Background
Quality Air Rifles and Air Pistols are beautiful, accurate and fun. If you enjoy the skill of shooting, consider Air Guns. They are not the toys we had as kids. These are not BB guns. These are better quality, far more powerful and highly accurate pellet guns.
In the subsequent pages you will read about 3 "springers", 2 rifles and 1 pistol. Springers adopt their name from the type of mechanism they use to provide the compressed air to propel the pellet. Springers use a main spring to drive a piston in a cylinder. Springers are cocked once for every shot. There are other mechanisms employed in air guns such as Pre-Charged Pneumatic (PCP) and pump pneumatic. The PCP requires a high pressure compressor (~3000psi) or a local scuba shop to fill a charge tank. Pump air guns require several strokes to fill an on-gun chamber with compressed air. I prefer the springer. Springers provide plenty of power and velocity for hunting squirrels and rabbits if that is your goal. Personally I just like putting holes in paper...accurately! Air rifles attain 600-1500 foot per second (fps) depending on the caliber and make/model. That means the pellet travels a minimum of 2 football fields in 1 second. Energy attains 20 foot pounds.
Air rifles are categorized into break barrel or fixed barrel. In a break barrel the barrel also serves as the cocking arm. Fixed barrel air rifles are categorized into side lever or under lever. A side lever has a lever on the side of the rifle to cock the mainspring. An under lever has a lever on the bottom of the rifle to cock the mainspring. I prefer fixed barrels.
Air guns (springers) are available in a variety of calibers today. These include .177, .20, .22, and .25. You will also be surprised to find PCPs in .50 caliber! The most popular calibers by far are the .177 (most prevalent) and .22. I prefer the .22 caliber. The same air gun may be available in multiple calibers. Given the same gun, The smaller the caliber the faster the pellet. However, the smaller the caliber, the less the energy. This is not immediately obvious as energy increases by the square of the speed but only linearly proportional to the mass. There are other websites that explain this in detail. In short, the .22 holds energy at range better than the .177. In the UK, their laws require a 12 foot pound limit without a special license. These are called FAC air guns.
Manufacturers
Fine manufacturers of air guns include Weihrauch (Germany), Air Arms (UK) and RWS Diana (Germany). There are many other fine companies like Feinwerkbau (Germany) which is known for its high end competition target rifles. And of course a plethora of affordable air guns like Gamo (Spain), etc. Beeman is an interesting phenomenon. Many years ago Dr. Beeman started an import company to import fine air guns from Europe into the US. He struck contracts with the European companies to re-badge their products with the Beeman name and nomenclature. Some products may be built to slightly different specifications. An example of this is the Weihrauch HW-45 Silver Star which is brought into the US by the Beeman company and sold as the Beeman P11.
Dealers
My favorite dealer for air rifles so far is Air Guns of Arizona. These folks are HIGHLY recommended. They ship promptly even if one item is back ordered and communicate well. They also have an eye for customer satisfaction. Little things like mounting your scope for you, testing and including a chronograph printout with your air gun and quality shipment packaging. If they don't have something they give you an idea of where to find it or try to get it. I've even had them answer my email on a holiday. These guys are great. The only complaint I have is they tightened down the scope mount on the 54 so tight it dented the scope tube and pulled threads on the dovetail clamp. I understand airgun recoil and the need for tight mounting but the first thing you have to do when a scope comes pre-mounted is set the eye relief and then re-center. When you order, let them know you will reset the eye relief as they assume you will not.
I have also tried Pyramyd Air. My experience with them has been less favorable. They will hold a shipment if one 2c piece is backordered for a month without telling you or asking you. They don't bother to even inspect before they ship and they aren't very helpful in locating specialty items. However, their website is useful for information and they do a decent job.
Scopes
I am not ecstatic about the scope choices for air guns. Suffice it to say the ones I have are made in China. The quality just isn't there either in the optics or the controls. Air guns need a scope with an Adjustable Objective (AO) that goes down to 10 yards/meters. Most rifle scopes for fire arms (powder rifles) have a minimum AO of 50m/yds. The AO is the scopes ability to focus. I wish Nikon or Zeiss made a scope for air guns. Even though Nikon scopes are made in the Philippines, the quality of Nikon is by far superior to that of the three air rifle scopes from Centerpoint, Leapers, and Nikko Stirling. In fact I have a Weaver, Simmons and old Redfield and the optical clarity in these is better than the centerpoint or leapers. The Weaver is a 36x40 fixed mag target scope and has very good quality though I can't use it for my air rifles.
I must say all three of the air rifle scopes appear to be from the same Chinese company. The Centerpoint and the Leapers share the same control knobs. The Centerpoint and the Nikko appear to share the same body. On all three, the control knobs for zoom are very tight and difficult to turn. All three Chinese scopes share the same lack of brightness, sharpness, clarity, eye placement difficulty, and white-out with slight head movement that simply is not there on my Nikon. And that is comparing all four at the same magnification level.
I wish I could say these scopes were inexpensive. They cost half what my Nikon cost but I would not call these scopes inexpensive. I would call them cheap however. Which is a totally different parameter.
Nikko Stirling does offer a better clarity in their platinum and especially diamond line. I do not own a Diamond but many have said their optics are on par with Nikon. I do have a platinum. The platinum is pretty good, still less clarity than Nikon but better than leapers or centerpoint.
I should also mention that there are clarity differences between models in the same line. For example the Nikko Stirling 10-50x60 Platinum Nighteater has better clarity than the 8-32x60. I would also say that given the 10-50x60 is a 50x power rifle scope, that puts it in a class with relatively few contenders making it the best value for its price point. The Diamond Sportsman would be in a totally different class at twice the cost. But I find the optical clarity on the 10-50 nighteater very good, equal to the weaver T-series 36x40.
There are many other factors in judging clarity and a scope and there are several forums and websites dedicated to that science. They are a wealth of information. For example, temperature affects the range finding ability of a riflescope as well as Point Of Impact (POI). The amount of adjustment travel, the ability to hold zero, the reticle focal plane, and the ability to remain sealed and many more.
My opinions on clarity are based on my eyeball and using these scopes in my own target shooting. The most important factor to me is a very fine focused sight picture free from blurriness or warping. Also the centerpoint, leapers and 8-32 nighteater present a white haze sight picture when your eye gets slightly off axis. I hate this. All the other scopes present a black sight picture when the eye is slightly off center. I like that. I guess it shouldn't matter but I am used to the black, I find the white distracting. Also, a "feature" of all variable mag scopes and high mag scopes is that at the low mag setting the eye relief is very forgiving for eye alignment but not at high mag settings. Some are worse than others. I find the 10-50x60 nighteater much better than the 8-32x60.
I can highly recommend Kinneys Shooting Supply for the Nikko Stirling Nighteater 10-50x60. These folks are helpful and polite.
There is also talk of scopes for air rifles needing to be designed for air rifle shock and vibration vice powder rifle shock and vibration. The theory is that a powder rifle scope is designed for rearward recoil only and not for the forward/rearward recoil that is unique to a spring air rifle. Granted there is some scientific basis for this based on vibration power spectrum density, but I am not sure if the extent is urban legend or not. The recoil on my pellet guns are no where near even a .22 Long Rifle. And .223 Ruger mini-14 or mini-30's semiautos have significant forward and rearward recoil in comparison and have on occasion been blamed for eating scopes. I cannot help wonder however if the scope damage blamed on air and powder rifles is due to some other event or manufacturing defect. Regardless, Leapers scopes advertise testing their scopes with forward and rearward impacts. I will say these scopes; Leapers, Centerpoint and Nikko Stirling appear to hold up to the recoil on my air rifles and powder rifles. But I will also say this, when Nikon makes a 10m AO scope of sufficient magnification I will try it on an air rifle.
Scope Mounts and Rings
There are several good scope mounts on the market. I have tried individual rings (beeman) and one piece mounts (BKL). My favorite by far is a 11mm dovetail to weaver/picatinny rail adapter and Burris Signature Zee rings. The Burris signature line uses self aligning plastic inserts and have offset inserts for taking up most of the adjustment in fitting a scope to a rifle. This keeps the internal optics closer to zero align which helps optical clarity. These plastic inserts get a better grip than metal rings and won't mar the finish or pinch the scope tube. The Burris mounts do have one down side. The cross clamp screw is slotted instead of socketed. This is easily rectified by buying screws from McMaster Carr.
Air Rifles are also fitted with a scope stop of some type. Either a screw head that sits on top of the receiver (RWS) or a machined hole in the top of the receiver (Air Arms). Some scope mounts and Rings have the stop pin, others have a machined slot for the screw head. These so called stop pins are necessary for the air rifle recoil. The weaver and picatinny rings use the rail clamp cross bolt as the ring stop to the rail. The dovetail to weaver/picatinny adapter bases themselves also have a stop pin to mate with the receiver. Remember, weaver accessories (rings) fit on picatinny rails but the inverse is not necessarily true.
I can recommend Optics Planet for all sorts of rings and bases and scopes and 4 scopes for genuine honesty and knowledge in Zeiss and Nikon.
Air Rifles have a large ballistic drop. That means at 100 yards the pellet drops below the barrel line of sight by inches. These inches translate into Minutes Of Angle or MOA. Air Rifle scopes tend to have large MOA adjustment ranges. A 30mm tube can accommodate a larger MOA adjustment range than a 1" tube but is not guaranteed so check the particular scope specs. But it's not such a big deal as it used to be as there are adjustable scope mounts and fixed 20MOA mounts and of course the Burris Signature ring offsets that can alleviate this so you have to do the minimum of click adjustments which is necessary to keeping the barrel optics as close to zero align as possible.
Tools
I highly recommend a torque driver that takes 1/4" bits for working on guns whether air or firearm, maintenance or scope mounting, a torque screwdriver is a must. I do not recommend the cheapo plastic versions either. Do yourself a favor, buy a quality SK or Craftsman product. This torque driver is available from McMaster Carr or Sears Craftsman and comes with a factory calibration sheet. It is meant for a production line, high quality. I would not go over 32 inch pounds on M4 screws and 24 inch pounds on M3 screws, assuming there is at least 5mm of threads. Smaller screws like #6 and sometimes #8s depending on thread depth need only 15 ft lbs. If you have a doubt, contact the manufacturer of the ring or the base. Alternatively you can use a 1/4" socket torque wrench. But remember, small screws need inch pounds not foot pounds.
For setting a scope on straight, small bubble levels are indispensible and can be obtained from Mcmaster Carr along with replacement screws, taps/dies, etc of every shape or size.
It is always advisable to Loctite screws that will not be routinely removed. A little dab of clear fingernail polish on the outside of screw heads can be used as well.
Spring Air Rifle TUNE KITS
There is just one name and website you need to know: Jim Maccari.
