Survival UK Forums

Oh my goodness, am I really going to date to start a threat about what's the best calibre to have? Urm....kind of.

I have had some thoughts on this and have come to a thought that might annoy some people, because it's about uber SHTF as in TEOTWAWKI style event outcome. Very extreme, but hey, if you're ready for that, anything smaller should be a snowflake instead of a blizzard.

If everything does go totally TU and it's really bad, if you need an air rifle as a survival tool (it just means you're not prepped right haha, I'm kidding) then you'll need ammo for that rifle.

If you have a .177 rifle, then you're going to have a good time with longer range and less of a dramatic curve/arch for trajectory. Obviously you're limited to accepting .177 ammo.

If you have a .22, you have a much more obvious parabolic trajectory for your pellets, which you can mitigate and get used to with enough practice, however, you can use .22, .20, and even .177 pellets in your gun. Granted it will lose accuracy and power when shooting smaller pellets, but you'll have that option, at least.

There is always the notion of the changeable barrels. You know, the guns where you can swap a barrel from .177 to .22 calibre. However, these are typically not that fantastic performance...plus I am not the best at keeping track of where parts are. I would probably end up losing one of the barrels.

Rest assured, there is a solution, albeit not a great one, and a stunningly obvious one.

If you have a .177 and find loads of .22 ammo, but did not store enough .177 pellets, you are in a real problem. That is, providing you don't also have a .22 rifle.

Simple hu? Get a spare rifle that's the other calibre. Problem solved.

Next month I'm getting another rifle. Identical to the .177 I am currently using, but in .22 calibre. How will I know them apart? I'm going to use a slightly different camo pattern on the 2 guns. Both patterns will work, but the different colours will let me know which one is which calibre.

There is also one other option, it'll be time consuming, but could be worth it. Have a system to modify/change the pellets you have into the ones you need. This could be as simple as a metal file, to smooth off a little material from a .22 pellet to make it into .177, or it could be a complete melt, mould, cool, load, shoot, type of system. But, if you have a way to convert the pellets you have into pellets you can use, that's even better. One of the best things about this system, you can reuse the pellets from target practice, if you can melt and remould them!

Or, you simply use say half of the money you would of used to buy the second rifle to buy loads and loads of pellets of your preferred calibre and then have a couple of buried cache's, that you can access whenever needed.

You did afterall previously mention about the importance of standardising on such things to avoid such mismatch problems....

http://forum.survivaluk.net/showthread.php?tid=6942

Well if it's a shtf scenario I'm not restricted to current firearms laws so I would go for .22 running around 18 ftlb's in my HW80.If I was not comfortable with tuning I would stick to .177 and still feel perfectly happy taking game with it.

Years ago I bought a Spitzer mould and did some experimenting with casting my own pellets.Accuracy was very poor at anything other than very close range.Considering the fact that pellets are still relatively cheap I would much rather stock up quality pellets that suit my rifle than try to reshape or cast.

Hunting for survival would be challenge enough,I would want the odds in my favour as much as possible.Trying to hunt with a home cast or modified pellet makes no sense to me.

For the cost of a second .22 air gun, even a cheap one, plus a couple of thousand pellets, you could purchase around 10,000 .177 pellets.

How long would it take to reshape 10,000 .22 pellets? And even if you could do so, their accuracy would be rubbish in comparison to professionally moulded ones.

Using at a rate of 15 shots per day, that would support almost two years hunting.

I'm with Devonian on this. Buy extra pellets now and cache them ( low cost .177s can be had for around £10 / 1000

We have both .177 and .22 rifles. Different guns for different purposes. Two of them are almost identical to look at on first glance. Your idea about different camo patterns is a good one.

Shooting 0.177 pellets from a 0.22 spring powered rifle will wreck it rapidly. The rifle relies on the pressure in the cylinder to stop the piston from slamming into the end, a 0.177 pellet will not seal well enough to provide this "cushion" of air. Accuracy will be laughable, the pellet will not pick up any spin from the rifling and will be trying to tumble before it even leaves the barrel. If you absolutely have to use pellets of one calibre in another, get a pair of pliers and squash several pellets into a round ball that fits the barrel. You can do this with any lead you can find. A lead ball or cylinder can be "bumped up" to better fit a barrel by hitting it from both sides with metal rod whilst it is in the barrel, you could use this method to make a batch of pellets before leaving home, you need to take care not to damage your barrel with the metal rods.

Far better to buy a large stock of decent pellets in the first place.

I agree with Steve and lightspeed , just stock up on pellets for whichever calibre you plump for....as for two of the same gun in different calibre's I personally wouldn't do that just because in the excitement of the hunt you may hold over/under for the wrong gun as they feel identical in the shoulder....the plus side of two of a kind is there may be some commonality of parts if you're lucky.....deffo pick a calibre and stock up on pellets after you've found which suit your gun....bulk deal's are available , I know of a shop that will deffo do 10% of the marked price(reasonable to start with) for 10 tins and is open to further negotiations for bigger quantities.

Great info there guys.

Thank you.

I hang my head in shame, but am still very pleased that some great stuff has come out as a result...silver lining, I guess.

Steve, I had not thought about the cylinder impacts.

DEV, spot on about my earlier post on standardising.

Talon, great thoughts about increasing power, I think Monty said about keeping stronger springs around for just that reason.

LS and MNM, great points too guys.

I was wrong. Over thinking a solution is not always the smartest thing to do haha. My bad, sorry guys.

Another nice thing about the .22 ???

SHTF and WROL, it takes about 1 hour to turn the barrel of your .22 airgun into a serviceable and accurate .22 rimfire rifle!

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Gives the real increase in power everyone craves and needs.

caliber is irrelvant, as long as you have the pellets!

I go for .22, purely because the air rifle I purchased from NR (before he wanted to beat me) was in that caliber. I did have another .22 springer, but some scrote pinched it from my mums garage. I've got about 10,000 pellets in .22. Next purchase will be a .177 when I decide which one I want.

Can't find an Edgar Brothers XVI anywhere, especially for a decent price, and Logun S16s are getting more and more difficult to source