Don't know if anyone mentioned the main difference between the pellets last time . The cardboard boxed ones are single batch from a single die , the big printed number on the bottom of the box. The tinned ones are mixed batch from multiple machines , quite often with dies that are past their best. Back in the day we used to try the different die numbers in our guns to find the best die , but even back then there were some dies that were better than others overall.
Spot on. I used prems in 7.9, 10.5, and 14.3 from when they were introduced about '93 and they gave a significant edge from other pellets at the time. As the dies wore in time ,accuracy went out the window as. Iirc the founding person ic had left the company and qc duly suffered. In my experience best accuracy is from the tin, they either work or they don't, and don't rattle the tin about.
It's funny but as soon as you mentioned the words 'dimple finish' (1.10) it reminded me of a thought I've always had about golf balls. Apparently without the dimples they do not fly straight, hence the reason for being there. Just a thought 🤔
I am so glad to see someone else doing unique testing and saying… WTF how could that be. Really appreciate all your time and effort in posting your videos.
It's funny really mate. The more I learn,the more I realised how little i knew😆 Some things seem to completely defy logic and really throw a curve ball at times .
Since I retired I have had more time to experiment with pellets. Here's my two-penneth (JSB Exact and RWS Meisterkugeln): 1. Washing pellets. Nicer to handle but little difference in performance. 2. Weighing pellets. Definitely an improvement in consistency but probably only worth it for competition use as it is so time-consuming. 3. Pellet-sizing. Definitely an improvement in my TX200 (springer). Not so sure about my S400 (PCP) as the pellet-loading probe pushes the pellet into the breech which will inevitably have some sizing action. Fun hobby, isn't it? 😀
I bought last year an "used" HW97 and an almost full cardboard 7,9gr of those Crosman pellets came with it. The HW97 was in new condition and maybe 100 pellets from that 1250 carboard box where shot with that rifle. I was very impressed how accurate those pellets where, and they had all a the same tight fit in the barrel. They shot also wel from my other HW's and even my air pistols. Cheers!
I've tried all sorts of tricks over the decades form lubing to harsh language (tend to use harsh lenguage the most). I'm a fiddler. I will use pellets with slightly bent skirts as it doesn't seem to make any difference in my rifles. I do bin ones with knackered heads though. I used to roll them, wash them, lube them, weigh them, inspect under a mag, sonicate them, pray, scream, beg and tickle their tummies. The best ones were for competitions and the others for plinking. Nearly every shot I'd miss was due to mis-judging the range or the blooming wind, it was never my fault LOL. Nowadays I do nowt as I've never found anything made any significant difference worth the effort for semi serious shooting. If you're into competitions then weighing is probably worth the effort and cleaning if you've got a really grotty batch. I rarely clean my barrels unless it's a full strip down or something major happens with grouping. I shoot a HW98 and an S400 using H+N FTT 4.52 sub 12. FWIW.
I've done a lot of rock polishing. I have both roller type tumbling devices and a vibratory tumbler. It vibrates at a high frequency but doesn't roll or tumble. Rocks are always polished with some kind of medium such as ceramic shapes, with water, and a fine abrasive. The water and media reduce the shock on the rocks and provide a lot of surface area to smooth the surfaces. A short vibratory tumble with a very fine polish might be perfect to smooth pellets without shrinking them much. You can open the vibratory tumblers and look at the pellets as they vibrate so you could easily monitor your progress.
I hope that I'm mistaken, but I don't think you'll have much luck with sorting the Crosmans after tumbling. I have used a Pelletgage to measure the head size on these several times in the past. Along the way I discovered that the pellets could be forced through one hole with a little extra force from my fingertip and from that point it could be fitted through several smaller holes, one after the other, and eventually would find its true "No Go" hole. I learned that I was doing essentially the same thing that you're doing, removing the flash from the pellet's seams, but I was shaving it off gradually with the Pelletgage's holes instead of tumbling them off. I got the same results that you are getting for all my efforts. The darn things will group 6,7,or8 in a single hole, but the remainder of the 10 shots would be wide and in unpredictable directions, sometimes in a sub-group and sometimes scattered. That is the same result that I get with the unaltered pellets. After sorting them by head size, I further sorted them by weight within each head size. I shot them from various guns, always indoors and with the guns clamped in a vice to take my skills out of the equation. Still no joy. I think there are voids in the lead or maybe skirts that are canted slightly. I've never measured them for consistent length, so that could be the trick. Good luck to you and I'll definitely be following your efforts. BTW, It's been my experience that these pellets foul badly when shot much over 860 fps. I think it's because of the antimony content. Harder than pure lead and less self-lubricating.
There is a German youtuber who coaches international 10m shooters. He did a test with damaged pellets to see how it influenced the grouping and the result was that damage had almost no effect. He damaged them pretty hard using a pair of pliers.
Absolutely, I've done plenty of testing on skirt damage,a few vids on here aswell. Head damage or eccentricity is not great but skirt damage really makes very little difference 😉
Maybe try Rumbling the pellets along with some small, Wet, plastic beads - or the Mineralised beads that come in Some showerheads?? That would reduce the Contacting of the pellets AND Polish them better. (Maybe) Rumbling Usually involves using some other, wet, deburring/polishing medium, rather than just the parts you want to process. (In this case - pellets & beads + Water) Maybe also add a squidge of Toothpaste?? Rumbling, Dry, metal on metal is Never a good Idea!!
Correct, when I worked in a factory pressing shop several years back, the parts would go in to a large container and be mixed with rounded beads of a sort, chuck in little bit of lube and rotate it for about 30 mins to remove the burrs.
Another theory that I've entertained, but don't know how to test, involves skirt diameter along with head diameter. If the heads were all exactly 4.50, but the skirts varied from 4.45 to 4.57, depending on the land and grove dimensions of the barrel, you could load the pellet into the breech on a slight slant rather than with the skirt directly behind the head and centered on the same axis. A thin skirted pellet or a long skirted pellet might self correct for this better (or worse) than a thick skirted pellet or a long skirted pellet. The malleability of pure soft lead vs. lead antimony alloys make also make a difference. Slugs would be able to self center better than diablos because of the longer area of engagement with the rifling and the fact that they are solid. A pellet with a skirt that is the identical diameter at both head and skirt that engaged the rifling at the proper depth should be the best pellet for that barrel, ti my way of thinking. What say you?
With a soft material like lead, tumbling or vibratory tumbling might well just compact and smooth pellets without removing much material. They might get smaller by compressing and rounding the edges more than removing material. Weighing before and after would tell the tale.
I have rumbled pellets with a medium ( glas beads) to take of the sharp edges and the burs. Sorted by weight. And I picked up a bit of accuracy. Did this with the 10.34 JSB and the 10.69 H&N.
I remember trying all of this kind of stuff with Accupels and a few others years ago to get them accurate enough to hunt with. Then my local gun shop put me on to JSB exacts. Never before had I been able to open a tin of pellets and stack them on top of eachother at 30 meters before. I've used nothing but JSB since as they just work without any need for playing around with them. I used to have to weigh each pellet from a tin and put them into batches and reshape or discard the deformed ones before with other brands, now I just load up my mags and get to work.
I've tried tumbling JSBs with both corn cobb and walnut shells, with and without added wax. With no wax, I got a dull finish; likely took off the outer coating on pellets. Got much lower carbon buildup in barrel; i.e., patches after 50 shots did not show the black material, BUT I saw small lead flakes on the patches and got some fliers. With wax in the tumbler with the medium, I did not get much different results than untumbled pellets.
Interesting experiment. The varied velocity will be the inconsistent skirt size and air passing over the skirt at different rates before they expand. Try rumbling or polishing in a round container
seems like the go-pro is either overheating or when you hit the go-pro you caused some internal damge through impact and somehow damaged the SD-card reader,
Interesting, I have seen rumbling being used to remove flashing, actually on rubber grommets, but first I have heard of it being used on air gun pellets. I would have though that the pellets would need washing afterwards at the very least. It probably provides a good base for washing and sizing afterwards, but won't do too much on its own. I thought the pellet skirt expands with the air slug behind it and gives the seal, so too small a pellet would loose power and potentially become unstable in flight if the skirt does seal evenly in the barrel. I guess flashing on one side of the pellet would have a similar effect. You may not be mad, but it is certainly sending me mad thinking about it!
It's an absolute wormhole mate... I'm going to revisit it all with a slightly more scientific approach and measure before and after timed rumblings to see what undersizes I can yield. The 9015 particularly runs far better with the close but looser fitting pellets. When they are tight it's actually possible to end up seating them in the barrel with a bit of yaw. Not ideal 😉
Ok fella. Hope you dont mind but i need to ask a question. I bought a kral hi-cap, i know not the best but money is money. I while ago i got a pellet jammed in barrel, about 20% down from muzzle. I think the barrel is choked. Ive never had much luck with it but since i cleared the barrel its not that accurate. But i cant seem to get any kind of decent groups. Now the rub. Have i buggered the barrel and is there any way i can get it checked without costing too much as im on the sick. Thanx for any advice. Great channel by the way
Is it possible you took the lube off them by tumbling? Maybe your first group did so well because barrel was lubed from previously shooting JSB's? I say this because my first few Premier shots do well and I mostly shoot JSBs. So i lube Premiers and they shhot better.
again a very fun experiment :). maybe use a polish media in the tumbler like Brass Polishing Walnut Media. and use something like the SR737 Tumbler nano and do a 1000 at a time :)
That sounds expensive mate 😆 The main reason for using no media was so I didn't have to wash and re lube them after. I have since done some more and washed them, there's alot less swarfe than I imagined. Especially compared to out the box Prems(they are quite grotty out the box)
You mentioned that the 9015 seems to like a smaller diameter pellet and rumbling will definitely make a pellet smaller, the early shots showed promise, next time if you sized them after rumbling there might be more consistency with a given size. I've not had great results with Crosman pellets myself. What media are you rumbling the pellets in?
There was no media. Just the pellets themselves. As far as I can tell that's the better option. I'm not a fan of sizing as such,it's actually alot harder to do it accurately than I imagined. But I do like measuring and batching by natural size and weight. There's plenty more vids to come in time I'll cover all the nerdy stuff in a bit more detail 😉
Go-Pro's not what they used to be. QC dropped through the floor & overheating issues. The Insta360 Ace Pro or DJI Osmo Action 4 are very good. Mate of mine uses the DJI & swears by it.
can u use a sonic jewels cleaner?? for pellets or is it to harsh.oh and insta360 camera people are dropping Go Pro for insta360 people say go pros the new ones are overheating and are not so good now
Don't know if anyone mentioned the main difference between the pellets last time .
The cardboard boxed ones are single batch from a single die , the big printed number on the bottom of the box.
The tinned ones are mixed batch from multiple machines , quite often with dies that are past their best.
Back in the day we used to try the different die numbers in our guns to find the best die , but even back then there were some dies that were better than others overall.
Spot on. I used prems in 7.9, 10.5, and 14.3 from when they were introduced about '93 and they gave a significant edge from other pellets at the time. As the dies wore in time ,accuracy went out the window as. Iirc the founding person ic had left the company and qc duly suffered.
In my experience best accuracy is from the tin, they either work or they don't, and don't rattle the tin about.
It's funny but as soon as you mentioned the words 'dimple finish' (1.10) it reminded me of a thought I've always had about golf balls. Apparently without the dimples they do not fly straight, hence the reason for being there. Just a thought 🤔
I am so glad to see someone else doing unique testing and saying… WTF how could that be. Really appreciate all your time and effort in posting your videos.
It's funny really mate. The more I learn,the more I realised how little i knew😆
Some things seem to completely defy logic and really throw a curve ball at times
.
It’s like the Airgun Gods and saying hold my beer and watch this
Do you make stocks for Red Wolf’s?
Since I retired I have had more time to experiment with pellets. Here's my two-penneth (JSB Exact and RWS Meisterkugeln):
1. Washing pellets. Nicer to handle but little difference in performance.
2. Weighing pellets. Definitely an improvement in consistency but probably only worth it for competition use as it is so time-consuming.
3. Pellet-sizing. Definitely an improvement in my TX200 (springer). Not so sure about my S400 (PCP) as the pellet-loading probe pushes the pellet into the breech which will inevitably have some sizing action.
Fun hobby, isn't it? 😀
I bought last year an "used" HW97 and an almost full cardboard 7,9gr of those Crosman pellets came with it. The HW97 was in new condition and maybe 100 pellets from that 1250 carboard box where shot with that rifle. I was very impressed how accurate those pellets where, and they had all a the same tight fit in the barrel. They shot also wel from my other HW's and even my air pistols. Cheers!
I've tried all sorts of tricks over the decades form lubing to harsh language (tend to use harsh lenguage the most). I'm a fiddler. I will use pellets with slightly bent skirts as it doesn't seem to make any difference in my rifles. I do bin ones with knackered heads though.
I used to roll them, wash them, lube them, weigh them, inspect under a mag, sonicate them, pray, scream, beg and tickle their tummies. The best ones were for competitions and the others for plinking.
Nearly every shot I'd miss was due to mis-judging the range or the blooming wind, it was never my fault LOL.
Nowadays I do nowt as I've never found anything made any significant difference worth the effort for semi serious shooting.
If you're into competitions then weighing is probably worth the effort and cleaning if you've got a really grotty batch.
I rarely clean my barrels unless it's a full strip down or something major happens with grouping.
I shoot a HW98 and an S400 using H+N FTT 4.52 sub 12. FWIW.
I've done a lot of rock polishing. I have both roller type tumbling devices and a vibratory tumbler. It vibrates at a high frequency but doesn't roll or tumble. Rocks are always polished with some kind of medium such as ceramic shapes, with water, and a fine abrasive. The water and media reduce the shock on the rocks and provide a lot of surface area to smooth the surfaces. A short vibratory tumble with a very fine polish might be perfect to smooth pellets without shrinking them much. You can open the vibratory tumblers and look at the pellets as they vibrate so you could easily monitor your progress.
I hope that I'm mistaken, but I don't think you'll have much luck with sorting the Crosmans after tumbling. I have used a Pelletgage to measure the head size on these several times in the past. Along the way I discovered that the pellets could be forced through one hole with a little extra force from my fingertip and from that point it could be fitted through several smaller holes, one after the other, and eventually would find its true "No Go" hole. I learned that I was doing essentially the same thing that you're doing, removing the flash from the pellet's seams, but I was shaving it off gradually with the Pelletgage's holes instead of tumbling them off. I got the same results that you are getting for all my efforts. The darn things will group 6,7,or8 in a single hole, but the remainder of the 10 shots would be wide and in unpredictable directions, sometimes in a sub-group and sometimes scattered. That is the same result that I get with the unaltered pellets.
After sorting them by head size, I further sorted them by weight within each head size. I shot them from various guns, always indoors and with the guns clamped in a vice to take my skills out of the equation. Still no joy. I think there are voids in the lead or maybe skirts that are canted slightly. I've never measured them for consistent length, so that could be the trick. Good luck to you and I'll definitely be following your efforts.
BTW, It's been my experience that these pellets foul badly when shot much over 860 fps. I think it's because of the antimony content. Harder than pure lead and less self-lubricating.
There is a German youtuber who coaches international 10m shooters. He did a test with damaged pellets to see how it influenced the grouping and the result was that damage had almost no effect. He damaged them pretty hard using a pair of pliers.
Absolutely, I've done plenty of testing on skirt damage,a few vids on here aswell. Head damage or eccentricity is not great but skirt damage really makes very little difference 😉
This was very interesting even if it doesn’t relate to my shooting. So impressed with the trouble you go to 🙏
As I recall, the old Premiers were not clean pellets, straight from the box. A thorough washing was a must.
Just to throw a spanner in the rumbler. How many pellets you put in at a time must also make a difference...
Maybe try Rumbling the pellets along with some small, Wet, plastic beads - or the Mineralised beads that come in Some showerheads?? That would reduce the Contacting of the pellets AND Polish them better. (Maybe) Rumbling Usually involves using some other, wet, deburring/polishing medium, rather than just the parts you want to process. (In this case - pellets & beads + Water) Maybe also add a squidge of Toothpaste?? Rumbling, Dry, metal on metal is Never a good Idea!!
Correct, when I worked in a factory pressing shop several years back, the parts would go in to a large container and be mixed with rounded beads of a sort, chuck in little bit of lube and rotate it for about 30 mins to remove the burrs.
Another theory that I've entertained, but don't know how to test, involves skirt diameter along with head diameter. If the heads were all exactly 4.50, but the skirts varied from 4.45 to 4.57, depending on the land and grove dimensions of the barrel, you could load the pellet into the breech on a slight slant rather than with the skirt directly behind the head and centered on the same axis. A thin skirted pellet or a long skirted pellet might self correct for this better (or worse) than a thick skirted pellet or a long skirted pellet. The malleability of pure soft lead vs. lead antimony alloys make also make a difference. Slugs would be able to self center better than diablos because of the longer area of engagement with the rifling and the fact that they are solid. A pellet with a skirt that is the identical diameter at both head and skirt that engaged the rifling at the proper depth should be the best pellet for that barrel, ti my way of thinking. What say you?
With a soft material like lead, tumbling or vibratory tumbling might well just compact and smooth pellets without removing much material. They might get smaller by compressing and rounding the edges more than removing material. Weighing before and after would tell the tale.
This is great. ‘Rumbling’ could become a trend. Can we even diesel the pellets with the mango chutney, I wonder? Loved it! Thanks from Baz.
I have rumbled pellets with a medium ( glas beads) to take of the sharp edges and the burs. Sorted by weight.
And I picked up a bit of accuracy. Did this with the 10.34 JSB and the 10.69 H&N.
I remember trying all of this kind of stuff with Accupels and a few others years ago to get them accurate enough to hunt with. Then my local gun shop put me on to JSB exacts. Never before had I been able to open a tin of pellets and stack them on top of eachother at 30 meters before. I've used nothing but JSB since as they just work without any need for playing around with them. I used to have to weigh each pellet from a tin and put them into batches and reshape or discard the deformed ones before with other brands, now I just load up my mags and get to work.
Well, the latest batch of JSB I ordered is terrible 😂 QYS to the rescue!
It might be worth tumbling with a medium such as corncob or walnut shells. Would stop the dimpling but still clean them up and remove swarf.
I've tried tumbling JSBs with both corn cobb and walnut shells, with and without added wax. With no wax, I got a dull finish; likely took off the outer coating on pellets. Got much lower carbon buildup in barrel; i.e., patches after 50 shots did not show the black material, BUT I saw small lead flakes on the patches and got some fliers. With wax in the tumbler with the medium, I did not get much different results than untumbled pellets.
Another interesting video, like to see if the JSB heavies improve by tumbling.
Interesting experiment. The varied velocity will be the inconsistent skirt size and air passing over the skirt at different rates before they expand. Try rumbling or polishing in a round container
I reckon so too mate. The xti was definitely a bit more lively on firing with a noticeably more abrupt crack with the blow by 😉
seems like the go-pro is either overheating or when you hit the go-pro you caused some internal damge through impact and somehow damaged the SD-card reader,
Maybe the rumbling makes the pellet surface harder meaning that residual lead from softer pellets gets swept out losing the zero?
When chronoing from 18:00 I noticed the flashed speed was 1fps faster than recorded. This was every time, 1fps is insignificant, but why every time?
Interesting, I have seen rumbling being used to remove flashing, actually on rubber grommets, but first I have heard of it being used on air gun pellets. I would have though that the pellets would need washing afterwards at the very least. It probably provides a good base for washing and sizing afterwards, but won't do too much on its own. I thought the pellet skirt expands with the air slug behind it and gives the seal, so too small a pellet would loose power and potentially become unstable in flight if the skirt does seal evenly in the barrel. I guess flashing on one side of the pellet would have a similar effect. You may not be mad, but it is certainly sending me mad thinking about it!
It's an absolute wormhole mate... I'm going to revisit it all with a slightly more scientific approach and measure before and after timed rumblings to see what undersizes I can yield. The 9015 particularly runs far better with the close but looser fitting pellets. When they are tight it's actually possible to end up seating them in the barrel with a bit of yaw. Not ideal 😉
Ok fella. Hope you dont mind but i need to ask a question.
I bought a kral hi-cap, i know not the best but money is money.
I while ago i got a pellet jammed in barrel, about 20% down from muzzle. I think the barrel is choked. Ive never had much luck with it but since i cleared the barrel its not that accurate. But i cant seem to get any kind of decent groups.
Now the rub. Have i buggered the barrel and is there any way i can get it checked without costing too much as im on the sick.
Thanx for any advice.
Great channel by the way
Is it possible you took the lube off them by tumbling? Maybe your first group did so well because barrel was lubed from previously shooting JSB's? I say this because my first few Premier shots do well and I mostly shoot JSBs. So i lube Premiers and they shhot better.
again a very fun experiment :). maybe use a polish media in the tumbler like Brass Polishing Walnut Media. and use something like the SR737 Tumbler nano and do a 1000 at a time :)
That sounds expensive mate 😆
The main reason for using no media was so I didn't have to wash and re lube them after. I have since done some more and washed them, there's alot less swarfe than I imagined. Especially compared to out the box Prems(they are quite grotty out the box)
You mentioned that the 9015 seems to like a smaller diameter pellet and rumbling will definitely make a pellet smaller, the early shots showed promise, next time if you sized them after rumbling there might be more consistency with a given size. I've not had great results with Crosman pellets myself. What media are you rumbling the pellets in?
There was no media. Just the pellets themselves. As far as I can tell that's the better option. I'm not a fan of sizing as such,it's actually alot harder to do it accurately than I imagined. But I do like measuring and batching by natural size and weight.
There's plenty more vids to come in time I'll cover all the nerdy stuff in a bit more detail 😉
Go-Pro's not what they used to be. QC dropped through the floor & overheating issues. The Insta360 Ace Pro or DJI Osmo Action 4 are very good. Mate of mine uses the DJI & swears by it.
Interesting, what rpm did you rumble them at?
50 😉 nice and gently
@@tillysgunstocks thanks might give that a go
can u use a sonic jewels cleaner?? for pellets or is it to harsh.oh and insta360 camera people are dropping Go Pro for insta360 people say go pros the new ones are overheating and are not so good now
Good thing for washing pellets if you're into that.
Yep I've done a fair bit of cleaning pellets in my ultrasonic cleaner. Works really well tbh
Don’t you lose power when you do the pellet like that
I think it's time to retire that Go pro!
Yeah I think so too mate, channel budget can't stretch quite that far yet though..
@@tillysgunstocksjust use a smartphone instead. There is no need for an action camera in what you are doing
I'll stick with my JSB's
Crosman just keeps dropping the quality the 1322, 1377 and 2240 come so crooked from the factory. the pellets are terrible.
👉💯👍