Guns Illustrated 2011. Dan ShidelerЧитать онлайн книгу.
who have complained that the 1911-22 is prone to stovepipe jams. This was true in the case of mine, too, until 250 or 300 rounds slicked things up. It then proved remarkably reliable and jam-free. Just shows what a good cleaning every now and then and six boxes of ammunition can do. Some shooters have broken in their 1911-22s using ammo with a little more oomph, such as CCI Stingers, but I used good old Remington Thunderbolt and Federal American Eagle. What my 1911-22 really prefers, though – in terms of both accuracy and reliability – is Remington Golden Bullet hollowpoints.
The 1911-22’s trigger takes some getting used to. It’s creepy, and you have to get into the habit of releasing it fully so it can reset. The gun’s finish is rather thin, and I suspect that a few hundred more trips into and out of the holster will strip the bluing (or blacking, rather) off the slide pretty thoroughly. Still, for an extremely affordable plinker or as a training stand-in for a “real” 1911, these are petty gripes.
The Chiappa 1911-22 comes in a lockable hard case with two 10-round polymer magazines and a surprisingly well-written user’s manual. As near as I can tell, it’s made of offshore components that are assembled in God’s Country (Dayton, Ohio). Never head of Chiappa? Sure you have – it used to be known as Armi Sport. For more information, visit chiappafirearms.com.
The 50-caliber Shinsung Dragon Slayer PCP air Rifle, shown with Leaper’s scope and bipod.
The Chiappa 1911 22, shown here with reproduction M7 shoulder holster.
SHINSUNG CAREER DRAGON SLAYER .50 AIR RIFLE
I’m either growing up or growing down, but I’m finally taking an active interest in air rifles. These are banner days for the airgun industry, and the hottest thing in an already-hot market is the pre-charged pneumatic (PCP) gun. In a PCP airgun, compressed air is held under extremely high pressure (up to 3,000 lbs.) in a tubelike reservoir usually located beneath the gun’s barrel.
The ShinSung Career Dragon Slayer .50 is the Godzilla of PCP rifles, firing 200-gr. pellets at 600 fps, give or take. That’s 160 ft-lbs. of energy, generally comparable to the old blackpowder loading of the .44 Russian revolver cartridge. Needless to say the Dragon Slayer .50 is capable of game a good deal larger than starlings or chipmunks.
The good folks at Pyramyd Air Gun Mall kindly lent me a Dragon Slayer .50 so I could see what this PCP fuss was all about. Contrary to my expectations, however, there’s really nothing mysterious about operating this behemoth of an air rifle. You can charge the reservoir from a scuba tank or a heavy-duty hand pump that Pyramyd recommends. Living in the middle of Amish country, I didn’t have a scuba tank handy and was rather put off by the array of fittings and adapters that might be needed to fill the reservoir in this manner, but the hand pump did the trick just fi ne, especially if you can pull a Tom Sawyer and trick someone else into doing it.
When the reservoir is full, cock the sidelever near the breech, insert the pellet, and seat it by closing the lever. You’re now ready to go.
My Dragon Slayer had about a 5.5-lb. trigger pull with zero staginess, and considering that the rifle weighs around 11.5 lbs. when duded up with a Leapers 4-16x50AO scope and a bipod, you’re not likely to have too many called fl iers due to the jitters. My Dragon Slayer turned in consistent 2.25-inch groups at 50 yards with the swaged hollowpoint pellets supplied by Pyramyd and 3-inch groups with the solids. (When I opened the boxes, the pellets neither looked nor felt as though they weighed 200 grains, but my RCBS reloading scale says they did, right down to the half-grain.)
If you think that the Dragon Slayer is silent simply because it’s an airgun, allow me to disabuse you. The Dragon Slayer sounded to me an awful lot like a Browning Baby or Colt Vest Pocket semiauto in .25 ACP being fired in a small room. That kind of report isn’t going to deafen children or break windows, but it’s quite noticeable.
Pyramyd Air retails the Dragon Slayer Combo (with scope, hard case, and bipod) for a cool $799. Add another $238 for the hand pump and you can see that owning the Mother of All Airguns entails quite an investment. The Dragon Slayer is a remarkably well-crafted airgun that shoots like there’s no tomorrow, but I suppose my uses would be better served by the new Benjamin Marauder 25-caliber PCP airgun that’s scheduled to appear as this edition of Gun Digest goes to press. Still, if the biggest and baddest is your cup of tea, you might want to pay an online visit to Pyramyd Air at pyramydair.com and check out the Dragon Slayer (and about a thousand other fascinating airguns).
200-gr. 50-cal. pellets for the Dragon Slayer, with a .357 Magnum for scale.
Ithaca’s M66 Supersingle BY DAN SHIDELER
To borrow a line from the old Lone Ranger radio show, return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when I used to hunt groundhogs on the old Erie-Lackawanna railroad embankment heading west out of Fort Wayne toward Huntington, Indiana.
My perennial hunting buddy, my brother Dave, and I had honed our groundhog hunting to the level of a science, but one with the delicacy of a fi ne art. We’d walk the tracks, scoping out the grades and washouts and gullies and irrigation ditches for the telltale yellow splashes of sand and clay that told us that a groundhog had set up housekeeping nearby.
Dave would then produce a dog whistle from his pocket and give it a loud, piercing blow. As brilliant clouds of indigo buntings rose from the scrub brush, more often than not a hog would poke his head out of his hole, as if to ask who in the hell is making so much racket? Then we’d let him have it.
Ithaca M66 Super Single in .410 — ugly as sin, but what a shooter!
Even today, I grin when I read of varminters picking off groundhogs with carefully-placed shots at 300 yards. Back in our railroad days, Dave and I harvested bushels of them with such distinctly non-varmint guns as a Colt Model 1927 .45 Auto, an H&R Model 922 .22 revolver and a Marlin 336C in .35 Remington. Thanks to that two-dollar dog whistle, most of our shots were under 35 yards.
I particularly remember one unfortunate dirt-piggy who had the bad judgment to pop out of his hole on the dried clay bank of an irrigation ditch barely 25 yards away from Dave and me. I raised my shotgun to my shoulder and sent a 3” magnum charge of #4 lead shot right at his head. The shot patterned perfectly and sent up a round, absolutely symmetrical puff of clay dust positioned like a halo around the groundhog’s head. Lights out, piggy!
Rebounding hammer and automatic extractor come standard in the M66. Note the barrel wall thickness in this .410.
That was the single most entertaining gunshot I’ve ever taken. Even now, 30 years later, the memory of that dust cloud splashing up around that groundhog’s head – as round and even as a smoke ring blown from my pipe – never fails to make me smile. My hair could be on fire and I could have a hornet up my nose, but the recollection of that perfect groundhog, that perfect pattern, would still make me grin.
I wish I still had the shotgun I was toting that day. It was a 12-ga. Ithaca Model 66 Supersingle. Most serious shotgunners would dismiss the Model 66 as a kid’s gun or worse, but this kid has taken a lot of rabbits, one or two grouse and, yes, even plenty of groundhogs with the old M66.
As I write this I have a .410 Model 66 propped up in a corner of my office. It’s an ugly little spud, with its lever hanging beneath its blocky receiver and oddly Western-style straight stock, but the little gun can shoot. I will bet you a case of Leinenkugel’s Honey Weiss that I can take a Brenneke rifled slug load, pop it into the Model 66, and hit a can of pork and beans with it two times