Range Report 06-20-09

I took the children to Dad's house while my Darling Wife went to a baby shower. One of my hopes for the visit was to see if his CB caps would go all the way through the barrel of my Marlin 60. He couldn't find the CBs but he did have some Aguila Super Colibris. I did some research when I got home and one retailer says it sounds like a loud airgun when fired. To me, it sounded quieter than my pellet rifle, but I didn't do a side-by-side comparison (yet).

Everyone says to use it only in handguns, because that's what the lawyers had Aguila put on the box. I can tell you for certain, it WILL fire from a Marlin Model 60 or a Winchester Model 69B if the barrel is clean and in good condition. Both are full-length rifles and it fires them out with enough speed to smear the lead on concrete 40-ish feet away and make an impressive splash in the birdbath at that range. As expected and advertised, it did not cycle the action in my Marlin, and (due to the shorter overall length*) we had to hold it muzzle-down to chamber a round. My dad said he did see one of the rounds he fired veering like a curve ball out of his Winchester, but overall accuracy was suitable for backyard plinking (which is what we were doing).

I'll have to see how they group out of my Marlin, but this might be THE solution for my pigeon problem**

When we finished plinking, dad gave me a few rounds of the Aguila, and I gave him some CCI Mini-Mags to fill the empty holes in his cartridge box. Then we took my sister out in the front yard to show her the difference between the high velocity and the primer-only rounds. She shot a gnarly old oak tree with the Aguila and I actually saw the bullet bounce back straight toward me and stop in the weeds halfway. Then she fired a CCI mini-mag, which made a 2" blast zone in the bark and embedded the bullet at least 1/2" into the tree. When we went up to inspect the tree, we did find one little piece of bark was missing from the Super Colibri round's impact.

*Difference in Overall Length:



**The Super Colibri is short because it has a half-weight bullet. That's still 3x heavier than a standard .177cal. pellet (typically 7.9 grain), and it should hit much harder on a pigeon. Now I'm wondering if I can pull out one of the much cheaper CCI 40-grain bullets, dump its powder, and use just the primer to fire its bullet. That should be murder on crows. And pigeons. Oh . . . nevermind. That was a crow joke but you were government educated so you missed it.

::sigh::

Anyhow, I crunched some numbers and they look good. The Aguilas are supposed to head out at around 500FPS, which gets around 10FPE on a bird. That is solidly middle-of-the-pack when it comes to .22cal. pellet rifles, but a 16 foot-pounds pellet rifle is about as loud as a .22LR rifle shot. The Aguilas are quiet. For comparison, my Daisy 880 (20th Anniversary Special Edition, with metal receiver and rifled barrel, thank you very much!) is supposed to launch around 700 feet per second a 7.9 grain pellet for a whopping 8 to 9 ft/lbs. of energy on target. Note that the smaller, faster projectile is a strategy for penetration, and as I have noted before, it does too good a job at that! Now if I could get a .22 caliber 40 grain bullet on a pigeon at a few hundred feet per second, THAT would pack a wallop! I'd have to make them count, though . . . the neighbors across the subdivision wouldn't appreciate finding a .22 in their car having gone through a window. The risk of hurting a person, I think is about nil but I don't want to send random bullets flying around the sky, that's just rude! The brighter glass on my Marlin would help with that whole "can't see it!" problem as well.

Shooting is fun. Shooting subsonics in the yard is more fun.