Diana model 34 .177 heavy pellet use

[Mossonarock]

Almost all manufactures use the same size TP in a givin model of air gun regardless of caliber!

I guess I was paying attention to the only one who didn't. funny how something so common sense can't be assumed.
Once again life makes a fool of me.

[HectorMedina]

I've been watching this thread because it has been enlightening to me how well the contributors to this forum know what happens inside airguns. This forum is easily the most scientific/technically oriented forum I know. Thanks to all for contributing!

Now if I may, for  a short while, explain the manufacturer in question's perspective on the issue of the springs:
We believe springs should yield the power that the customer paid for.
As simple as that.
We will not use gimmicks to advertise power, we will not tell you something that we cannot deliver.

BUT, we ARE bound by the market forces.
Putting a $30 spring in a $200 gun would add $120 to the gun. Yes, that is the proportion under current market structure. And there is precious little ANY manufacturer can do about it.

So, we put in a spring that falls within the cost of material parameters, but that ALSO yields the power we said it would (or exceed it).
We play not only with the geometry of the spring, about which we have talked much, but we also push the limits of the material.
The result is a spring that we KNOW will not be a "life-time" spring for some shooters, but that will be a "life-time" spring for MOST shooters. And here we need to remember that, worldwide, out of ALL the spring-piston airguns bought only about 10-20% get continuous heavy usage.
MOST are bought, shot for a weekend or two, and then put away till the estate executor has to decide about it.
And so, a MEDIAN (statistical term), life of 4,500 shots is deemed acceptable.

Now, as with humans, not all springs are born the same, even with EXACTLY the same materials, geometry and heat treatment. So, SOME will last 10,000 shots (at 20 shots per month that is 42 years), and some will last 2,000 shots (at 20 shots per week, that is 2 years).

It can be mathematically demonstrated (using finite element analysis techniques), that those springs that are used intensively (as in 100 shots per weekly session) WILL fail "early" due to a phenomenon that happens INSIDE the steel that, although it is a bit more complex that the name implies, we'll call "work hardening".

Having said all that, I would concur with those of you that have expressed the idea that a spring in a spring-piston airgun is a consumable.
Depending on what EACH shooter wants, that consumable can be made to last many years, or yield top performance for a shorter while.

And, to ME, as a professional gunsmith, the over-riding criteria should be to achieve the accuracy and precision the shooter wants. No more, no less. If we go too much into the extremely high precision, we will punish yield, if we privilege too much yield, we will punish accuracy and life. BUT, if this "life" still falls within the parameters of what the users want, then it is acceptable.

So, if Wes/Ike wants a 1" at 50 yards and he gets that with the Baracudas, that is GREAT and he should keep on shooting them, KNOWING that if he shoots 100 pellets every week in intensive sessions, then his spring MAY last a couple of years. If he is contented with 1" at 30 yards, and he wants to keep on shooting the same spring for many years, then perhaps he would be wise to shoot something in the 8 grs. region.

Hardness of the pellet plays a more important role when you are talking about different materials (not so much as alloys, but as in lead vs. tin). The difference in the spring life in the case of the Premiers vs. JSB's is more a question of pellet DESIGN than material.
A tin pellet will be harder INITIALLY, so, it is good that tin pellets are lighter. In this sense, the GTO's in 0.22" are exceptional performers out to 30 yards, the restricted power transfer capability (expansion ratio) of the 0.177" cal. makes current tin pellets somewhat difficult to use effectively. But it can be done, just not in a standard OEM steel spring D34.

In the grand scheme of things, a spring is a spring, whether you pay $10 for the OEM replacement and DIY every couple of years, or you get a Pro to tune your gun, pay $200 and then having to replace that spring every 10 years; it is up to you to gauge how much added value that will have.

One thing we ALL need to understand: THERE ARE NO MAGIC SOLUTIONS. All the ads about "drop-in" steel spring kits making the gun 10 times better, smooother, quieter, less hold sensitive, etc, etc, etc, are just that : Advertisement/Propaganda.
You WILL pay one way or the other in different aspects. Spring life at rated power/ Power/ annual breakdown and re-lubing/ etc.
Luckily, there is a LOT of information about how different kits behave/perform, AND about how to do it.

If you do NOT enjoy SOME level of tinkering, write to a Pro and specify what are the important parameters he needs to put his attention on. He will then discuss with you all aspects of the job, and it will be up to you to decide to take the plunge or not.

Hope this helps, keep well and shoot straight!





HM

[triggerfest]

Exactly my thinking !

A spring is a consumable. And the whole idea behind shooting imho, is to hit where you are aiming at. Regardles of the type of pellet or pellet weight, you take the best option. Any care about the spring comes second.

[Madd Hatter]

Almost all manufactures use the same size TP in a givin model of air gun regardless of caliber!

I guess I was paying attention to the only one who didn't. funny how something so common sense can't be assumed.
Once again life makes a fool of me.

Join the club. If life didn't do that every once a a while and keep us humble, we would all be so full of our selves no one would want to be around us. 😁

[Madd Hatter]

I've been watching this thread because it has been enlightening to me how well the contributors to this forum know what happens inside airguns. This forum is easily the most scientific/technically oriented forum I know. Thanks to all for contributing!

Now if I may, for  a short while, explain the manufacturer in question's perspective on the issue of the springs:
We believe springs should yield the power that the customer paid for.
As simple as that.
We will not use gimmicks to advertise power, we will not tell you something that we cannot deliver.

BUT, we ARE bound by the market forces.
Putting a $30 spring in a $200 gun would add $120 to the gun. Yes, that is the proportion under current market structure. And there is precious little ANY manufacturer can do about it.

So, we put in a spring that falls within the cost of material parameters, but that ALSO yields the power we said it would (or exceed it).
We play not only with the geometry of the spring, about which we have talked much, but we also push the limits of the material.
The result is a spring that we KNOW will not be a "life-time" spring for some shooters, but that will be a "life-time" spring for MOST shooters. And here we need to remember that, worldwide, out of ALL the spring-piston airguns bought only about 10-20% get continuous heavy usage.
MOST are bought, shot for a weekend or two, and then put away till the estate executor has to decide about it.
And so, a MEDIAN (statistical term), life of 4,500 shots is deemed acceptable.

Now, as with humans, not all springs are born the same, even with EXACTLY the same materials, geometry and heat treatment. So, SOME will last 10,000 shots (at 20 shots per month that is 42 years), and some will last 2,000 shots (at 20 shots per week, that is 2 years).

It can be mathematically demonstrated (using finite element analysis techniques), that those springs that are used intensively (as in 100 shots per weekly session) WILL fail "early" due to a phenomenon that happens INSIDE the steel that, although it is a bit more complex that the name implies, we'll call "work hardening".

Having said all that, I would concur with those of you that have expressed the idea that a spring in a spring-piston airgun is a consumable.
Depending on what EACH shooter wants, that consumable can be made to last many years, or yield top performance for a shorter while.

And, to ME, as a professional gunsmith, the over-riding criteria should be to achieve the accuracy and precision the shooter wants. No more, no less. If we go too much into the extremely high precision, we will punish yield, if we privilege too much yield, we will punish accuracy and life. BUT, if this "life" still falls within the parameters of what the users want, then it is acceptable.

So, if Wes/Ike wants a 1" at 50 yards and he gets that with the Baracudas, that is GREAT and he should keep on shooting them, KNOWING that if he shoots 100 pellets every week in intensive sessions, then his spring MAY last a couple of years. If he is contented with 1" at 30 yards, and he wants to keep on shooting the same spring for many years, then perhaps he would be wise to shoot something in the 8 grs. region.

Hardness of the pellet plays a more important role when you are talking about different materials (not so much as alloys, but as in lead vs. tin). The difference in the spring life in the case of the Premiers vs. JSB's is more a question of pellet DESIGN than material.
A tin pellet will be harder INITIALLY, so, it is good that tin pellets are lighter. In this sense, the GTO's in 0.22" are exceptional performers out to 30 yards, the restricted power transfer capability (expansion ratio) of the 0.177" cal. makes current tin pellets somewhat difficult to use effectively. But it can be done, just not in a standard OEM steel spring D34.

In the grand scheme of things, a spring is a spring, whether you pay $10 for the OEM replacement and DIY every couple of years, or you get a Pro to tune your gun, pay $200 and then having to replace that spring every 10 years; it is up to you to gauge how much added value that will have.

One thing we ALL need to understand: THERE ARE NO MAGIC SOLUTIONS. All the ads about "drop-in" steel spring kits making the gun 10 times better, smooother, quieter, less hold sensitive, etc, etc, etc, are just that : Advertisement/Propaganda.
You WILL pay one way or the other in different aspects. Spring life at rated power/ Power/ annual breakdown and re-lubing/ etc.
Luckily, there is a LOT of information about how different kits behave/perform, AND about how to do it.

If you do NOT enjoy SOME level of tinkering, write to a Pro and specify what are the important parameters he needs to put his attention on. He will then discuss with you all aspects of the job, and it will be up to you to decide to take the plunge or not.

Hope this helps, keep well and shoot straight!





HM

Excellent info Hector as usual. Thanks! 🤔

[fwbsport]

Nced on HWs has the spring thing about where there is wear in springs and what heavies do "against the law" which is they SLOW the spring from unbinding and actually the wear of the spring inside is accelerated for the life of the spring.

So then a spring, which is the almost cheapest part of the Springer Air Rifle should should should be the "heart" of the rifle; and I am shocked a mere 10$ spring is put into a D54 or other and the cost to put a decent rifle together with a better spring.

I have forbad heavy pellets in my own tuned to 13 gr .20s by Hector because these 15gr .20s are doing weird things coming out of the barrel of my Hector Special D54 .20.

One out of three or five shots with the heavy pellets sounds as loud as a dry fire with the heavy pellet hitting the ground in front of the target at slingshot velocity!  Then I load another and it SLAMS into the target dead center.  Hector had mentioned the washers inside the muzzle brake may be harder to control the heavier pellet and certainly SOMETHING is happening with my own Diana.

This is part of the reason why I think modifying a rifle is a very tricky business where the hours of work (labor) on the rifle way outweigh the parts.

My solution to the problem with the Heavy .20 pellets is to see what the regular ones do when they get here (that Hector tuned the rifle to) and it will probably straighten out straightway according to Hector's prediction.

 

[HectorMedina]

@ John;

I just hope you haven't broken one of the baffles.  But, we'll see. I have given you some homework, so let's see if you find bits and pieces of pellets here and there.
It's  not so much that modifying a gun is tricky. It is that if you have a REALLY  "souped up" car, you cannot drive it like a family sedan.
And keeping to the car analogy, a 440 engine in a medium-light car will eat tires like nobody's business. So a spring, unless it is well matched to the power it needs to deliver AT THE RATE it needs to deliver it, will suffer.

TO the rest of the friends: Two of you asked me to go deeper into the geometry of the springs and into why intensive, continual, sessions fatigue the spring more rapidly and cause early breakage. So, I'll try to explain it as simply as possible, without "dumbing it down". Please bear with me.

We discussed the Geometry at length in this post:

https://www.ctcustomairguns.com/hectors-airgun-blog/lets-talk-springs-ii-geometry

But BEFORE that we had discussed the MATERIALS of springs, so let's go back 13 months and think about things:

And let's start with a simple, everyday analogy that if we cannot relate, it is not beyond anyone's means to repeat the experiment:

Anyone that has put soap concentrate into a dispenser bottle and added water knows that he has two options:
a) very slowly rotate the bottle to homogenize the solution
b) wait overnight/24 hours for the two parts to become one.

Now, you cannot do that with oil and water because they are immiscible (Sunday word that means they do not dissolve in each other).
The analogy comes because carbon is soluble in steel, silicon, chrome, vanadium, and cobalt are, just up to a point. Aluminum and copper are not.

So, if you have a steel alloy that has iron and carbon (obviously), plus Silicon, Chrome (these four make the steel a "Valve Steel", as we explained here:

https://www.ctcustomairguns.com/hectors-airgun-blog/lets-talk-springs

And some other elements are added, like Copper (to increase resistance to fatigue), Vanadium and Cobalt (To increase the elastic limit -tensile strength-), and sometimes, even after the alloy has been "cooked" at the proper temperature, MORE Vanadium and Manganese, we have a very peculiar compound.

These extremely sophisticated steels have a number of properties that cannot be replicated by any other material on earth (or in the stars):
They can resist wide deflections without exceeding their elastic limit (taking a set), they can  repeat the duty cycles MILLIONS of times as long as certain limits for stress and strain are followed, they will release back almost the same amount of energy they received EVERY time (lack of Hysteresis).

BUT, because they are a "concoction" of sorts, they are also subject to some rules:
1.- The non-alloyed (meaning not "fixated" into the crystalline geometry) elements (solutes) flow rather easily among the solvent (Iron+Carbon) molecules
2.- Heat affects the structure of the crystals, as well as of the "dough" by facilitating the flow of non-alloyed elements.
3.- The lighter the duty cycle, the more "complete" will be the energy delivered, the energy that is not returned stays INSIDE the steel and heats it up

And so, in airgun design, we are faced with requirements that very clearly NEED TO INFRINGE on these principles:
For example: Break barrels benefit from large pre-loads of relatively thin wire springs compressed almost to solid, as we demonstrated here:
https://www.ctcustomairguns.com/hectors-airgun-blog/the-gunsmiths-tune-part-14-full-power-walther-lgv
But by doing this we infringe on principle #3 which leads to the other two principles being infringed.

We can also infringe on principle #2 by shooting 100 pellets in an hour, and when we do this for days on end. We do not allow principle #1 to help us in re-establishing an equilibrium of alloyed and non-alloyed elements.

So, that is how by using ONE gun intensively, WE can create the conditions for a short spring life.

Could we design airguns that overcome this?  Yes, but no one would buy them, they would be too expensive. Just imagine a D54 going from $570 to $770. Would YOU buy an airgun because it assures you that the spring will last 10 years? Doubt it.

Can we use a different technology? Yes, but the alternative is not perfect. Gas springs are notoriously more inefficient because a big part of the cocking effort goes into defeating the friction that is caused by the relatively high pressures needed to seal properly the gas that is accumulating the  work/energy of the cocking stroke. Materials have advanced, and we ARE getting closer and closer.

It's just a question of time before we can use each material (air, gas, or steel) to it's best.

In the meantime, the REAL solution is to buy TWO identical guns, LOL!  and shoot one one day, letting them both rest one day, and then shooting the other, then repeating.

;-)

Keep well and shoot straight!






HM

[Frank in Fairfield]

Simple fix.
Have the engine (cars/trucks) makers make springs for airgun use.
Engine valve springs seem to last forever.
Lubrication is the key...

[nced]

I went to Pyramid Air shopping today and one of the representatives prompted a customer service chat. While we were chatting I asked him whether using heavy pellets such as the 10.65 gr Barracudas would damage my rifle and he emphatically said no. I've read a few posts on here that concerns me with his answer and was hoping to get some feedback from those of you who have actual experience with this.


Thanks

When I first sold a used .177 R9 to my brother decades ago he only used the 10.5 grain Crosman Premiers because they were a bit less affected by wind and they were "deep perpetrators" on tree squirrels. LOL, when cleaning squirrels after a hunt I noticed that he hit one grey at the hip and that CPH drove long ways through the squirrel to get embedded in the spine at the neck. The CPH was also very accurate at the 14.5fpe tun level of the gun as sold to him. He was shooting "3 shot powder burner groups" at that time but here is a target shot with two timy CPH groups shot at a single setting from his bench.........


We used Maccari Tarantula springs in our R9 at that time (.128 wire) and with my brother shooting about 10,000 shots per year (same as I did) the "T" springs would be replaced every other season. After several years my brother found that the flatter trajectory of the 7.9 grain CPL trumped the slightly better wind resistance of the CPH and switched to shooting the lighter pellets. I did replace one "T spring" the season after the switch do to the fact that he was previously shooting "heavies", but I never replaced another Maccari "T" spring before moving from West Virginia to North Carolina a few years later.

Anywhoo........I do have experience proving to my satisfaction that the claim made by "the spring man" at ARH that heavy pellets shorten spring life. 

[HectorMedina]

Simple fix.
Have the engine (cars/trucks) makers make springs for airgun use.
Engine valve springs seem to last forever.
Lubrication is the key...

Sorry, Frank, but no.

BIG difference is the duty cycle.

Motor valve springs are compressed maybe to  66-70% of their length For example: from 1.8" to 1.2" at max lift. In most cases, we compress airgun springs to 50% and less of their length. Exception are the short stroked guns.

This is the real difference. And even in Motor Engine Valves, the current trend in the performance side is to nest two, even three springs.

There is an outfit in Poland that does nested springs for airguns, and they had a "shop" in EBay, but I have not been able to get hold of them lately and the language barrier was too much to overcome for them.

If anyone speaks Polish good enough to exchange EMails of technical/commercial nature, I would be grateful for their help.

;-)

Keep well and shoot straight!





HM