for. Roy Hutchinson, an airgun enthusiast and designer who had his own engineering facility, had designed a powerful underlever cocking spring gun. The main feature of his design was the power of the gun, and the fact that a small bolt was used to push the pellet into the barrel. This ensured that the skirt of the pellet was in no way deformed, so that there was a perfect seal in the rifling and hence no loss of power. Sterling had the machining capacity and the tooling was made in-house. Responsibility for the whole project was given to a young engineer called Peter Moon, whose production background had been in the frantic world of domestic appliances and progress was rapid. There was a bit of a rub when Roy took his time over producing drawings, so Peter designed his own solution to the problem. The result was the HR-81 rifle. It was downright ugly, on account of the engineer’s cosmetics and the very cheap Italian stock. More important, though, it was particularly well made, powerful and effective, and it has already become a classic, much sought after.

The trade told me confidently that the new rifle would never sell; it used an underlever, and underlevers were things of the past. For a while, the trade seemed to be right. The rifle did not sell at first, and I became quite worried. Suddenly, however, it caught on and we were in the happy position of being able to sell all that we could make. Furthermore, it spawned a fashion in airguns, so that the underlever came back with a vengeance; it is now more popular than the sidelever.

As the HR-81 was something entirely new, we offered a no- quibble guarantee that we would replace any gun returned for any reason at all. A handful came back with scratched or damaged stocks, and were instantly replaced, although the damage must have occurred after the guns were despatched from Sterling. Others came back to us in pieces, because some know-all had been going to tune his gun to produce yet more power. Since the rifle was assembled with the mainspring held under considerable pressure, in a special press, these amateur would-be tuners did not stand a chance of getting the pieces back together again. Still, for the sake of improving the name and keeping the customers happy, we reassembled the guns for free. This service was even extended to those who claimed that they had barely removed the weapon from Its original packing and certainly never even fired it — but we would find burred screw heads and scratches, the tell-tale signs that a ‘tinker’ had been at work. Without comment, we would reassemble or replace the particular weapon. The trade, without saying too much themselves, appreciated these gestures, and the business began to snowball.’

[Pagoda113]

So what went wrong? I like mine (no.1286) in 0.22" cal. although it does demand much concentration to obtain reasonable accuracy, mainly due to the trigger being too heavy IMHO.