Weihrauch HW90 has Arrived

[CharlieF]

When you are using a mechanical spring in an airgun, you are creating excessive compression to the spring, Normally, you don’t want to stress a spring past 50% compression to maintain reliability, but that doesn’t work in a spring gun. Instead, you compress the spring almost 100%. You take up almost all the gap between the spring coils to get ultimate performance, and over time that tends to weaken the spring. Plus, if you leave it cocked, you’re taking even more life out of the spring. So you use special materials and do special heat treatments to deal with that, but you’re basically fighting a losing battle. The spring gradually degrades

A Piston, powerplant eliminates the weak link in the system. The gas doesn’t care if it is compressed, it’s not going to degrade the life of the power plant, The life of a Piston powerplant is easily twice that of a spring, and at the end of that time, it will shoot close to the original numbers. It’s either working completely fine, or it’s not working at all.

A Piston powerplant has few moving parts, there is no spring torque, no vibration, no need for spring guides. To make a spring powerplant really quiet and vibration free, you have to custom fit inner and outer spring guides because every spring is slightly different, You don’t have to do that with a piston powerplant. There are billions of gas springs in use throughout the world. Automobile manufactures have adopted them because of their reliability, and we know how to make them with high precision. With a Piston gas spring powerplant in your airgun, you get a lot of the advantages of an expensive, custom-tuned powerplant at a more affordable price.

The theoban piston offers a further advantage of being power adjustable whereas the Nitro Piston is fixed For many it just comes down to what you are comfortable with There is nothing wrong with a springer, if that is what you enjoy There are many different ways to put a pellet on target each will get it there, it just boils down to what you enjoy the most

 

[JayJay]

IMHO, the primary benefit of gas-ram technology is the ability to easily tune the power level. One of the great pleasures of airguns is playing with the tech. However, only the Theobens (HW90/RX) deliver that potential and you'll have to buy a gauge, pump, and fittings.

Gas-rams can also provide higher power in a smaller space than a traditional springer. A metal spring is limited by the available space and can bind up, whereas the gas in a ram occupies essentially no space and can be charged to very high levels. You can store more energy in a smaller space. I think this is how Gamo gets such high power levels out of their lightweight Magnum series. They use a small ram with very high pressure. But I have read the Gamo ram has reliability problems. Or is it the Hatsans? I forget.

There are many fine gas ram rifles that don't offer easy ram tuning or rebuilding. They actually offer LESS tuneability than a regular springer. At this point, the only gas-ram that interests me is the HW90. All my other guns are regular springers. 

If Weihrauch came out with a gas-ram HW30 or HW50 that has the same adjustability as the HW90, I would buy it in an instant.