Well, I shot the Red Panda yesterday and today with a little over 1,000 pellets down the pipe. Here are my initial observations:
- Fit and finish is extraordinarily good, easily on par with FX, AAA, AA, Daystate and other premium brands.
- It’s heavy, extremely heavy but weight is your friend on the bench.
- There is no doubt It’s a purpose built BR rifle for sure.
- If the safety is engaged, you can pull the cocking lever back but it won’t engage the hammer.
- Cocking is extremely smooth and quite easy for a .30 cal. Easily done with one finger.
- It can be single loaded as the mag well is wide open. However, the rear edge is quite sharp and my thumb is quite sore and red from single loading.
- Some barrels prefer to shoot lubed pellets but this one likes the pellets straight from the tin.
- The rear air tank makes a good bag rider if you are so inclined to shoot from a bag?
- The rifle’s gages are set up for a right hand shooter which is appreciated being a righty.
- The Foster fill fitting is on the rear right side. I like to shoot tethered and would prefer it either on the left side or in another location that doesn’t interfere with my shooting hand.
- This is my first experience with an Arca Swiss rail. I had to order an adapter for my AccuTac bipod. However, I found it very easy to slide the bipod to any position along the rail’s full length. I like it.
- The gun, in its present tune is an air hog. I only got two mags before the pressure dropped from 4100 to 3000 psi.
Now for the Range report… Yesterday I used my FX pocket crony and the speeds made no sense to me. The first shots were 875 and then the speeds fell quickly. The “shooting” reg was set to 2150-ish and the 1st reg was set to 2900 and the main air tank was at 4100. All gauges are in PSI but it’s stamped on the side to fill to 300 BAR? The HS was set to the middle position as was the transfer port. There is no manual included with the rifle so I deferred to the few YouTube videos I could find on tuning.
I left the reg alone and played with the HS adjuster but again the speeds made no sense as it would go up and down. For example one 70 shot string had an extreme spread of 243 FPS, yes you read that correctly, 243 spread with a 38 standard deviation! I got sooooo frustrated and headed home thinking the FX Crony was the tool that couldn’t be trusted. Today I returned to the range with my Digital Pro Crono and used it in conjunction with my FX and lo and behold they agreed with one another, as I had verified in last range trips. Uh oh
this is not good. I decided to put the HS setting back to factory setting in the middle and then started adjusting the transfer port and finally I was able to quickly move the velocity up or down with VERY little adjustment off of factory center.
I was tuning for JSB 50 grain pellets and wanted to get them up between 920 - 940 and could easily do that with the transfer port adjuster. Once the speeds were at 925-930 I started drilling a ragged hole at 100 but after just a few shots the velocity rapidly dropped. Long story and lots of $$$ pellets later I discovered the transfer port setting was not holding. I could see the adjuster would move one or two graduations even though I had the locking nut on the right side as tight as my fingers could turn it, without using a tool. I couldn’t shoot a full mag without the speed falling off so I couldn’t verify the tuning was in harmony. Again another frustrating day and a loss of hundreds of $$$ pellets $$$.
I believe the rifle has a LOT of potential so don’t read too much negativity into my initial review. After I got home I made a call to Donny FL and they suggested adding a TINY drop of BLUE LocTite to the threads of the locking nut. I removed the nut, well actually it is a male threaded stud with a thumb head cap, cleaned the threads and added a SMALL drop of BLUE LocTite and it’s back in the safe to set up. It’s going to be a week before I can get back to testing again so I will report back next week. In the interim here are targets I shot today at 100Y. When the speed was up and holding, that is when I was able to shoot a single under dime sized ragged hole. BUT, when the transfer port adjustment slipped and the velocity dropped off the groups quickly opened up. I’m not posting cherry picked groups, just as the targets were shot by a Joe Average shooter.
3.5k for the MCAR? Ugh... that's a nope.
