With a limited budget and with a helping hand from our lovely members we are now on the home straight.

The new plinking bench has been built and given a coat of paint.

All that’s need now is to finish the safety wall and it’s ready to use.

Many thanks to all our members for the helping hand over the past few weeks its much appreciated.

Black Cat Air Gun has an indoor shooting range, a bench for plinking and zeroing and a Hunter Field Target (HFT) course.

Yours truly hasn’t tried the clubs HFT course yet, but I plan to probably early in 2021. My current focus is to try a few pellet types and find out what happens to my shots over different ranges. Pellet weight and type of pellet will affect the flight and more so over a greater distance.

To give you a better introduction to HFT, I’ve found quite a nice short video. This shows you what HFT is and the sort of fun and banter you could expect at this and other clubs.

Whilst this video is aimed at people new to the sport, it’s nicely done, and even experienced people might enjoy the chat!

Cheers and best wishes

We have a new risk assessment in place and there will be a copy at the club from Wednesday for anyone wishing to come to shoot, this will need to be read and understood and then signed and dated.

Please adhere to the new rules or the club will not be able to stay open.

Many thanks from the Management Team.

One of the steps I decided to take was to take a look at how easy or hard it is to shoot accurately. This was a very short video of yours truly. Using a simple gun rest with the target set to 16 meters at the end of my garden.

One of the things I noticed was the way the gun moved slightly. It seems as though my heart beat suddenly made it jump! My resting heart rate is around 40 to 45 per minute.

As with all trials and tests, I will hopefully learn from my errors and improve over time.

If you have any quick (polite) tips to give me, please feel free to mention them in the discussion box which should be below here.

Cheers for now!

I wanted a rifle which could work in most situations. A general all-round PCP air rifle with multi-shot and single shot capability, it had to be easy to carry and handle and within a tight budget. Buying an air rifle is only the first of many purchases when starting out.

There would need to be a couple of major purchases like a decent scope and a way to fill up the pressure reservoir. Pellets, targets, a garden backstop and so on.

I decided in the end to invest in a BSA R10 SE Super Carbine. The consensus seems to be that they are accurate, but some people had been let down by a flaw in the regulator. A regulator is needed to help ensure the right amount of pressure is delivered when firing the rifle.

I thought this series of articles could show you what I’ve found with owning the BSA rifle. The good, the bad and the ugly.

I’ve been advised by someone who understands the law that the onus is on the owner of the air rifle to ensure it shoots below 12 ft lbs. So, I bought a chronograph to measure the speed of the pellet when leaving the rifle. Once one knows the weight of the pellet, there are calculators available to convert feet per second and weight in grains into the number of foot pounds.

This video is about filling up an air rifle using a pump and not from a diver’s bottle.

I had been warned that using a pump was hard work! Rather than write about it, here is a short video (just over 4 minutes) which a demonstration!

So Much to Learn – So Little time

Why air rifle shooting?

As a youngster, my father decided to pay for shooting lessons at a small bore shooting club which was run very near where we lived. We lived in Woodgreen, north London and this .22 shooting club was based next door to Alexandra Palace train station.

Our teaching included safety, how to sight and how to use a sling to aid accuracy. The sling accuracy thing seemed to me like some form of medieval torcher. I’ve since found out it’s called the hasty sling and was used as a quick aid to improve target accuracy. There is another type target aid called the loop sling which may be better the hasty sling.

You could find out more here – Loop Sling https://gundigest.com/more/how-to/rifle-shooting-basics-loop-sling

So, part of my decision was a hankering to rekindle an old lost skill.

What else contributed to air rifle shooting?

I wanted a sport which would give me something to do, brought me outdoors, had skill associated with it and kept my mind calm.

As a regular and 64-year-old tennis player, I know I can’t maintain the same level of fitness and at some point, my various injuries will catch up with me.

Already tried green bowls but it just didn’t grab me.

Air Rifle Shooting – How Serious am I?

I tend to throw everything into every activity I decide to take up. Whether this has been football, tennis, table tennis, archery, horse riding, skiing, water skiing, scuba diving or whatever. I will read, study, learn and keep improving as much as I can.

Just before the pandemic hit, I bought an air rifle and just thought about plinking in my (not excessively big) garden. Bought a Gamo, break action, gas ram and had a go. It had whisper in the title somewhere. My thinking behind this was to get something which was quiet and wouldn’t worry my neighbours.

I fully expected a phut, phut sound of a silenced stealth like rifle (just like the movies)! What I really got was somewhat louder than a phut, plus breaking and loading this gas ram was a little harder than I thought!

I then thought about joining a club but since we were in covid-19 lockdown, there wasn’t a lot going on.

Joining an Air Rifle Club in Swindon

As someone very new to air rifles and shooting, I wondered what was around and how do I decide on where to join.

Having lived in Swindon for just over 25 years, I wanted something reasonably close to me and started to explore. One of the places I looked was on an air gun forum called unsurprisingly https://www.airgunforum.co.uk/

A quick search for a club in Swindon and out popped Black Cat HFT Air Gun. Once I’d found a club name it was easy enough to open a new browser tab and see whether this club popped up. Sure enough, there was a Facebook group. I applied to join and was quickly approved.

Bear in mind that acronyms like HFT didn’t mean anything to me at all. It took a bit of searching to find out that HFT meant Hunter Field Target and FT meant Field Target.

It turns out the in many respects, FT and HFT are completely different. Of the two, I preferred the idea for HFT as it’s more like real life IE hunting but without killing little furry animals. This wikepdia page does a reasonable job of explaining it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Field_Target

A quick post on Facebook and my wife and I visited to find out what this club was like, costs etc.

The club is just outside Swindon in a place called Sevenhampton and is adjacent to Black Cat Archery. The full address is Black Cat Archery, Woodland site, Roves Farm, Sevenhampton, Swindon, Wiltshire SN6 7QG. A page on their new website has a google map on it https://blackcatairrifles.co.uk/find-black-cat-air-rifles/

Joining the club

My original idea was for my wife and I to join as it was something we could do together. Turns out, Mrs Prior was not that enthused, so I paid and joined up on my own.

Plinking

The club has a bench area for plinking and zeroing. I quickly re-read the instruction manual for my Gamo .177 air rifle so I could work out what on earth to do with the turrets on the rifle scope. When shooting anything, the pellet or bullet will not go in a straight line because of something called gravity! A pellet will loop up to the point of impact which means getting a pellet to hit the zero is dependent on several things.

Speed, size, weight, shape of pellet all affects the flight as does the range of the target and the wind. In fact there are quite a lot of calculations going on… Although this picture is meant as a bit of a joke… Some people do take hunter field target very seriously!

The cheap Gamo was pretty accurate once I had correctly set the scope up and was helped by different members on each visit.

One thing I can confidently say about this club is the members really are helpful and very friendly. They went out of their way to make me feel welcomed and were happy to share their experience and views with this newcomer.

Air Rifles and What to do Next

 The cheapo Gamo was accurate but sitting down and breaking the barrel was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. It seems that gas ram type air rifles have less recoil than springers, but the pull needed is considerable across the whole range of motion. My muscles told me another solution was in order!

If you are new to this sport you will find a huge range of air rifles to suite your need and budget. Not only that but you will see, break action, underlever, CO2 and PcP (Pre-Charged Pneumatic) so what to choose?

In the end I wanted something which was easy to handle, had a large shot count, provided multi-shot and single shot, not too heavy and fitted me reasonably well. I had already decided on a PcP type air rifle.

There are so many brands out there, it’s almost bewildering. In my case I spoke to a few people, watched lots of YouTube videos, read reviews on forums. It’s funny but you will probably find as many good reviews as possible and bad reviews for any one air rifle that it can cause a degree of analysis paralysis.

The other challenge with buying a PcP is you will need air delivered under quite a lot of pressure. The general advice was to buy a diver’s type bottle as filling becomes a breeze. My concern with going down this route was that if we had another lockdown, I might not be able to fill the bottle as it needs filling via a diver’s shop and might be closed.

I had already been warned that filling with a pump was hard work but in the end that is what I decided to do.

The rifle I chose as my first was a BSA R10 SE Super Carbine as it fitted my criteria the best. Some people have mentioned regulator problems with these guns and yet others have found them good to shoot.

I can report that my latest MK5 Hill Pump is not as hard as I had thought. Apparently, it’s around 15% easier than their MK4 pump, it comes with a Dry-Pac system to reduce moisture and is very well-made. https://www.airriflepump.com/index.html

So far so good.

Having visited the plinking bench, I’ve managed to zero the cheap Gamo scope. Someone gave me some chalk targets, and these emit a lovely white puff when you hit them.

My next challenge is to buy a decent scope and have a go at the HFT course. There are some rules with this sport, with shots varying between kneeling, standing and prone.

Whilst testing this, I’ve found kneeling at home almost impossible as my quadriceps are as tight as piano wire. Funny how playing tennis and other sports can destroy some flexibility and enhance others.

My next plan is to do some much-needed stretching! And test my air rifle in the garden. At only 16 yards, it’s not big enough to test the whole range of hunter field target but at least I’ll get a feel and can gauge where I’m at.