Umarex Heckler & Koch MP5K-PDW
Have a blast with this CO2-powered 40-shot fun gun
WIN! KONUSPRO
T30 3-12x44 worth £179
BSA R-10 SE
SUPER CARBINE Short on length, but big on performance
GEAR ADVICE
upgrade your gun? Choose the best aftermarket parts for your airgun round-up
PUT A SPRING(ER) IN YOUR STEP
Break-barrel or underlever? We look at four of the best
Issue 120
hunting
TWILIGHT CROW SHOOT
Put in a late shift and target crafty corvids
TARGET SHOOTER
WHEN THE WIND BLseOWS
Make sure tho pellets fly true
Fieldcraft
HUNTING MASTERCLASS
■ Target rabbits and squirrels in a single session ■ Mix it up with stalking and ambush tactics ■ Gear up for a foray in field and woodland
Editor’s letter
IT’S SHOWTIME ISSUE 120 may 2019 Meet the TEAM Editor-in-Chief MIKE Morton Mike has been shooting air rifles and pistols for four decades, and loves target shooting, hunting, plinking and tinkering.
CONTRIBUTOR Richard Saunders RICHARD is a journalist , author and airgun hunter who’s been creeping about the undergrowth with his rifle for more than 30 years.
CONTRIBUTOR
It hardly feels like any time has passed since we were celebrating the turn of the year, and yet show season is already in full swing. As I write, the Great British Shooting Show has just passed, I’m about to pack for the IWA Outdoor Classics show in Nuremberg, and then it’s my local West of England Game Fair the following weekend. The Great British Shooting Show really has gone from strength to strength since its move to the Birmingham NEC last year. Everyone who’s anyone in the shooting industry now seems to consider the event an absolute must, and the result is a bustling show with lots of great new gear and loads of brilliant deals for punters. We’ve pulled together a round-up of some of the exciting new kit that was unveiled, and you can see it on page 11. This year’s show also saw the inaugural Great British Shooting Awards, an initiative organised by Future Field Sports in association with show organisers and sponsors including Pulsar, ATN Optics and BSA Guns to celebrate the products, people and organisations that make the shooting world what it is. It was a wonderful evening with some very deserving winners, including Air Arms, who picked up the gong for Airgun of the Year with the S510 Ultimate Sporter XS. Show season continues apace with the Northern Shooting Show at the Yorkshire Event Centre in May, the Game Fair at Hatfield House in July and the Midland Game Fair at Weston Park in September – not to mention a host of other local shooting events. We look forward to catching up with you at one of them.
Mat Manning Group Editor, Airgun Brands airgunshooter@futurenet.com
Kev Hawker KEV is an avid shooter and countryman, specialising in hunting and fieldcraft, with more than 40 years of in-the-field experience.
Contributor Jonathan young Jonathan has a lifelong interest in shooting and weapons history, and loves collecting airguns as well as shooting them.
Contributor Andy McLachlan ANDY is the man to help you get a competitive edge. While he’s happy shooting HFT, he’s been taking on benchrest lately as well.
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CONTENTS 26
Bang or bling
Want to make cosmetic changes or add utility? Here’s our guide to gun modifications
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Every month…
8 Zeroing In
We check out some tasty new kit at the British Shooting Show and reveal this year’s award winners, chat to Crewe Rifle & Pistol Club – and unveil all the dates for this year’s Target Sprint season of events
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24 Letters
Mat’s extensive gun collection and the best way to measure ballistics data come under scrutiny this issue
25 Competition
Enter our free competition and you could win a KonusPro T30 3-12x44 scope worth £179!
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65 Airgun Answers
Don’t suffer in silence – ask our experts your gun-related questions, and they’ll be happy to help
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90 The Gun Room
The Webley Mark 3, one of the most popular British airguns ever made
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Issue 120 MAY 2019
Especially For HFT
TARGEt SHOOTER
Your regular guide to HFT and everything target-related!
51 Get inside
Andy McLachlan discusses the many benefits of joining an indoor target club
54 Lessons learned
36
Mixing it up
Hunt on both woodland and grassland permissions for a tasty dinner treat
Following a difficult 2018, Andy looks ahead to his next few months of shooting with renewed vigour and enthusiasm
the 57 When wind blows
Tips and tricks for gauging wind direction and speed outdoors
42
The late shift
Roost shooting at dusk can be an ideal way of curbing corvid numbers – find out how
46
Collecting bug
Ever wondered how to start collecting guns? Start here – but be careful, it can become very addictive!
TEsting Station 100% independent reviews R-10 SE 72 BSA Super Carbine
A shorter and smaller version of the very popular R-10 – but has shedding weight led to any compromises?
78
Norica Storm X
This budget-friendly break-barrel comes with a ton of extras
Heckler & 82 Umarex Koch MP5K-PDW Can Umarex’s blowback recreation of this classic gun live up to the original?
86 Rangemaster Sovereign
.177 pellets which promise royal performance without upper-class price
82 www.airgunmagazine.co.uk
Heckler & Koch MP5K-PDW Even non-shooters have heard of the legendary MP5, so this blowback replica needs to deliver
7
Zeroing In KIT / News / People / events / insight
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
THE TALOS PRINCIPLE If you’re thinking of picking up an FFP scope, Mike Morton reckons the Athlon Talos deserves a place on your shortlist
F
irst focal plane telescopic sights are on the rise. They’re a bit like bullpups in many ways: some shooters view them as being fickle and fanciful, while others find them to be flexible and fantastic. But again like bullpups, they’re here to stay, with the Talos BTR 4-14x44 from US company Athlon Optics being a great example of the latest breed. The Talos BTR 4-14x44 is a bit of a Goldilocks scope, being not too long at 12.9 inches (32.8cm), not too big with a 44mm objective lens, and offering a useful magnification range from 4-14x that’s just right for most applications. It has side focus parallax adjustment and an illuminated
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reticle, and manages to deliver all this for a wallet-friendly £300. With an FFP scope like this, the size of the reticle will shrink or expand along with your target as you zoom in or out. This offers quick target acquisition at low power, while giving you precise holdover positions with finer details at higher magnifications. Athlon’s APLR2 FFP IR MIL reticle is based on the milliradian, a unit of angle that’s usually shortened to ‘mrad’ or ‘mil’, with one mil measuring 3.6 inches (9.1cm) at 100 yards. The windage and elevation turrets are also graduated in mils, with each click adjusting the crosshair by 1/10 of a milliradian. So if your shot is falling half a mil low, for example, you’ll need to adjust up by five clicks. And because this is a first focal
plane scope, the relationship between the reticle and the turret adjustments will be the same for every level of magnification. The reticle is illuminated in red, with 11 levels of brightness. This may seem like overkill, but the additional degree of fidelity will be really useful when using the scope at different levels of magnification. A smaller reticle, as viewed on a low-mag setting, will need a very different level of illumination than a large reticle on high-mag at the same degree of ambient light. In Greek mythology, Talos was a giant bronze man who guarded the island of Crete. With its high build quality, optical quality and level of features, we suspect Talos may end up being a giant in airgun shooting lore as well.
www.airgunmagazine.co.uk
11
See some of the best new products from the British Shooting Show
16
John Farbrother of Optics Warehouse on his shooting wins
20
All the details on the new season of Target Sprint events
KEY Specs Manufacturer: Athlon Optics (www.athlonoptics. com) Scope supplied by: Rifleman Firearms (www. riflemanfirearms.com) Model: Talos BTR 4-14X44 FFP IR-MIL Price: £300 Tube diameter: 30mm Magnification range: 4-14 Objective lens: 44mm Reticle: APLR2 FFP IR MIL Illumination: Red, with 11 levels of brightness Eye relief: 3.23 to 3.15 inches
if your shot is falling half a mil low, for example, you’ll need to adjust up by five clicks
The size of a first focal plane reticle grows or shrinks at the same ratio with the changing size of the image of your target when you zoom in or zoom out
Click value: 0.1 milliradian Adjustment range per rotation: Five milliradians Total elevation adjustment: 20 milliradians Total windage adjustment: 20 milliradians Turret style: Exposed Parallax adjustment: Side focus – 10 yards to infinity Purging material: Nitrogen Length: 32.7cm Weight: 669g
The Talos offers a magnification range of 4-14x, has an illuminated reticle in red with 11 degrees of intensity, and a fast-focus ocular ring
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Each click will shift the shot by 1/10 of a milliradian – the reticle is graduated in milliradians, meaning it’s easy to make corresponding adjustments
The windage and elevation turret caps can be released with a 3mm hex key and repositioned at your set zero
9
Zeroing IN News and More First impressions
Guns And Gear On Show Thousands of shooters got to see some great new gear at the British Shooting Show at the Birmingham NEC last month. Here are just a few of the items that caught our eye while we were browsing the stands
Brocock Patagonia
Terence Logan of Brocock with the new Patagonia edition of the Bantam. A tricked-out version of the PCP was used by Claudio Flores of Patagonia Airguns to win the 2018 Extreme Benchrest title, and the new gun
features those world-beating refinements. Visitors were also able to see the new laminate stock for the Bantam HR. Made by Minelli, the elegant new handle completely transforms the gun’s looks.
Walther Reign
The new Reign from Walther looks set to make a serious impression in 2019. Bevin Lesueur of Umarex, pictured, said the lightweight bullpup combines affordability with a raft of innovative features.
Weihrauch HW 100 BP
BSA R-10 TH
One of the biggest head-turners on Birmingham gun-maker BSA Guns’ stand was the R-10 TH. Produced to mark 10 years of production of the iconic PCP, the new edition features refinements including an elegant Minelli thumbhole stock and a bigger bottle for a significantly increased shot capacity.
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Bullpups look set for another strong year, and Weihrauch’s official importer Hull Cartridge was attracting a lot of attention with its new bullpup offering. The stubby HW 100 BP, shown here by Chris Horner, squeezes the best features of the supersuccessful HW 100 series into a very small package indeed.
FX Wildcat Mk2
There was a lot of interest in new hardware from FX Airguns, including the Mk2 version of the famous Wildcat. The latest incarnation is equipped with a Smooth Twist X barrel and an eight-shot magazine.
NiteSite Duo
NiteSite was showing off its new Duo day and night scope. It combines the company’s tried and tested night vision technology and one-touch video recording with a conventional telescopic sight.
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9000
What’s really going on in our sport...
Airmax 30 SF Compact & Hawke Endurance Hawke LRF laser rangefinders have a reputation for being compact, affordable and very accurate. The new Endurance OLED range has all the features of the original and the same ease of use, but with a clearly illuminated display for use in low-light conditions. Visitors to the Hawke stand also
got to see the new Airmax 30 Compact scopes. The latest addition to the Airmax range, these ultra-compact scopes are just 227mm long and weigh 589g, but are still packed with features including side parallax, an illuminated glass-etched reticle and a 30mm mono-tube chassis.
Gamo Boxer The Gamo Boxer is a neat little bullpup that won’t break the bank. Aimed at the more affordable end of the market, the diminutive PCP features a beech thumbhole stock, 10-shot magazine, side-bolt action, integral Whisper shroud, an on-board pressure gauge and a cold hammer-forged barrel.
ATA Airborne
Sportsman Gun Centre was showcasing the new Airborne multi-shot PCP air rifle from ATA. The buddy-bottle gun boasts a high shot capacity and great value for money.
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I WISH I WAS NORMAL Or at least I wish I could be seen by everyone else (and that means non-shooters) as being normal When meeting people, I never hide the fact that I shoot and hunt. In fact, I often make a point of specifically mentioning it so that I can promote the sport, show non-shooters how great it is, and potentially introduce them to shooting or eating wild game. But I recently read of one doctors’ surgery charging £200 for an FAC letter – not because of the man-hours involved, but because the surgery thought people should not be shooting. I also recently met the mother of one of Scotland’s top pistol shooters, who could not persuade the village hall committee to let her set up a shooting club. And she was on the committee itself! I’m sure we’ve all experienced at least some sort of negative attitude from other people when we’ve been out and about enjoying our sport. That often comes from ‘normal’ people, those just walking their dogs, rather than out-and-out ‘anti-shooters’. But now, perhaps, there is a glimmer of hope. Young Olympian James Miller won the BBC Radio Surrey Elite Young Sports Personality of the Year, and international silver medallist Emily Shawyer came second in the Carmarthenshire Young Sportswoman of the Year. Both had been up against athletes from ‘normal’ sports. I dream of one day seeing XYZ Carpets – as a made-up example – as a sponsor’s label on a shooting jacket. Perhaps now Sky is no longer sponsoring cycling, it might look at the next up and coming sport. Could it do for shooting what it did for cycling? Fingers crossed.
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