Mike Morton reveals how to use felt cleaning pellets with your spring powered rifle
Using felt pellets can be an effective way to maintain your springer
Q. How do you use felt cleaning pellets with a springer?
A. Felt cleaning pellets are excellent tools for giving the bore of your gun a gentle maintenance clean – but they do need to be used with care. Most people understand that dry-firing a springer is a bad idea. When a pellet is fired, the air pressure that builds up behind the projectile acts as a buffer, protecting the piston when it comes to the end of its travel. If you fire a springer without a pellet in the breech you’ll take away this beneficial effect. Felt pellets, being much lighter and offering little resistance compared with a lead pellet, don’t provide the same cushioning effect, so shooting one of these on its own is almost as bad as dry-firing the gun.
The solution is to push a felt pellet into the breech, then seat a lead pellet immediately behind it. The cleaning pellet will still do its job as it travels down the barrel, while the air cushion provided by the lead pellet will protect the piston. Felt cleaning pellets can be very loud when fired in a PCP, but the lead pellet-behind-felt pellet method keeps everything nice and quiet in a springer.
After shooting a few pellets (typically five), head downrange when it’s safe to do so and see if you can recover any of the shot felt pellets. The last one or two should have come out perfectly clean.
This article originally appeared in the issue 106 of Airgun Shooter magazine. For more great content like this, subscribe today at our secure online store: www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk
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