American Airguns Blog
The Random Ramblings Of An Airgun Addict

Today we setup our TVA club FT course. It was me, Donnie Ross and my son. The morning was pretty uneventful, we set 10 lanes for the traditional field target and 5 lanes for the Hunter course. However I had a great time out there working with my son, teaching him a bit about target placement and setup. The time we spent was together was worth more to me than all of my airguns. He is now 14 and taller than me, he seems to grow and mature everytime I see him and it won't be but three years before he is off to college and then a life of his own. These will be experience that we will alway share along with our time spent shooting.

Shooting in general and airgunning specifically is such a great way to spend time with our families. I still go shooting with my dad from time to time and have fond memories from my youth of the same. My son and I have been shooting together and since he was about 7 and we still do that together from time to time but his interests will be changing to High School things and of course girls. But eventually he will come back to shooting, just like I did. Airgunning is a great sport, especially when you can share it with your family.

I finally had time today to convert my Gamo Rat target over to a different faceplate. I started by removing the face from the base, this was done by removing the bolt at the base of the faceplate and by removing the pin that holds the paddle arm linkage to the faceplate. I then snapped a line on the back of the faceplate from the bottom of the face vertically up to about a 1/4" above the reset arm that sticks out of the face. Because of the reset arm, I had to use a Hack saw to do the cutting. The cutting was a bit slower this way but it was pretty easy. The targets are made in China so I doubt that they use the best steel in the world.

It took me about 15 minutes to cut the unwanted part of the faceplate off and get it ready to weld on the new face. I decided to use an old squirrel face that I had laying around waiting to be made into a target, it had that same size killzone but that was ok since I need a few more large kill zones for the Hunter FT course. I drilled a 3/8" hole in the new face where the reset arm sticks out so that the new face would fit over it. The reset arm also had a weld at the base on both sides of the arm, I could have either ground out the weld or bevel the hole on the rear of the new face which is what I did. Then I simply welded the new face on the old plate and, bam, I was done.

I cleaned up the faceplate, reassmebled the target, painted and tested it. The target still goes down with about 3 ft. lbs. of energy, I was a bit worried a different face might be heavier and cause it to require more energy to trip. The conversion to about an hour from start to finish with a new face that was ready to be welded on the target action. I will put the new target and the other Gamo Squirrel target through some extensive testing out on the range and report on their durability at a later time.

It has been ten years now since I started my site. It was 1995 when I finally upgraded my home computer to something that would be internet ready and I eagerly started surfing the web for airgun sites where I could read the wealth of new airgun information that would be out there on the web. Unfortunately there weren't any that I could find, I spent about a month searching and looking without finding anything. I thought this was a terrible thing so I started my own airgun website, the American Airguns website. It was the first published website solely about adult airgunning.

Initially I gathered a lot of the site content from airgun catalogs that I had orderd from various companies. I scanned in text and pictures and added them to the page. I also started reviewing some airguns and adding my reviews to the site. I also started a free classified ad page so that airgunners would have a avenue to buy and sell their airguns with others throughout the US and the world. It started out as an email based page where the ads were emailed to me and then I posted them on the page by hand. That was great for a while since I got first chance at all the great deals! However it quickly became too much work so, being a software engineer, I wrote a script that allows the ads to be placed on the page automatically. It has been working great for a lot of year now.

Over the past few years, work and my activities with AAFTA/Airgunning have consumed too much of my time and stole time away from my editing duties on the website. As a result my site hasn't been changed much in that time. With the site's ten year aniversary this year I have been having some thoughts about updating it, especially the classified ads. Coming soong to an airgun website near you will be an updated classified ads page. The changes wont be too drastic but I am going to change the format of the page a bit and I am going to look into adding a login feature in the future so that I won't have any more anonymous logins that has caused me grief over the years. Hopefully the upgrades will be complete in the next week or two so keep your eyes peeled. I am thinking of updating the main page and give it a whole new look while keeping it simple. As the year progresses I will roll out the changes as I have time to make them. Thanks to everyone who have been faithful readers of the site over the years.

I recently bought a nice FWB 300 Universal match rifle from a reader of my classified ad page. This is a rifle that I have been keeping an eye out for but was never in a position to buy one when a nice one came along. I finally had my chance and so far I haven't regretted it one bit. The 300 is a joy to shoot and it is in like new condition. I found that it has a little bit better balance for me than the FWB603 and I was surprised to find that the report and limited amount of vibration and action movement doesn't bother me at all. I still like shooting the 603 but the 300 has become a new favorite.

Last fall I built a 21' range in my garage (which is about 6.5 meters) so I could practice my standing shooting over the winter. I scaled down the 10 meter targets for the 6.5 meter range and shoot away. My standing shooting has improved, I mostly used the 603 for my practice and occasionally my Diasy 853 (which is like going from a Mercedes to a Ford Escort). After setting up the FWB300, my score went up a bit. Field Target is still my favorite shooting sport but I am really enjoying the 10 meter style shooting and may have to try to get a silhouette shoot going at our local club. The 300 is a great rifle for anyone wanting a precision match rifle but not wanting to shell out the big bucks for a full up Olympic rifle.