Digging around in my loft, I came across a rifle I’d forgotten all about. Seeing it, both jogged my memory and raised a question you lot might be able to answer.

It’s an HW85 that was given to me in, I think ‘86, to test. It’s unusual for an 85 as it is stocked in a Hw77 pattern stock, just like the Beeman version of the HW80, is it the R1? It’s not the deluxe model as I also have one of those too and it’s stock pattern is unique to the 85.

Anyway this particular 85 came with a 77k for the purpose of testing them both with new choked barrels, LW I would guess. The results were good making the rifles less pellet sensitive in general and with superdomes, which were king at the time, they were as good as anything I’d shot up to that point. So I drew up a geeky report and sent my findings off to the nice man at Hull that had given me 2 such sweet rifles. He made the right noises about introducing choked barrels across the range but soon after that, I lost all interest in air rifles and never bothered to check.

Introducing them would have hit their margins and as all we ever sold in that period was 77ks and 85s anyway, they didn’t need to raise their game. For the shooter though, at that time when ammunition was poor, the results would have been really worthwhile.

So my question is, did Weihrauch actually introduce the choked barrels? If so was it 1985/86?

ATB

Richard