Pellet Quality Control

[Goose]

I ran across this the other day while feeding the Quest.  Of all the pellets used over all the years, this is the first one that I've found like this.  These are from the nineties (I think).

Stay safe,

J~

[jimbo]

I got some H&N 20.6gn pellets the other day from Pyramid and just for kicks I went ahead and started weighing them. I don't think I found one that weighed 20.6, the weights were all over the place

[Doug Wall]

We do a lot of pellet tests at Hard Air Magazine, and one of the the things that we look for are deformed or defective pellets. They are very few and far between.  I started shooting in the 1960s, and pellets really weren’t very good back then.

[nced]

I ran across this the other day while feeding the Quest.  Of all the pellets used over all the years, this is the first one that I've found like this.  These are from the nineties (I think).

Stay safe,

J~

A few years ago I ran into very poor QC from a pellet manufacturer with rather good reports. I ordered and received 8 tins of supposedly 4.52mm JSB Exacts and found those pellets had extreme size variations. This was first noticed by simply loading them into the leade of my .177 R9 with a few fitting snug but most very loose. At the first field target match I used those pellets I had two "dry fires" and would have had three if I didn't notice the pellet flipping out of th eR9 leade when re-latching the barrel after cocking. I then decided to measure those Exacts and this was the result........

I ended up selling the sorted Exacts and never ordered any more. LOL...I had one tin of supposedly 4.50mm exacts and eight tins of supposedly 4.52mm exacts and some pellets from the 4.50mm tin were larger than those from the 4.52mm tins and visa versa!

I've also had QC issues with the die lot marked and dated 7.9 grain Crosman Premiers with a few pellets similar to the one on the left in this pic..........
 

Decades ago I bought a case of die lot marked and dated boxed CPLs and the whole case had this "defect"............

I was going to return them to Crosman but decided to at least test their accuracy. Well, to my surprise they were as accurate as the best die lot marked pellets so I had my brother test them with his R9 and he had the same result. Well, noting that for some reason the boxes those CPLs were packed in had one part of the date stamp upside down relative to the rest of the stamp. That prompted my brother and I to pool out money, contact the pellet vendor, then bought every box of CPLs the vendor had with the "weird upside down date stamp". We received 4 complete cases (16 boxes) from the vendor and those pellets were saved for only hunter class field target
matches and squirrel hunting.

[Goose]

Good responses.  I've noted that QC has been very good over the years, although I have some current production Gamo pellets that really vary in diameter. 

The original Crosman Premiers were amazing, Ed!  Good on ya for grabbing those while you could.  They were the only pellets that the QB77  and QB20 liked back in the nineties. 

Pellets really have come a long way, Doug.  The ones I started with back in the mid-seventies (Sheridan 5mm pellets aside) left a lot to be desired.

Cheers,

J~

[Toxylon]

Tins of Gamo pellets have seriously birth defected pellets (equal to the Copperhead in the OP) in them as a rule. Even the normal looking pellets in them have such a range in size that the pellet fit and performance is all over the map.

All the JSB's I've Gaged have been very consistent, although not always of the exact (heh) diameter stated in the tin.

[buellm2]

Here's a different quality control issue.   I bought maybe 10 or more tins of .177 Gamo Super Points.   Every tin has some wadcutters mixed in.  Could that be the reason they were so cheap?  It doesn't really matter since there's no confusing the two types of pellets.

[Tater]

Moved to the Pellets Gate.

[gamo2hammerli]

One time I had a tin of Crosman Premier Hollow Points...about 40 pellets were so much smaller, they fell out of the muzzle!!!  This is less than 10 years ago.  I posted a photo here of them...don't know if I still have that photo in the computer.

[rsterne]

I also had a tin of Crosman Premiers year ago that had about 10% of them much smaller (either .177 or .20 cal) that just fell through the .22 cal barrel.... The rest shot fine!....

Bob