There have been a handful of recent posts that got me thinking I need to finally get around to the review of the USFT that I've been wanting to do for a while now. Questions like "regulated or unregulated" from just a few minutes ago, or the guy a few weeks ago looking for hand-made/high quality airgun related items, or the occasional posts about buying American made airguns, or the steady beat of PCP greenhorns asking how many pumps to fill x gun, or what guns can be filled with a pump, or if a SCUBA tank can be of any use to an airgunner. All of those questions can be answered with a greater familiarity of the USFT, it's design, and operation.
It just dawned on me that even the names of the maker and model of this gun sounds like a confusing jumble of alphabet soup to those unfamiliar with them. For starters, It is made by Tim McMurray, owner of MAC1 airguns out in California. The USFT stands for United Stated Field Target (I think). Tim makes each one, by hand, himself. When I ordered mine, the phone conversation was a little over an hour long. We discussed back and forth what I wanted (what side I wanted the breech to open to, barrel length, tube length, color, type of barrel, caliber, accessories, and other configuration details) and he gave me a time frame. Custom is NOT fast, by the way.
As an intro, the USFT is widely known amongst the field target and benchrest crowd, and equally foreign to the large number of airgunners not involved in the aforementioned competitive events. For that reason, I feel it might be beneficial to share what I've learned about my specimen over the past few years of ownership. And if not beneficial, perhaps at least entertaining, for the USFT is a collection of oddities in airgun design. And it truly looks the part.
View attachment 164954 If ever there was a less gun-looking gun, I'm unaware of it. The USFT appears to be leftovers from what you might find in the bed of a plumbers pickup after a day of replacing pipes. But what it lacks in aesthetic appeal, it more than makes up for in performance and convenience.
A detailed break down of the outstanding performance and rock-steady reliability I've experienced from this gun in the last 3 years is what I hope to achieve through an ongoing series of write-ups. I plan to take it at a leisurely pace, creating new posts as time allows. This won't be the typical "review," as there's no motivation to sell them, so there will be no "hawking of wares" in this series of posts about the venerable USFT.
If I've not got your attention yet, how does a gun that only needs to be filled to 1450psi sound? How bout a gun for which barrel swaps are so easy that 16mm Lothar blanks don't need machined to fit, just whatever smoothing you want to do to the crown? How bout a gun that allows direct access to the rear of the barrel for cleaning? What about a gun with an exposed valve stem that is hit by a revolver-esque hammer that is cocked for each shot? How bout a gun for which no regulator is necessary yet is still capable of competition winning consistency? How bout a gun with the fill port and gauge at the rear so that you don't have to look down the business end of the barrel to fill or check pressure? How bout a gun so simple in it's design that most of us have more fingers than all of the orings in the entire gun? How bout a gun with so many innovative features (when it first came out) that the rumor goes that Mike Nisch used it as inspiration for his Thomas guns? How bout the OG power plenum?
I hope to answer all of those questions and more as I analyze what makes the USFT tic, and the performance the atomic clock of ticking that the USFT is, provides.
More to come.
Love that KTM orange! Also, I started making cuts on that block of laminate that I purchased over a year ago, with the goal of making some new furniture for my #132
