A beginners guide to airgun ownership, shooting and accuracy

[One-Shot]

Bit late getting in on the thread, but wanted to acknowledge the good information provided.
Very good read.

[ThomasT]

Thank you for this article, I learned some very important new things about airguns which will help me down the road.

Have a great day,
ThomasT

[Airgun_Capital]

Excellent to know. It's like you condensed years of experience into a few paragraphs!

[Methuselah]

A great thread started in 2013! I probably read it in 2015 when I  got my 1st airgun, and maybe it wasn't a sticky back then, so it was just one (very good) source of information...

I've recently rekindled my interests in airguns and like most, the "first order of business" is accuracy. No point in shooting a gun that can't hit what you're aiming at,  right?

So to get to the point, which is cleaning, which really is also accuracy, you have new, and you have used. For new, yeah, that's here, pretty much 100%. Used OTOH, maybe it's off topic (to be fair, though the OP mentioned it as accuracy fall-off).

My tidbit to add, though not particularly Earth shattering, is pulling monofilament, plus possibly patch through moderator, that it or embedded particulate on it could damage the rifling, can be moderated by inserting a short segment of drinking straw in the muzzle to pull past. Not that I knew or remembered this, but after reading this thread, I recalled seeing some straws with my gun cleaning supplies. The light bulb came on why they are there  

Tidbit #2, kinda off-topic, is trying different pellets and the suggestion of a sampler. Well, this hits home for me bc I have a few with no "assigned" favorite pellet. So, the tidbit is you can't necessarily pick 10 new pellets out, fire them and say yeah or nay. It may take 3 to 5 to "settle in", and some say many more than that.

Relevancy is that cleaning between attempts with different pellets while looking for your new (or used) guns favorite may speed up the settling in process.

I'm going through this now and believe it only took one round for me to work past that settling in. Maybe not though, and rounds that didn't group actually needed the barrel cleaning, or just more rounds fired? I think that's an interesting question  . Reckon I'd just have to do more shooting to know (or have more experience?).

I've found one pellet that goups in my newly acquired well-used gun. After that I was thinking about cleaning the barrel. This thread makes me wonder if cleaning before I started trying different pellets was called for...

Great original posting, very good thread with lots of contributing information. Glad it's a sticky!

[Back_Roads]

 Cleaning between different pellets is a good idea, but usually takes 10 seasoning shots or more, I find just shooting 10 of the next pellet to test, then running the test works about the same in most cases.