DO NOT TRUST YOUR GUN TO REFLEX SHOOTING >> They broke my air gun while doing a yearly checkup. They charged me €65 for “greasing the o rings” but my gun is no longer working. They do not own their mistake, fix it or reimburse. In fact they won’t even send the tax bill for what I paid. I had to pay extra €150 to get my gun fixed by another gunsmith. They also botched my order of a €2000 gun (a Morini FP). Very bad customer support and follow up (which ends up being non existent).
I took advantage of my participation at the Intarso Reflex Shooting Cup in Genk, to visit their sport shooting shop. I got really lucky. I found the only shop I know in Belgium dedicated exclusively to sport shooting,filled with competition material. Looking at the pellet choice alone was great. It is hard to find good pellets to do 10m air pistol shooting in the few shops that are left in Brussels, and here they had a ton. When I asked Peter to give me one of each for testing, he said: “why not do the tests here in the shop?” You should have seen the smile in my face 🙂
I had seen the targets at the end of the shop but thought they were there for sale. Luckily for me they are there for testing!
Peter got hands on really quick, brought out a case full of tins to test (with serial numbers to be able to buy the same batch) and set up the vise and the chronograph to start working. He took care of everything to make sure I did not add bias to the tests because of my noobness.
These are the results:
I know that 10 shots are not enough to do appropriate testing, but with my results it would not have an impact either. I did it to learn, which is a great part of why I’m loving pistol shooting.
So Peter started shooting and checking the speed of the pellets to make sure there where not big deviations. When there were deviations, we could see a bigger spread in the target hole.
The surprising things for me were that the cheaper pellets performed better than more expensive makes, that even within the same brand and model there where great differences, and that even though there was a card with my pistol recommending 4.49 pellets the wider 4.50 performed better (in fact Peter noticed that there was wiggle room when entering the smaller pellets).
I could not get my head around the fact that the same machines produce such different pellets (I had an idealized view of the precision of industrial processes), so I asked Peter and he explained. It seems that at the factories they use scrap lead that they melt for each batch of pellets they are going to melt. This introduces inconsistencies in the properties of the metal used, and you end up with harder or softer leads. They produce about 100 tins of pellets per batch (I probably got this number wrong), and then use a few of them to run quality tests. Based on these tests they decide on which one of their different makes they put on the tin. Yes, they are made with the same dies and machines!
The winner was the JSB Yellow Match Diabolo Middle Weight
And off I left with a heavy bag of pellets and a light smiling spirit.
I cannot recommend enough to visit the shop if you have a chance. Check out the Reflex Shooting online shop to get an idea of all the stuff they have.
DO NOT TRUST YOUR GUN TO REFLEX SHOOTING