As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I had to say goodbye to my M3 compact because it couldn’t be relied upon to shoot accurately after sitting overnight. My major pest issue involves rats, coming from a canal behind my yard and invading my chicken emporium. It’s not unusual for me to get 5 per evening and I tend to snipe them from indoors, at a range of 50-80yards. That requires an accurate pellet shooter that is good to go at a moments notice. I’m not knocking FX because I have several Pantheras that I love. Rather, it’s just that my M3 wasn’t suited to the task at hand, in spite of many attempts to make it work.
So, a search ensued to find a compact and accurate 22 pellet shooter that could reach out to 80 and be relied upon to maintain POI after bouts of inactivity without having to dry fire or futz with HST settings. Frankly, I was very skeptical about the Airmaks Krait because earlier incarnations were known to have a very bad case of first shot jitters, resulting from a poor regulator design. However, I was able to test one over the course of a week to determine if Airmaks had truly fixed the problem. I also evaluated a Ghost carbine and a Panthera Hunter Compact. The PHC just didn’t have the form factor that I wanted and the Ghost, while a very fine specimen, didn’t merit the premium of spending another $600 for my use case. I also wasn’t able to test the Ghost as extensively as the Krait and so the Krait ended up being the “safer” bet for my use case. You can’t beat having an opportunity to actually determine if a tool works for your specific job. If I were looking for the most premium package, I would likely lean more towards the Ghost, but in this case I’m simply looking for functionality and boy o boy, the Krait delivers!
I ended up opting for the cheapest tubed version because, again, this is a tool rather than an object for admiration and I can refill it quickly from my tank at home. It’s a stubby, ugly beast but extremely compact, at 24” OAL:
It’s also very quiet, equipped only with one or two sections of a Huma Mod30 and it has a really nice shot cycle thanks to its unorthodox hammer setup. The CZ barrel shoots a variety of pellets well but has proven to be ridiculously accurate with JTS18.1s which I have it set up shooting at 910fps. At lower power, the hades were also very good. Airmaks took a lot of flak regarding the reg problems on earlier kraits and I have to say that they have made an astonishing comeback. Right from day 1, the reg has shown no signs of creep or variation from input (tank) pressure and is perhaps the most solid reg that I’ve encountered on my many PCPs. Correspondingly, first shots are dead on regardless of input pressure or downtime. It was tuned carefully at median tank pressure at 96.5% on the speed curve and maintains an SD ~2 from 280 bar to 130, which provides around 60 shots from the 200cc tube. In the photo below the gun had been sat for a week with 210bar in the tank and there’s no visible deviation from the 120bar set point.
The only issue encountered so far is that the butt pad was wobbly, fixed by me as you can see in the pic above with a securing screw. There’s always something…
Overall, I’m very happy with this decision and the gun has proved it’s worth with a 100% scorecard on the rats. Before anyone asks, I have no desire to try slugs or heavier pellets. With a 400mm choked barrel, the 18 grain pellets represent the best horse for this course.
