Hi all,

I obtained a bit of a project Fenman while ago that had been "converted to spring", well if you call shoving in a massive spring with no guides a spring conversion then we've all been doing this tuning lark wrong, anyway the rifles had been a bit abused in its life, some of the internals where missing, so it was either going to be a nicely done spring conversion (which I already have a kit sitting here) or try to convert it back to a rammer again, now on doing a bit of Google searching I realised that the HW90 has roughly the same size and design of rear valve guide and the cross pin retaining holes and pins are the same size as well, so a secondhand one was obtained, I thought that the rear guide that goes inside the piston and seals against the piston wall on the 90 would have worked on the Fenman piston but after examination by our very own Nick G at one of the bashes, I was told that the fit was not tight enough, so Nick kindly made me up a new seal carrier (which was one of the original parts missing from inside), after all the work that had been done by Nick, when I went to screw the new filling valve into the original Theoben valve housing it would only screw in so far and was sticking out the end, I had 2BA thread tap handy (like you do) and retapped the thread but the valve still only seated down a tiny bit more, so the pump can't be attached to fill the rifle, so plan B was started, whilst Nick was doing the seal carrier for me a Diana 340 N-tec drop in ram became available on here which I purchased and was put in one night just to see if the rifle would work with it and to see if the new Diana 35 piston head Nick helped attach to the front of the piston as the original seal was buggered (like they always are), well I have to say that it shoots pretty nice with they Diana ram in it and not as harsh as a proper rammer dare I say, I'll compare my Sirocco with the Fenman at the next bash to compare their differences, at the moment it's doing about 10.2fp with 16 grain AAs and 10.9 with 14.66 Excite hammers.

Cheers

Pete