Man, the past few months have just been crazy busy, and because of that, there hasn't been much time for airguns, or the blog. It's looking like January is going to be more of the same, so I thought I would take a little bit of the down time available between Christmas and New Years, to adjust my AA 410CRBSL carbine down to about 20 fpe at the muzzle.
I plan to hunt it with the relatively new, H&N 12.6 grain, Baracuda non-lead tin, .22 cal pellets on California ground squirrels next year.
For all practical purposes, I'm out of serious hunting with springers, and have made the complete switch to PCP's. Just a better tool for what I do.
Last spring and summer, I hunted exclusively with my new Benjamin Marauder PCP pistol/carbine. The gun, shooting 12.8 grain, DYNAMIC Sn-2 tin pellets, generates 13 fpe at the muzzle. That was essentially the same power as my R9, or HW97 .20 cals, and doing it in a PCP repeater carbine, that is recoilless, accurate, quiet, and weighs 4+ pounds less than either of those guns. I was loving it.
I was hunting very steep terrain, at elevations that at times were close to 6,000 feet, and humping a heavy rifle around in those conditions gets old real fast. The Marauder pistol/carbine was awesome to hunt with in those areas.
There were some situations however, where the terrain was to steep and rugged, to allow me to get close enough to take some nice shots on squirrels in the 70/75 yard range. With my P-Rod doing 13 fpe, my self imposed range limit, is just a little over 60 yards. So I had to pass on those 70/75 yard shots, but it got me to thinking about a carbine doing about 20 fpe, that would reach out there, in that inaccessible terrain, and roll those furballs with ease.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I already owned the solution. My AA 410CRBSL .22 cal carbine, turned down to 20 fpe, would be just about ideal. It currently does 27 fpe for 20 shots, with the 14.5 grain DYNAMIC PCP-2 tin pellets, so using the power adjuster to cut it back to 20 fpe, shooting the 12.6 grain Baracuda Green pellets was a no brainer.
So why not just shoot it as is? Well, because I don't need 27 fpe at the muzzle to cleanly kill ground squirrels at 75 yards, and dropping it back to 20 fpe will increase the shot count by some number, as yet not known.
Also, in my experience, most light pellets do not do real well accuracy wise when driven ultra fast.
I also want to test the H&N non-lead offering, just in case the DYNAMICS become unobtainium in the future.
Using one of the online calculators, I determined that I need an average muzzle velocity of 845 fps, to produce 20 fpe at the muzzle, with the 12.6 grain pellet.
According to my past notes, this rifle is launching the 14.5 grain DYNAMIC PCP-2 tin pellets at an average of 911 fps, for an average of 27 fpe at the muzzle. That's with the power control set wide open. At that setting, I'm sure it will be launching the 12.6 grain Baracudas at close to 1000 fps, or maybe a bit more. I don't need that kind of velocity, and that's one of the reasons why I'll be adjusting the power down to give me about 20 fpe at the muzzle.
I'll get the chronograph set up here soon, and report back with my findings. It will be interesting to see what happens to the shot count, when the power is dropped from 27 fpe, to 20 fpe. Probably nothing major, but I should pick up a few more shots.
More to come.
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