Show your Daisy 880's

[rangerjoel]

Come on… you know you have one of these hiding in your collection or may have owned one at one time before you learned about Beeman. Tell us all about your 880.


I first saw the Daisy 880 when I spent the day with another family from our church. Their son was much older than me and to find an activity that we could both do together, his mother suggested that I bring my BB gun with me.
Until then, I thought my Daisy 499 was capable of killing bears but I was too soon learn what real power was! As a young boy, even I could tell from the graceful lines and streamlined pump handle that this rifle was something very different and more powerful than my lever action. Seeing that rifle shoot was eye opener to me and I knew that I had to have one! It would be years before it happened, but the 880 was the first BB gun I bought with my own money.


There are four variants that I know of. One has a built up sheet metal pump handle with the loop made of pot metal and attached by a screw.

It also has a metal receiver and a smoothed boar. As the example you see below. Later models replaced the built up sheet metal pump handle with a pot metal casting.

 It too had a metal receiver and a rifled barrel. The third variant had an injection molded pump handle that was more flexible and felt kind of flimsy when putting in ten pumps. It still had the metal receiver though.

The latest variant has a plastic pump handle, and plastic receiver and feels more like a toy that the original version.

The rifle in this post is one of the first variants and is in very rough shape with rust and a damaged sheet metal barrel shroud.


It pumps well but because it has a smoothed barrel, the accuracy is terrible. At an estimated $30.00 blue book value, I have no qualms about refinishing it and adding a rifled barrel. But that post will be for a later day over in the shop talk forum.

[bobri]

I got my first 880 back in the mid 70's.  It was my third BB gun and I traded my bike for it.  I wanted to buy one of these for my first BB gun really bad, but I lost the money for it on the way to the store to get it.  Somehow the $30 fell out of my pants pocket while my friend and I rode on our bikes to the store a few miles away.  Not a good experience :O  I think this was the first model you described.  It had the metal handle and receiver and no rifled barrel.  Nice paint job, and stock had a hand wiped finish to make the wood grain look more real.  I can't remember what I did with it.  Back then it seemed a fancy gun, now these seem just a toy to me.

A couple of year ago I saw a like new used one at the CT airgun show and bought it for a nice price.  It's the one with the plastic pump handle and metal receiver.  I still haven't shot it though, except a few dry fires to make sure it works.  Just fired it a couple of times now and it still had the air from the couple of pumps I put in for storage a couple of year ago.  I'll have to go shoot it and see what it can do.  I think it has a rifled barrel, not sure, rifling is very shallow if it's there at all.  Sorry I don't have a picture of it, but it looks basically just like the one in you picture.

[rangerjoel]

When I had my 880, I thought that it was the pinnacle of air gun shooting refinement. Until one day one of our wealthier neighbors, the kind that owned German motorcycles and went sailing for the weekend showed me a Beeman catalogue and his FWB 124. It was then that I realized that I was worshiping a false god. The world was a much larger place and there was more in it than just Daisy! I saved for over two years to get my Beeman R-10 (on scratch and dent sale from the Beeman shop in Santa Rosa) which was one of the most powerful air rifles that they imported at the time. Shadily, I got it at a time in my life where things like collage, girls and motorcycles became more interesting and sold the R-10. Fifteen years later, I’m back in the hobby and probably will never own an R-10 again, I’m just as happy with my Chinese made B-26