Hacking the Crosman Vigilante

[Rob M]

awesome job !

[George Schmermund]

After looking at some more pushed pellets using a different type of microscope and revisiting the earlier micro-photographs of barrel cross sections I've come to see the potential value of barrel lapping as described previously by Scot Laughlin (classicalgas). I'm not a full convert yet, but I am willing to rearrange my thinking when I see new and useful information come out of my wandering experiments.

[George Schmermund]

It was an awakening for me to spend an evening using the stereo inspection microscope to view the pellets that I've been using . I've been too focused (pun) on all aspects of barrel treatments and have spent little or no time considering pellets. After looking closely at a collection of Crosman pellets that I've been using it became very clear that I've hit a wall as far as grouping performance is concerned. The closer look showed the horror of my situation. I may have made improvements in the barrels I'm working with, but any more improvements won't be demonstrable with cheap pellets.

I finally broke down and bought an array of RWS wadcutter pellets and discovered that there's a whole new world out there. I'll readily confess that it's a tyro's mistake to use garden variety pellets when you're new to airguns. I'm now reformed. I'll begin marching forward using only time proven superior pellets to up my game here. There is new hope for further improvements using a $50 Vigilante as the foundation for constructing the custom carbine that I've been fantasizing about.

I also realize that nothing really heroic is going to come from all of my experimental adventures, but in the end I'll have a nifty lightweight carbine that will serve me well in short distance shooting at targets and vermin. I'll also have learned far more about CO2 pellet guns than I thought I would at the start of all this. The journey continues.

More to come!

[George Schmermund]

After showing my neighbor the first Vigilante I bought last year he decided to get one. I was over at his house this weekend and we did some target shooting in his back yard. We both noticed that his pistol was acting unusual so we started to inspect it up close. One of the first things that we noticed was that the pellet clip, when rotated, didn't make the usual clicking sound as the detent cylinder passed over the pellet holes in the clip. A closer look from the side of the pistol, when held up to the light, showed that the clip had to move further forward to engage the breech of the barrel then when it was new.

It turned out that the barrel was pushed forward enough to almost disengage the detent cylinder from the clip when the pistol was fired. That accounted for the loss of power and the obvious excess of CO2 leaking out from the sides of the gun. When the barrel was removed and inspected it could be seen that the shoulder at the muzzle end was not square to the barrel. The factory machining was poor, as expected, and it was clear that the cutting tool used was not set properly to the work. The effect was to have a wedge shaped shoulder pressing against the barrel stop at the end of the barrel housing.

Since I've made new and longer barrels for my Vigilantes the barrel stop is no longer part of the housing. I had not anticipated that this could be a problem down the road for a well used and unaltered pistol. To see if his gun was an anomaly I decided to inspect the 3 original factory barrels that were collecting on the bench. The photos clearly show that all 3 of them have tapers cut into the barrel at the shoulder. After some period of use the taper will deform the plastic. Eventually this insidious problem of the barrel moving forward will show up, to a more or less extent, in all of these guns that are tapered.

If you're a Vigilante owner it would be worthwhile to inspect your gun for barrel creep.

[George Schmermund]

Maybe most Vigilante owners know this already, but It bears repeating for those who might not. I've discovered that a double ended Q-Tip can be encouraged to fit into a .177 barrel with the help of a kabob stick or the like and then fired through with the gun's powerplant. Aim it into a waste basket or some other safe catching arrangement. They come out very fast. It's easy to see the cleaning effect when you inspect the two tips.

[AmBraCol]

I usually snip the q-tip and just use one end at a time.  A couple drops of appropriate cleaner and through the barrel it goes.  The next few go dry.  Works great.  Don't have a Vigilante, but have used this method in various of my .177 caliber guns.

[George Schmermund]

The new weaver rail needed to be fit tested, so I put together another 10" barrel gun to see how it would look along with the new housing extension.  This housing is designed to protect the crown if the gun is dropped or bumped. I like it better than the exposed muzzle on the earlier builds.

[AmBraCol]

Does this housing put the barrel under tension (like the old powder burning Dan Wessons did)?

[Rob M]

that looks awesome.. nice upgrade to the gun just on looks alone

[George Schmermund]

Paul - The barrel is not under any intentional tension.

Rob - Thanks for the approval on the new upgrade. I'm going to retire the older design that's on eBay and replace it with this new barrel housing upgrade, though the weaver rail won't be offered yet.

Also, thank you to the member that gave this thread a rating. I have no ideas as to how that works or why it exists, but I'll take it as a positive sign about the experiments!

[George Schmermund]

 Since I have become totally distracted with improving the muzzles on longer barrels lately, I hadn't paid much attention to the clips. With my new awakening concerning pellet quality more time is being spent looking at them under magnification. Doing some pellet pushing through just the clip was instructive. It turns out that the pellets get mauled before they even reach the forcing cone at the breech. The main problem is the galling left by the ribs that are in the clip chambers.

It was mentioned by Scot L  early on in this thread  that taper reaming the pellet clips was useful. To that end I've now used various drill sizes to reduce the effects left by these ribs. It certainly reduced the severity of the damage to the pellets when they are visually examined, but I haven't done any shooting tests yet. To do a better job on the cylinders I ordered a .177 - .176 step reamer. It's a stubby aircraft type and looks to be ideal for this application. It should arrive in the mail today. If so, I'll get busy with it and see what level of improvement if can make.

I'll take some pictures and report on what the results are.

[George Schmermund]

The step reamer arrived in the mail today. I had said that the step was .177" - 176". Actually it's .178" - 176". The .178" bore that is left after reaming seems to be an excellent fit for the RWS Basic Line wadcutters pellets. The skirts on these pellets all measure close to .185". The skirts on the Crosman Competition wadcutters runs from ~.176" to ~.182". I can see where the cylinder ribs would be a way to keep poorly made pellets in the clip. I'll do some shooting tomorrow and see what the new clips do for velocity and accuracy.

The photos show the reamer and the handle that I've mounted it into.

[Rob M]

looks perfect... that's a tiny reamer @

[George Schmermund]

Measuring the head diameter on pellets can be tricky. Even if you use one of the commercially available sizers there can be questions about whether the head is really round or not. Putting the pellets into an assortment of precision holes won't necessarily give you good information on a distorted head. Before setting up the laser micrometer (a nontrivial project) I decided to cobble together a simple test method.

Since I can't seem to throw out anything I've accumulated a lot of stuff that can be repurposed for doing experiments. What came out of the junk pile this time is a platen from an old HP scanner. Any clean, flat, and smooth surface can be used, of course. The important part for making reliable measurements is a good digital caliper. It should read down to 0.0005" or 10 microns. It should have a thumb wheel for adjustment because the adjusting action needs to be very smooth with a minimum of stiction.

The caliper is placed onto the cleaned glass and a spacer is placed under it at the end of the scale. The spacer is used to keep the caliper parallel to the face of the glass without rocking. This arrangement works well because the measuring jaws are raised above the glass far enough for the jaws to touch only one end of the pellet. Since I'm now using wadcutters exclusively the pellets can be inverted and measured without any wobble. With the Jaws slightly open and the pellet remaining against the fixed jaw it can be rotated by the jaw for another measurement around the circumference.

It will take some practice to get the feel for making the measurements, but when you get there you'll find that it can be done quickly and with considerably less force than a micrometer needs. Also, there is no fumbling with trying to hold the pellet square while rotating the spindle. Repeatability on the same pellet is when you've arrived.

The photos illustrate the measuring arrangement.

 

[George Schmermund]

After spending a lot of time working on the Vigilante and doing upgrades using the Crosman 1077 barrels it seemed logical to buy a 1077 carbine in its original form and see how it performs and what can be done with it as far as improvements.

Even just out of the box the Vigilante was impressive. I questioned how anyone could manufacture an airgun revolver this nice and sell it for only $50. Now that I've got a 1077 I have to ask myself how anyone could manufacture an airgun like this and get even $20 for It. I've spent the afternoon with my new nemesis, the 1077, and hope that I've got enough beer in the refrigerator to sooth my wounds and see me through this mega-disappointment tonight.

[Rob M]

very cool on the measurement set up.. Id imagine an air gauge would be more accurate, they are no longer made or extremely expensive.. another idea would be 2 precision ground plates ( think mill vise  parallel set ) stood parallel in a fixture atop a surface plate  that only clears .1770 and another next to it that clears whatever other size,.
the 1077 is a mess, I had one for 6 months , thought there was potential there, but the trigger killed all my ideas.. There is also an issue with the gas egress from the tube adapter to the valve, and there limits what can be fed to the valve per shot

[WhatUPSbox?]

If you go with the pair of parallels approach, they could be set up wedged at .001 per inch or so, pellet lateral position would indicate size

[George Schmermund]

Now that the muzzle crown and choke treatments are working out so well it seemed reasonable to look a little deeper into the barrels again. The last time I looked it was with the cross sections of 1" slices of the original 6" factory barrels. This time I'm looking down the whole barrel with the notion that any improvements can be tested directly by just putting the barrel back into the gun and doing some shooting.

Since I can't see very far into the muzzle or breech with the microscopes or just the camera lens without destroying the barrel I've decided to utilize the Storz/Hopkins borescope to get a better look. Just looking down the bore with the unaided eye proved to be quite deceptive. There are 10 shiny swirls and as many dark, mostly non-reflecting swirls evenly spaced down the barrel.

Way back when I was doing the sections and looking at them with a microscope the shiny parts of the rifling were identified as the lands. It's actually the opposite. If you go back and look at the photos from then you'll see the parts of the rifling that I referred to as "worms" are actually the face of the LANDS! How embarrassing! There's no fool like an old fool.

Anyway, my apologies for the misinformation. I stand corrected and am ready to move on. The borescope will now turn into an excellent tool for evaluating the method that I've chosen to deal with the refacing of the lands. It will be somewhat of an offbeat method of lapping then what is conventional, but that's what keeps me interested in all of this stuff.

[George Schmermund]

Most of the shooting that I do is from a vise. I'm interested in the effects of barrel treatments so the gun must be taken from the vise to change barrels. The same thing goes for installing and aligning the different optics. I usually just sight down the bore to be sure that I can at least get on the paper. The carbines are generally more awkward than the pistols using this method.

I finally broke down and bought a laser bore sighter from eBay. The one that I chose is a generic one from china, though some of these are branded. I try to get info about stuff by reading reviews on sites like Amazon. The reviews that were available for this device seemed to make this purchase a bit of a crapshoot, but for less than $20 I was willing to take my chances.

It finally arrived a couple of days ago and I got to play with it this weekend. As reported in the reviews it has some really crummy adjustable adapters and I can see where many owners had plenty of room to complain. The sighter that I ordered was for a bore range from .22 up to much larger calibers. My usage would be mostly .177, so I knew that I'd have to make my own arrangements for stabilizing the bore alignment.

My solution was to bore out a couple of wadcutter pellets on the lathe and use them with one of the provided screws to fashion a .177 adapter. The rifling in the barrel helps to keeps the pellets concentric with the bore. They work far better than the rubber ones that come in the kit. Once the pointer is installed into the bore it can be rotated to check the axial alignment. There were several complaints that the alignment was poor and when the laser is rotated it describes a circle of various diameters on the target. Mine was no exception.

There is a hex wrench included with the kit and it allows you to adjust the position of the laser on the target. The nice thing about the adjustment screws is that there are 4 apposing set screws that adjust the alignment. The bad thing is that there is only one wrench to work with. The alignment becomes virtually impossible with just one wrench because when you loosen the screws the laser can loose contact from the battery circuit. This contributes to more than one problem.

Anyone who has tried to center work in an independent 4 jaw lathe chuck using only one chuck key knows what I'm talking about. The solution is to get a second hex wrench and use it to allow the simultaneous adjustment of apposing screws by turning one in and the other out while keeping light pressure on both of them.  This process will keep the laser in electrical contact at all times and allow the dot on the target to rotate in smaller and small circles as you adjust its position. Replacing the supplied rubber pieces with a pellet(s) that fit the bore makes this an excellent instrument for bore sighting. I'm very pleased with the outcome.

As an aside, the complaints of very short battery life may be that the adjustment screws, as sent from the factory, are not snug enough to give reliable electrical contact with the laser.

[WhatUPSbox?]

George,
It would be interesting, when you get the data, to see how the bore sighter  compares to pellets on target, at least in the horizontal axis.