Brocock Sniper HP in the house

Here's some testing with my new barrel (replaced by AoA).

I mounted an Athlon Argos scope on the Brocock and my initial thoughts are that the gun feels more stable during the shot cycle than with a slightly smaller/lighter Sightmark I have had on it. This Athlon scope is also mounted a little higher on the gun being in slighter taller rings. FWIW, this scope seems quite nice, but at higher magnifications the reticle is thicker than I was expecting.

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I have shot about 300 Monster Redesigned plus a handful of other pellets and have left the gun tune (and barrel) in the condition I received it from AoA. The accuracy so far is holding and the new barrel seems to have the same preference for the Redesigned JSB as my first barrel. The only interesting difference is that this barrel seems to shoot H&N Baracuda’s a bit worse than the original LW barrel. I have kept my Rocker1 LDC on for all shots and I have not seen any pellet clipping again. (Previously it was bad enough for the pellet not even to hit the target or by bullet box.)

Here are some sample targets from last night. All are 5-shot groups at 50 yards. For perspective, the target stickers I use are 1/2 inch in diameter.

Monster Redesigned (MRD) vs. Monsters (M) (full power only)

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Monster Redesigned (MRD) vs. Monsters (M) vs. H&N Baracudas (5.51, 5.52, & 5.53)

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I had a breech seal go bad on the top-left group so I repeated it with a hold-under below after fixing the o-ring. I did a 1/2 mil hold under for the H&N pellets.



JSB 18.1 at each power level

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JSB 14.35 at each power level

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Not wanting to change my scope settings with these lighter pellets, I did hold-unders to keep pellets on target so don’t pay much attention to the POI for power levels 5, 4, and 3. Power levels 2, 1, and 0 were shot without any hold-over or under. (I’ll be repeating this test with JSB 15.9s in the near future.)

The light was too poor by the time I got outside to use my chrony. But generally the Brocock is good for 50-shots with an ES of 10-15 fps from a 250 bar fill. The Monster Redesigned pellets clearly are still the best in this gun. However, I am noting vertical stringing on some of the MRD groups. I have a pretty crappy (loose and wobbly) UTG bipod on it and my table is definitely NOT the most stable… yeah, I need to do something about that someday…

But with that being said, I can’t be too disappointed with most of the MRD groups!

Oh, there has been some discussion regarding Brocock triggers. And yes, it was heavy as shipped but (at least for me) it was easy to adjust to be perfectly usable and (at least for me) fairly comparable to my Air Arms s510 and FX Royale. But then again, I was also really happy with the Quattro trigger in my Hatsan Flash! ;-)
 
I’m curious about the power wheels on the sniper hp’s. Watching reviews from about a year or so ago, they claimed to have 6 distinct power levels. When I got mine last November from AoA, it has 4 distinct power level settings. When I asked AoA about this they said that they did originally come out with 6 settings, but feedback was that it was too many so they changed it to 4. @mcoulter clearly has 5 settings on his power wheel. Weird....

@mcoulter, have you tried the JSB 15.89 out of that lw poly barrel? Shooting at 885 FPS, power setting 2 on my gun, the accuracy is right up there with the monster rd’s at 890fps on power level 4(highest setting on my gun). And I get 80 shots on a fill versus 60 and about half price on ammo.
 
Yeah, I might have confused things with how I count power levels. I started at zero (it's a JavaScript thing) and ended at 5 so yes, it has 6 power levels! I definitely feel that the gun is NOT shooting efficiently. It has a bit of a bark. But I pledged this time to no-touchy until I had a couple of tins of pellets through it.

I shot a bunch today. Lessons learned...

1) It HATES JSB 15.9 in 5.53 size. I took four tins in trade and never realized they were this sized :-( Maybe some other gun will like 'em but this one doesn't. Here they are compared to "normal" JSBs 15.9s. I was shooting the 15.9 at power level 1 (one up from lowest) and the Monster Redesigned (my baseline) at high.

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But I'm getting ahead of myself... Here's my 15.9 velocity test on "normal" 15.9 JSBs from a "big" tin (500 count). All targers are 50 yards. Again, I shoot a baseline group with Monster redesigned on high (top left). And then the 15.9s:

High (5) = 1055 fps
4 = 1035 fps
3 = 985 fps
2 = 915 fps
1 = 827 fps
Low (0) = 723 fps

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The biggest visible difference is the depth of the skirt. The 5.53 head 15.9 jsbs have a much shallower skirt.

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Not my best group here, but it shows the deeper skirt of the "normal" 15.9s...

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And here are the tins to compare. Normal on top and smaller 5.53 tin on bottom.

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I also decided to play with tray vs. magazine groups. Most everything I have shot was with the tray. I have only shot 3-4 magazines worth of pellets. Not much difference...

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And I finished up with NSA .217 21 grain vs. Monster Redesigned:

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So to me the biggest win so far is that the barrel is holding decent accuracy with the monster redesigned pellets. My old barrel would have leaded up and been shooting them poorly by now.

Fun stuff :)


 
Hey @L.Leon, I'd take those groups any day of the week! 

I probably have about 500 pellets through the new barrel on my Sniper and I really wanted to see if I would pull chunks of lead out of this barrel like I did from the original barrel when cleaning it. The good news is that there was barely any lead that came out when patchworming (is that a word?) the barrel. Just a few very small specs and pretty much like any other barrel I have cleaned. 

I have only shot a few groups of Monster Redesigned since the cleaning but I thought these three groups show a neat progression of groups hopefully tightening up again!

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Seems that by the third group the Redesigns were grouping tighter. Your groups will only get better as you become more familiar with the trigger. I get good groups when I do everything right. The rest of the time? Not so much. Don’t give up on the JSB 18s as they are very, very accurate in my Bantam and consistently so. Thanks for the update.