Crosman’s .25 Caliber Pellet Rifl e Thomas C. Tabor
The rotary self-indexing clip holds eight pellets.
shooting came at a very early age. But at 6 years old my puny stature and spindly arms weren’t up to the task of cocking my own BB gun. So, once I’d squeezed the red puckered top of the 5-cent pack- age of BBs and fi lled the magazine, I had to fi nd a family member to cock the rifl e for me. From there I would go on an exploratory safari around our small farm looking for adventure in the form of a dumber than normal bird, or if I was unsuccessful in that objective, a fence- post occasionally would be substituted. Once I’d settled on a potential target, I would line up the sights to the best of my abilities, elevate the rifl e well above the target, squeeze my non-shooting eye tightly closed, and then pull the trigger. After that I could watch while the BB made its way almost as if in slow mo- tion, traveling in its usual rainbow-like arcing fashion, toward whatever I was trying to hit. To my mother’s satisfac- tion, if that turned out to be a bird, I usually received only a fearful educa- tion out of the deal. Many decades have passed since
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those enjoyable days on the farm and since that time a number of airguns have replaced that ol’ Daisy BB gun. But while I have enjoyed owning and shooting those air rifl es and pistols, until recently I was under the belief that the technology simply wasn’t adequate to
ike many of today’s shooters, my interest in firearms and
The Crosman Benjamin Marauder .25 caliber airgun is certainly a world away from the ol’ Daisy that I used on the farm as a youngster.
produce the accuracy, trajectory, and retained pellet energy that I was looking for in an airgun. For the most part those experiences were limited to the common .17 caliber single-shot “break-barrel” air designs, but a couple received their power from the usual small disposable CO2 cylinders. Then came the day that I was given the opportunity to test one of Crosman’s new Benjamin® Ma- rauder® precharged pneumatic (pcp) airguns chambered in the unusual, but appealing, .25 caliber. After reading a little about the rifl e I became cautiously optimistic as to the rifl e’s potential for varmint shooting. But on the other hand, the .25 caliber 28-grain pellet certainly appeared huge in size, and in all hon- esty, I wondered if this wouldn’t turn out to be a deja vu experience mimicking those days on the farm of rainbow-like trajectories and not much in the form of velocity and pellet energy. Neverthe- less, by the time the rifl e arrived I was eager to try it out and quickly mounted a Center Point 3-12x scope on it. The Center Point scope came equipped with a parallax side dial adjustment and very simple but creative locks on its reticle dials. The turrets appeared similar to the typical target style found on many higher magnification scopes, but to prevent the crosshair settings from acci- dentally becoming changed, each turret possessed a locking ring located at its base. Simply turning the ring to make
contact with the turret dial resulted in locking the setting in place. Sometimes “simple” is simply best. ADVANTAGES
OVER MORE TRADITIONAL AIRGUNS As I alluded to earlier, my prior ex-
perience with airguns mostly involved single-shot designs, which received their power by manually hand-cocking the gun, pumping them up, or in few cases the pellets were propelled by CO2. One of the major advantages I found in the Crosman Benjamin Marauder was the fact that it contained a self-indexing eight-round clip. By simply working the bolt of the rifl e another pellet au- tomatically was fed into the chamber. When the rifl e is fully charged, I found it was capable of fi ring a maximum of about 40 shots before needing to be recharged with air. In my case I used the company’s hand pump for that purpose, which worked very well, and it came with the side benefi t of exercis- ing my aging, overly fl abby abs. Bring- ing the pressure up from zero to the recommended maximum level of 2,900 psi did, however, take a bit of time to achieve, but I found it unnecessary to complete the entire charging process in a single session. In this case you can simply walk away from the job, leaving the pump and hose attached to the rifl e, then return at your leisure to complete the charging process. I found that the built-in seals were entirely adequate to
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