A hunting we will go …

Over the last few days, I have inadvertently picked up a new hobby; something else to compete with my limited videogame time. Air rifle target practice. The targets being standard paper targets, beer cans, and backyard squirrels. Those pests have gone too far – chewing up pecans that trash the yard and deck, running across the house (maybe even getting into the attic), and the critters get into the crawl space. The squirrels need to die. Seriously.

Labor Day weekend I picked up a Crosman Sierra Pro 1000 FPS Break Barrel Rifle from Wal-Mart. Fancy stuff for a pellet gun. I probably should have done a little more research, but the squirrels were becoming a bit much, and this .177 pellet gun seemed like a good solution to the problem. Silly me. I decided that I “would give them a chance” by going with a single pellet shot instead of a bb-gun that took a lot of pellets. No bang, bang, bang with this puppy.

I am getting ahead of myself.

Out of the box (after spending 10 minutes to attach the scope) I had a hell of a time getting the rifle sighted. My first thought was that I just suck. I cannot see (-4R and -3.75L), so why would I expect to actually be able to hit the side of a barn with a gun? Everything with the scope was low of the mark, so after adjusting the scope to the highest setting, without much success, I decided to take the damn thing off. Straight away I was much better, but figured that something still has to be wrong because I was still a little low. After messing around for a while, I decided to try to remount the scope. Why include a nice 3-9×40 scope if it is worthless? Besides, I need to be able to hit squirrels in the pecan tree, so I am going to need the power of the scope to take out my targets.

After putting the scope back on, I finally got my shots to group pretty well at about 15 yards out. Not bull’s-eye good mind you, but good enough to start thinking about the squirrels. Or maybe a target a little further out. After moving my targets an additional 10 yards out, I was really low on my aim, but my grouping seemed to be OK. I could not figure out if the pellets were losing a fair amount of velocity over such a short distance, or if the gun/scope was just not sighted correctly.

All in all, I was fairly frustrated because I felt like I should be hitting dead center on my targets more often than not. After doing a google search or two, I learned that there may be some quality issues with this air rifle. Apparently it is made in China (as if that says it all), and is not known for its accuracy. For those of you interested in this sort of thing, the best I can tell is that the Crosman Sierra Pro is a Wal-Mart branded Crosman 1000 or Remington Summit; kits and maybe muzzle brakes are slightly different among each model.

I decided that maybe there was a problem with the gun, so I took it back to Wal-Mart, but have not checked out the new gun yet to see if it affords me better results.

Grouping problems notwithstanding, I have been having a blast shooting at targets and trying to get the gun sighted. Yesterday I also had a moment of truth. One of the varmints decided to show itself, and I took prompt action. My aim was accurate enough to take the sucker out in a single shot at about 20 yards out.

Stay tuned. More air rifle action on the way.

Share

Leave a Reply