A bit of low powered .25 Hatsan weirdness.

[Ribbonstone]

A little Hatsan .25 weirdness.

Sometimes it takes a fresh eye to spot something. Had my nephew over.  He asked why I never tried ball (#3 buckshot) in this .25 when I had tried in it a QB conversion.

I’ll admit, the thought never crossed my mind, thinking that the ball would roll out one end or the other of the cylinder/magazine.

But looking at it, the little light in my head blinked on.  There are two 0-rings on this mag. By seating ball in the middle of the magazine, it is between the o-rings, and it is held as stable as any pellet.  Won’t shake out to the front or the back.



Captured one to be sure the ball was large enough to be well rifled (crappy photo, but the rifling is even and deep):



Thought I was done with the slow air cylinder I had been working on, but  was wrong.  Got it back out and modded it once again.

By adding a plastic shim, could get it to stop rotation 1/6 of a turn early.  This let me pug the .port I had been using and open one of the previously plugged ports.



 This time, did NOT enlarge the single functioning port, so it’s something close to .110”.

Same fill pressure as before, just a more strangled off single valve port. 

Ended up with 35 shots inside of 4% (shots between 637fps to 612fps). Assuming the #3 buck is the 23.5gr.  , that would be  something like 20.5 foot-pounds of energy.

Thinking at this point that if they shoot ½ way decent at short range, could find 4 mags worth of shots per fill pretty useful for off hand plinking practice.

Tried 9 shots @ 20 yards.  Bullseye is about 1.2” in diameter.  Had an orange stick-on bullseye on the target, but the slow shots sucked it though the bullseye and into the back stop (taking some of the black of the sticker covered bullseye with it). Just going so slow by 20 yards that it wanted to carry the orange sticker with it rather than just punch cleanly through it.



Which turns out to be pretty crappy for pellets at that range (3/4”), but  its got to be useful for something.

[TheBullsEye]

why are you useing buck shot? wont that wear your rifleing down ?

[Ribbonstone]

Why?

Suspect the buckshot is softer (more "pure") lead than Crosman pellets. Melted enough CP's to cast a .378" ball, then cast one from melted buckshot.  The one from buckshot weighed more.

Not happy with that, put each ball on a flat steel plate and dropped a weight from a known height.  Buckshot ball showed a larger dent.

So without a graduated hardness tester, can't give you numbers, but the indication is that the buckshot lead  is softer than CP's (And about the same hardness as a ball cast from JSB's.

[TheBullsEye]

So your thinking more balistics then

[Ribbonstone]

Nothing for firearms is cheap any more (or often in stock) but when you could get Hornady #3 buckshot, ended up costing about 1/2 as much as common .25 pellets (or about 1/3-1/4 as much as the better .25 pellets). Bought some to feed an old Apache MSP. Most airguns didn't shoot them well.

Other than the fact I had them on hand, can't think of a single thing to recommend them.  At least in a single shot, it's impossible to load them backwards as you run after a possum in the dark, but with a repeater even that odd advantage is lost.

[TheBullsEye]

Oh okay gotcha