Airguns of Arizona Blog

My first job was to check out the guns for 10-meter accuracy. While all of them come equipped with iron sights, I decided to test them with optional scope or peep sight mounted. As you might expect from telescopic sights that cost less than $30, neither the Crosman nor the Daisy scope would make any of your shooting friends insanely envious, but at the same time, if what you are looking for is a sighting device that is adequate to the task of removing vermin from the garden at relatively short range, these scopes are up to the job.

When it got down to the actual evaluation, I decided to test the air rifles at two pumping strokes less than the maximum the factory allows. Experience has shown that the extra two strokes add only a little to the velocity. Incidentally, despite what you might have heard from other sources, pump up airguns are extremely consistent in their velocity. You can even pump one up, let it sit for half an hour or more, and still get very consistent results.

At eight pumps, the Daisy 22X happily shot 1-inch (edge-to-edge) groups at 10 meters with most pellets, including Daisy MaxSpeed .22 wadcutters and Crosman .22 Premiers. Group size dropped to 3/4 inch with RW Meisterkugeln flat-nosed .22 pellets.

At 8 pumps, the Crosman 2200B was extremely finicky about pellets. It shot huge groups – some over three inches — with every pellet but the RWS Meisterkuglns. With these pellets, groups settled down to 1 1/16th inch, not a great showing, but sufficient to the job. (Crosman tells me that its quality standard for the 2200B is 1 1/2 inch groups at 10 yards, with 1 inch being typical.)

The Benjamin 392, at 6 pumps, was the least pellet-sensitive gun tested, shooting half-inch groups with almost any pellet I fed it.

Then it was time for the can test. Shooting from a sitting position at 20 meters, I shot at steel soup cans with each gun, using Meisterkugln pellets and the same number of pumps as I had used at 10 meters. All three guns easily hit the can in the center mass and punched through one side. The 392 dimpled the backside of the can trying to make an exit hole.

At 15 meters, the Benjamin 392 went in one side and out the other. The Crosman 2200B went in one side and made a large dimple on the back side. The Daisy 22X pierced on side and made a smaller dimple on the back side.

At 10 meters, both the 392 and the 2200B blew through both sides of the can like a hot knife through butter. The Daisy 22X pellet lodged in the exit hole on the backside. Note well: these shots were made with wadcutter pellets. They generally do not penetrate well, but when they do, the typically leave large wound tunnels. Dome-headed pellets certainly would penetrate more efficiently.

It is also important to note that two air rifles of the same model, but two serial numbers apart, can perform better with radically different pellets. So, just because my Crosman 2200B achieved a certain level of performance with Meisterkugln pellets, that doesn’t mean your 2200B will perform similarly with the same pellets. Testing with different pellets is the only way to find out what works in your gun.

The bottom line: The Daisy 22X pumps the easiest, offers moderate accuracy, but penetrated the least on the can test. The Crosman 2200B offers moderate pumping effort, good penetration in the can test, but the lowest accuracy. The Benjamin 392 pumps hardest, hits the hardest, and offers the most accuracy, but costs nearly twice as much as the others. As the man said: “Ya pays yer money, and ya takes yer choice.” Any of these guns could be used for defending garden at 60 feet or less, but my first choice would be the Benjamin 392 if my wallet could stand it.

Til next time, aim true and shoot straight.

-          Jock Elliott

But before I get to my take on the actual air rifles, some words about my selection. I decided to go with American pump-up .22 caliber air rifles for several reasons. The first, quite frankly, is that I have a weak spot for pump-up air guns. I own several, and I enjoy shooting them frequently. In addition, pump-up guns are generally easy to shoot; they don’t jump and buck the way many spring-piston air rifles do. Pump-up rifles are also typically less expensive than their spring-piston counterparts, and they are usually a fraction the cost of pre-charged air rifles which are filled from a SCUBA tank or high pressure pump.

Lastly, I was inspired. Recently I received a copy of an excellent book American Air Rifles by James E. House (Krause Publications). In it, he evaluates more than a dozen American-made air rifles. His words reminded me that you don’t need an expensive European or Asian model to enjoy a great deal of shooting satisfaction – and utility — with an air rifle. Thanks, Mr. House.

One of the first challenges that I faced was generating some sort of performance standard. What kind of performance would be necessary to send Jabba the Chuck to that Big Salad Bar in the Sky? Since I didn’t have three equal National Institute of Standards-certified pest animals lining up to be shot for evaluation purposes, and at that time I did not have a chronograph, I chose the next best thing . . . soup cans. Yup, good oldCampbell’s to the rescue.

My reasoning was thus: a steel soup can is small enough and tough enough that, if you can hit it and cleanly pierce at least one side, you can probably hit and punch through the skull of a varmint. I have killed animals with air guns that wouldn’t pass this test, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If possible, I prefer to drop ‘em where they stand. (I chose .22 caliber for all three guns for the same reason.)

So let’s have a look at our three candidates.

Daisy 22X.

The Daisy 22X is 37.75 inches long and weights 4.5 lbs. It is the lightest of the three guns. It has 20.8 in rifled steel barrel. The manual says it can be pumped up to 10 times and claims 530 fps with 8.6 fp energy but doesn’t specify what weight pellets are involved. The 22X is a handsome gun with a wooden buttstock (with plastic buttplate) and wooden forearm. The receiver is metal.

The 22X is loaded by dropping pellets into the breech on top of the receiver. The bolt is opened by pulling a plastic lever on the right side of the receiver. Opening the bolt also cocks the action. With a scope attached to the rail on top of the receiver, loading requires placing the pellet in the slot on the top of the receiver just to the right of the breech and rolling the pellet into the breech. The 22X is the easiest to pump of the three rifles, but, as we’ll see in a bit, it comes at a price.

In 2002, the suggested retail price of the 22X was $73.95. The Daisy 2-7x scope that I used for testing carried an SRP of $29.95.

Crosman 2200B

The Crosman 2200B measures 39 inches long and weighs 4 lbs. 12 oz., just a few ounces more than the Daisy. The 2200B has a 20.79 inch rifled steel barrel, and the factory manual claims 525-595 fps at 10 pumps with 14.3 gr. pellets. The buttstock and forearm are plastic, and the receiver is metal and is equipped with a scope rail. Overall, the appearance is clean and appealing, and it looks like a “real” rifle. The entire plastic forearm moves to pump up the gun, and the 2200B requires only slightly more pumping effort than the Daisy.

The 2200B loads by dropping pellets into the breech on the right side of the receiver. A plastic lever opens the breech and cocks the action. Loading requires tipping the gun on its side. The slot leading to the breech is somewhat deep, and there is no elegant way to control the descent of a pellet to the breech itself. As a result, sometimes nose-heavy domed pellets arrive at the breech sideways or backwards. Sometimes jiggling the gun or dumping the pellet out and starting over is necessary to set things right.

The suggested retail price of the 2200B was $69.95, and the 4x Crosman scope that was used during testing was $9.95.

Benjamin 392

Benjamin 392, manufactured by Crosman Corporation, is 36.25 inches long and weighs 5.5 lbs, making it both the shortest and the heaviest of our three candidates. The 392 manual states this gun will produce velocities of 685 fps at 8 pumps but does not reveal the weight of the pellets used in making that determination.

It doesn’t take Holmesian powers of observation to figure out the 392 is solidly built. The only plastic used on this air rifle is the buttplate. The buttstock is solid wood, and so is the forearm which also serves as the pumping lever. (The 392 is also the hardest of the three guns to pump.) The breech and bolt are made of metal, but unlike the Daisy and the Crosman, there is no scope rail on top of the receiver. Holes for attaching a Williams peep sight are tapped into the side of the receiver, and that’s what I used for a sighting system.

The 392 can be scoped using intermounts from Crosman for around $15.00 and attach a scope (or a red dot sighting device) forward of the receiver. In the case of a scope, this requires either a long eye relief scope (a la Colonel Jeff Cooper’s scout rifle concept) or putting both scope rings forward of the turrets and letting the body of the scope hang over the receive.

The suggested retail price of the Benjamin 392 was $149.95, and the Williams peep was $27.95, making this combo by far and away the most expensive of the three guns tested.

Next time, we’ll see how these three rifles perform.

Til then, aim true and shoot straight.

-          Jock Elliott

Back in 2002, my wife and I decided that we would like to grow some fresh veggies. The next couple of blogs recall what happened then and make some recommendations in case you need to defend your garden.

There is no way to confirm this with rock-solid certainty, but according to my back-of-the-ammo-box calculations, it was the most expensive salad bar ever. And I had not tasted so much as a single bite of it – not a morsel of wax bean, not a sliver of tomato.

My wife and I had labored hard through sun and rain over the darn thing. We hired the roto-tiller guy (who showed up with a commercial-grade Troy-Bilt tiller and a business card that read “I dig my work.”) to pulverize a section of our lawn. Then we raked, picked rocks (lots of ‘em), ran strings and pegs, and planted: tomatoes, corn, squash, a couple of kinds of beans, peppers. It was a work of art. We were regular Arlo Guthries out there: “inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow . . .”

Then, by the sweat of our brow, we surrounded it with steel fence posts and sturdy critter-proof wire fencing. And we watched it grow and tended it. Then, just as the tender new plants were seriously establishing themselves, we went away for a weekend.

When we came back . . . someone . . . something . . . had given our garden a crew cut. Where once there had been vibrant plants bursting with the promise nature’s bounty, there was stubble. I was in utter shock: for the amount of money, sweat and effort we had put into this thing, we could have had veggies FEDEXed to us fromChile. Who was the culprit?

Then I saw him. Not one of the deer that wander through the yard. No, this was smaller, more insidious – good old Marmota monax, a woodchuck. And what a woodchuck this was! Round, firm, fully packed, he was so swollen and porcine he could barely wriggle through the hole he had dug under the fence. He was so fat he had a roll behind his neck. I had worked my butt off all spring so this groundhog could enjoy some mitey fine gourmet meals at my expense.

I wanted to shoot him so baaaaad! “Honey, call the supermarket and see if they got any Woodchuck Shake ‘N’ Bake, will ya?” (I never did terminate this particular woodchuck with extreme prejudice. Instead I took my revenge in laughter – he was so obscenely corpulent, likeGarfieldthe cat, his legs barely reached the ground. I referred to him as Jabba the Chuck.)

If you’ve got a problem with a woodchuck, a rabbit, a squirrel or other varmint munching on your garden or prize azaleas, and you live in or near a populated area, there is a problem. The law generally takes a very dim view of popping off any kind of firearm near dwellings, and many jurisdictions have specific prohibitions about shooting guns. Besides, any reader of this blog worth his or her salt will naturally be conscious of the safety of neighbors and their property.

In my case, I live within one-half mile of a major technical university. Shooting any kind of powder is strictly verboten. There is hope, though. Many places have absolutely nothing to say about shooting airguns. Recently, I’ve had my hands on three vintage American .22 caliber pump-up airguns that will dispatch vermin quite well at short ranges.

Next time, we’ll talk about them.

Til then, aim true and shoot straight.

-          Jock Elliott