I bought three really nice guns in 2023, two mediocre guns and one turd.
I'd personally rank them in this order.
1) .22 Huben K1. This is just an awesome rifle right out of the box. The only things about it that I can criticize are it's ergonomics, cleaning and clearing issues. Accuracy is excellent. Power can be dialed from 6 fpe to supposedly 80 fpe, (I've only cranked it up to 50). It's both compact and good looking. It gets a lot of shots per charge and it's backyard friendly out of the box. The biggest issue with it is that it is always potentially in a ready to fire state. You can't remove the magazine and cock the bolt to the rear. You can unlock and spin the cylinder to ensure that it's empty, but you can't put it into a state where it's visibly unloaded like a shooting range might require you to.
2) and 3) Tie. .30 Sidewinder and .177 HW95. Two very different guns that both needed a little work to get them where I wanted them.
The Sidewinder is like a bigger, uglier Huben K1 with some improvements, but is not anything close to backyard friendly out of the box. It's also super accurate and has easily adjustable power, but with removable magazines it is easy to clean and put in a visibly unloaded state and it has a convenient safety by the pistol grip. The big change to the Sidewinder was experimenting with different LDC's and modifications to them in order to make it somewhat backyard friendly. I also ordered the Steve Corcoran stock and I found that fits me much better than the original. It improves the appearance considerably as well.
The HW95 is as close to a perfect springer as I have come across. I'd put it ahead of the Sidewinder overall, except that within 100 shots of receiving it it started to develop a scraping sound while cocking and I ended up having to disassemble, relube and reassemble it and it's not a super easy springer to do that with. That seemed to fix it though. It's just an accurate, nice looking, easy to cock rifle with a fantastic trigger and reasonable length and weight. This is the rifle I'd grab first if I just wanted to shoot a hundred or so pellets.
4) Crosman 362. It's just another variation on the 13xx/22xx theme. This one has a longer charging stroke and a different stock than the 13xx. IMO, it's really the modular nature of the design and the fun of building your own "custom" rifle that makes these appealing. Their performance isn't anything to write home about and if you add up what you spend building a nice one you could easily afford an Avenger or Notos instead.
5) Gamo Magnum Swarm 3i. Not a bad budget oriented magnum springer except for the autoloading system, which is bad. If you remove the autoloader and single load it it's a very powerful and very lightweight magnum springer that delivers decent accuracy at a relatively low price.
6) Seneca Aspen. Point of impact changes every time I take it out of the case and sometimes when I pump it up. Shroud does very little to quiet the rifle and has too much play in it resulting in baffle strikes if you put an LDC on it. It's an example of a rifle that was badly designed to meet a low price point, as opposed to the Crosman which is well designed to meet a low price point.
