A Pellet Rifl e For Grandsons Member Don Sachs
springer (spring-powered air rifl e) to shoot pest birds in his family’s back- yard for a year or so. Ian was becoming frustrated because he was doing a lot more missing birds than hitting them. The springer vibrated a lot upon fi ring, making the rifl e rather diffi cult to shoot accurately. I have a FWB (Feinwerkbau) 124 break-over springer and find it diffi cult to shoot accurately because of vibration. That is just a characteristic of springers. My son-in-law, Scott, asked if I
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had suggestions for an air rifl e for Ian. The best I could think of was to fi x up the old Sheridan pump air rifl e that my brother and I bought in 1960 when I was 11 years old and my brother was 12. It was easy to shoot accurately. It did not vibrate. Although light, it had a good forward balance point and a good trig- ger. It would be a good gun for Ian and eventually for his younger brother Jett who is 9 years old. However, it needed major work.
SOME HISTORY Back in 1960, the standard air rifl es
for hunting were the “pump” pneumat- ics made by Crosman, Benjamin, and Sheridan. The much more expensive Sheridan ($27.50 at the time) was the best of the three. It was the most ac- curate, powerful, and well made. My parents never gave my brother and me money but, living on a farm, they did give us ways to earn money for ourselves. They allowed us to raise pumpkins and sweet corn and to pick and sell them. They also allowed us to pick up popcorn in the fi eld which the corn picker missed and then sell it. We made the money for the Sheridan in those ways. There was not a lot of good wild-
life habitat on the farm I grew up on in eastern Nebraska but I hunted a great deal with the Sheridan so got lots of birds, some rabbits, and one squirrel. To get the squirrel, I talked my dad into driving me to a woods about four miles from home where the landowner
Butt stock, right side.
said I could hunt. After a long morning of hunting, I got one squirrel and had to walk back home. It was a very hot and humid summer day. I also shot snakes and a big snapping turtle. My brother and I ate some of the snapping turtle but it was not very good. Snake is pretty good. I shot a muskrat and it tasted terrible. My brother still occasionally
reminds me of how I cheated him out of shooting a crow. We were walking down a road with a lot of large trees when he saw a crow. I was carrying the Sheridan and he asked me to hand it to him so he could shoot it. I asked him to point out where the crow was so I could shoot it. He fi nally gave in and I shot the crow. I told him I was a better shot and that he probably would have missed it. We ate that crow but dissected it fi rst and were amazed to fi nd a small snake in its stomach. There were lots of adventures with that pellet gun.
REPLACING THE STOCK When our younger brother started
using the Sheridan, I cut a couple of inches off the stock to better fi t him. The cut-off piece was lost and any new piece would not look right. Luckily, my son-in-law had some wood from a dead walnut tree found on their acreage ten years ago. A year or so later, I went with him to have the tree sawed into planks. Some of the wood had nice fi gure so it was sawed into thicker planks, think- ing that someday they might be used for gunstocks. The walnut had been dried for at least eight years so I asked Scott for a piece of it so I could make a new stock. Making a walnut stock from
scratch would be a new experience for me. I traced the patterns of the old butt stock and fore-arm onto the wood and a friend with a band saw cut them out, leaving a little extra wood. The plank was thicker than needed so most of the
y 12-year-old grandson, Ian, had been using a break-over
Whole rifl e, right side.
www.varminthunter.org Page 147
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