I just found a lead that is likely a breakthrough:At the back of the inletting there are interconnected steel plates covering the inletting sides. The plate on the left (viewed from above) has two longitudinal scuffs where the metal has been scraped pretty hard. There are no such marks on the plate on the right. Further, the plate on the left has bent inward at the tip, whereas the plate on the right is parallel to the inletting. Something has clearly gone wrong with the sled action here.
Steve,It figures! The distance between the two rearmost trigger mech pins corresponds nicely with the distance between the scrapes. While I have plenty of experience with the other sidelever Dianas, I'm still figuring out how the sled mech of the 54 affects all things, big and small.
The scarcity issues characterizing the .20 cal bit me today. There is one single retailer who stocks .20 cal pellets in my entire country. By happenstance, they have Exact 13.73 grainers, and only those. I drove to said retailer, prepared to buy everything they have, be it 10 tins or 20. They had... two.I drove home with a measly 1 000 pellets, barely enough to get to know the 54K. The next batch will have to come from a couple countries over, that is, if they have the ammo available. Kinda scary, when you think about it.
Steve,I'm not sure what you mean by moving the shims around, unless you mean taking a shim from one side and adding it to the other. I wouldn't leave any side without a shim, nor do I have extra shims around. The cocking lever does still rub against the cocking rod head, but not as much as before adjusting the pressure.In other news, I just couldn't restrain myself anymore and took the first, sneaky shots with the 54, from deep in my living room into my backyard.I don't have .20 cal Exacts yet, so I used the extinct Crow Mags the seller provided with the gun. They chambered extremely easily, unlike .22 cal Crow Mags in any of my guns. Curiously, the 54 felt harder to cock than either my OEM D48 or my V-Mach kitted D52. It seems the sled action adds noticeable resistance to the cocking stroke.Pulling the trigger (the best-feeling T06 I've handled), there was the uncanny lack of recoil, feeling like a shot with a heavy 6 fpe gun - cool!The 54 went off with quite a BANG!, so I was restricted to just two shots. Even that was of course very instructive.After both shots, when cracking the loading port open, a pretty heavy dieseling smoke rose from the works. Remember, this gun has fired upwards of a thousand pellets already, and has never been opened up. It corroborates my earlier experience that factory-lubed German guns don't stop dieseling almost ever. Minor downsides to the .20 cal turned up, in that I had to re-construct a patch puller that would have the correct resistance in this bore. A home-made .177 cal puller, with a thin Pro-Shot patch and a home-cut, thicker 16mm patch together proved the best configuration. Even with the heavy dieseling, the patches grabbed only faint rifling-shaped, lead gray marks, with no hint of burning oils or other crud.Felt pellets are a no-go with this caliber: a .22 cal VFG felt pellet was impossible to chamber in this gun, while a .177 cal cleaning pellet was obviously way too loose. AFAIK,there is no 5.0mm felt pellet available.