New & and hope to contribute as well as learn

Greetings everyone. I’m newly registered but am a long-time reader of this forum– It’s excellent. I come with a lot of stored up questions that I can’t answer by myself by relying only on reading old and new posts to this forum. I promise I won’t be blurting them out all at once though.

A Little Background:

I own a 24″ Condor with a low-flow tank, tuned and scoped to fire 18.1gr JSBs at 890-950 fps at a 5-20 yard range for varmint-control purposes (forty clean kills since Sept. 1st of this year plus 5 misses just from one walnut tree). I dedicated a month target shooting 20-80 pellets a day, zeroed at 10yds, also checking for the required hold-over for 20yds. I went up and down the scale of various tank-pressure fills and power-wheel settings until I settled on a 2550psi fill and 8/8 power-wheel setting. I now get 40 useful laser-accurate shots before refilling. All that required pumping on my Hill pump affected my lower back. But I’ve strengthened and immunized it by engaging in some over-all physical conditioning and muscle strengthening. A shroud on my Condor allows me to take opportune shots quietly and invisibly from behind a wooden 6 1/2 ft tall gate at the side of my house from where I have a view of 4/5 of the walnut tree crown in my front yard. Neighbors who happen to be milling about in their driveways or porches hear nothing when I fire. And the beeline of the falling mass of the varmint falling to the ground is so instantaneous that it too has gone unnoticed forty times. The dead varmints fall in a sun-dappled area below the tree that’s planted with bushes and covered with cedar bark that, viewed from the street or the neighbors’ living room picture windows, blocks or camouflages any inert shapes like that of a gray dead varmint on the ground. It’s been simply a matter of non-chalantly walking through the gate and retrieving the kill as if it were the most natural thing to my neighbors to see me appear and momentarily busy myself with picking up dead branches or nuts in my front yard and placing them at the bottom of a wheelbarrow (along with the sneaked-in dead varmint).

With my position in the community, the sensitiveness of people toward killing “cute furry creatures”, and the fact that I’m doing this in a residential area– my varminting with the Condor within city limits does have to be kept unpublicized. So I’ve worked at being absolutely safety conscious and efficient at this my initial purpose of varmint control– I was looking for no noise, pin-point accuracy and lethalness every time, and no exposing my activity. I purchased a Gamo Cat break-barrel at first and then immediately, looking for efficiency, a Condor. My initial mission has been pretty much completed now. Where in years past I used to look out the window and see 3 or 4 varmints scurrying about digging up the lawn or sitting smugly in the forks and branches of the tree and gnawing away on a walnut, now there’s just a silent still-life picture of lawn and tree with no telling signs of dug up grass or twitching leaves and swaying branches in the tree. Having settled on the Condor’s settings (for now, for varmint purposes), and with forty kills from that tree that seems to have decimated the population, I’m left with only having to check my zero daily by shooting one or two pellets a day at a target and keeping track of how many shots out of forty accurate shots I have left. The zero is consistent and unchanging. When my Garage Alarm (recommended in a post) at the base of the tree goes off and I have to go take care of business– which is hardly ever anymore—I don’t miss the kill zone of my target. Less pumping of the Hill pump — which is every 2 weeks or so now— also has helped my back recover. And my wife is very content with my results and happy that I harvested a now abundant amount of nuts to pay for part of the cost of the Condor and accessories.

My Condor rests on a rifle rest in our living room, I can pick it up quickly on a signal from the Alarm and head out the back door to the garage to take a quick off-hand shooting position behind the gate. My wife has not complained about the Condor being displayed at the base of the fireplace because of the positive tool it has been to me in protecting her landscaping and because she knows how much I respect what my Condor can do. The rifle, with shroud, has the lines of one long linear black needle and she knows I love the looks of it. I am a former road and tournament money pool player and aiming and sighting the Condor is quite similar to the feel of sighting down the length of my custom-made pool sticks. Plus the taking into account of all the variables involved when shooting an airgun and mastering it, as one does a pool stick on the green felt, is quite a satisfying challenge. Concerning the lines of the Condor, I will express that when I see add-on accessories that change the horizontality of its needle-like sleekness or distort its tank shape or alter the length-long uniformity of its black wasp color I tend to be dismayed or slightly grimace at the mouth. But those concerns are question-and-discussion for later. For now I am just introducing my arrival to airgun shooting and to the forum.

I also have come to wanting to buy another precision pcp— a bullpup. And I have questions about that whole business of bullpups and the lack of choice. But I’d like to bring up that subject later to find out what everybody else thinks. To sum up, I’m very happy with my Condor and look forward to participating in this forum. I am not engineering- or machinist-savvy, but I am looking to learn about lathing and milling because I have some airgun and accessories concepts that I would like to try my hand at creating like I see other forum members doing. Machining tools and machining techniques are also things I’d like some advice about.

That’s a little about where I’m coming from. I’m looking forward to this.