Air Rifle care

Thirdfox

Hi guys,

I'll be getting a hold of a rifle of my own soon enough (Steyr LG110 match) and I was wondering what you guys could tell me in terms of keeping it in tip top shape.

Should I be looking to get those cleaning kits from ebay (rods, different cleaners, cleaning pellets) or are there any other things I should look out for or get?

With the PCPs when removing the air cylinder should you twist out partially and fire the rifle to discharge the remaining air or just twist out fully in one go? I've seen different approaches in different ranges.

Oh and oily rag on the outside of the barrel - good/bad idea?

Thanks everyone!

Erk

Hi thirdfox, what i done with mine when i had it which was a BsaS10 and FxCutlas they were my pcps. I just put a few cleaning pellets through it until clean. For the cylinder i would do one full twist of it then shoot until there is no air left usually took 6-7 shots then take of and fill it For the oily rag i never done that? I would use rust preventing stuff and is good for maintaining wood etc and give it a wipe with that now and again Hope this helps

Sparks

I tend to favour a pull-through kit at the moment, but the shoot-through VFG pellets are good for a quick clean (fire two after any training session where you fire more than ten shots and aren't going to be shooting the next day. You don't need to clean as religiously as you do with fullbore, but if you ignore it, you can add 2mm to the group size on average, so I'd clean it every tin of 500 pellets wth the "blue gunk" (the lupus bore cleaner) on an abrasive VFG pellet and as many normal VFG pellets as required to come out clean. You'll need at least ten more pellets down the barrel after that before you're back to consistent grouping though.

Avoid oiling any part where there's a chance the oil might get into the barrel or near the path the compressed air takes; compressed air at 200 bar and oil is a bad, bad mix to have near your face.

Also, get a peli 1700 or something similar and cut the foam. It'll cost you the guts of €200 if not a bit more, but a broken LG110 will be a lot more expensive (if you're not getting the break-down version of the LG110, you'll need a larger peli). Storm and SBS are perfectly equivalent to Peli's cases - there's no difference between them that you'd ever notice in terms of how much protection they offer.

I was told to turn the cylinder and fire off the air by an anschutz dealer; but I'd been just unscrewing the cylinder for years before that, and I tend to do that on a crowded range still (ROs find multiple shots fired away from the firing line to be rather a heinous idea, and I can't really blame them too much for that).

Mostly, you just keep the rifle from getting too gunky (the peli helps with that enormously), never ever overfill the tank, and every so often plan to send it off to Steyr to get it serviced properly (we don't have anyone in Ireland who can actually service an ISSF airgun in-house so far as I know, the few who do send it off). And don't drop it

It wasn't me!

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/nra/ssusa_201007/index.php#/16

This popped up for me today, figured it was nicely timed. Might be of use.

Thirdfox

Seems like - "don't drop it" is the best advice...

Which is even better, the less maintainence needed the more you can worry about the shooting and not about lube et al.