Did you ever have an "AHA!" moment? Well, I sure had one today with the Sniper.
I have been chasing accuracy for a week or two and wondering if the care and feeding of a LW poly barrel would be THAT different from any other barrel I have had... (see post here
https://www.airgunnation.com/topic/lw-polygon-barrels/).
Well today i had more "meh" accuracy. Based on the vendor's (SPAW) suggestion, I gave the barrel ANOTHER good cleaning (just with my crown saver and ballistol patches). In doing so, I did pull out a bunch of lead from the barrel from shooting some H&N and Crosman pellets - I had been using these to see if leading the barrel more might help with accuracy.
Anyhow, I also decided to pull the barrel's end cap and well looky here... There might be some touches from pellets going on.:
I measured the inner diameter of the end cap and it's about 7.25mm. That seems like it would be big enough for a 5.5mm (.22) caliber pellet... This works out to be 0.875mm on any side of the pellet as it passes through this area. And here's the rough spacing between the end of the barrel and end cap:
And here are a couple of groups. One with the shroud but NOT the end cap. The other group was shot with NEITHER the shroud NOR the end cap. JSB Monster (880-890 fps) redesigned at 62 yards. Some difference, huh?
So far the gun's power plant / regulator have been great. No issues there. The gun handles fantastic. The trigger is now very good (almost on par with a fx royale I used to own). I"m really hoping to come up with a good solution that allows the gun to shoot as well with the shroud and end cap as without!
(And yes, the gun is LOUD without the end cap on!)