Condor .22 SS

Hello All,

This is my first post on my Condor SS .22. Up to this point I’ve been lurking and only answering questions that I had answers to. However I believe it is time to do a review on my Condor SS .22 with spin lock. I feel compelled to do this review mainly to share what I’ve found and what I can prove, and finally in defense of the Airforce Guns themselves. Sometimes I believe they get a bad rap either by haters or those who have maybe spent a week with the condor and believe they know enough to review it, which they don’t. If I wasn’t able to get the Condor to become a truly great gun, I wouldn’t even be doing this review and would have sold it.

When first Purchasing the Condor I was amazed at all the differing opinions out there. On pyramid air one guy wrote that the gun was extremely loud and if you want a gun that you can only shoot once in a while and is really loud then buy this gun. It just shows that they let any yahoo write whatever they want on the internet. He didn’t say how loud or compared to what or what his idea of loud was. So the facts are for me the gun gets 98 db outdoors and 104 db indoors, which I attribute to the sound waves bouncing off the walls. But in my opinion anything under 100 db. is fairly quiet not silent, but silencing 42 fpe down to 98 db is very good.

I’ve shot my condor a lot sometimes during the summer almost everyday, so I have really gotten good with it. Almost all of the things I say are going to be backed up by proof either through the written data, pictures, or the target groups I’ve shot and measured. It amazes me how many people can just spout off on a subject and say such BS, I want to scream where’s the proof? where’s all he data? You can’t just say that… Am I right?????

My background is mostly military I did 2 years in S. Korea along the DMZ. 3 Tours in Afghanistan and now I’m an engineer, a damn good engineer. 🙂

Accuracy:

This is of a 5 shot group. At 25 yards shot with JSB 18.1. I weighed and sorted them so the actual weight is 17.9 grain. When I was shooting this I thought the gun was broken and it wasn’t shooting the pellet because they all went into the same hole I saw no to little impact on the target. BTW this was so cool 🙂

This is how accurate I’ve gotten my gun to shoot, it molded into one glob and I retrieved it from my duct seal pellet trap like this. It didn’t start out this accurate at all. I’ve become a better shot with this gun as well which has a huge amount to do with accuracy. If you can’t shoot to begin with the gun’s accuracy doesn’t matter that much.

I attribute the accuracy to a few things. First the scope is mounted correctly, I have spirit level on the gun which helps a lot with the condor because it is very easy to tilt and not realize it. Second I have a good regulator which I can prove gets about a max of 5fps spread across a 10 shot group. Finally I attribute this level of accuracy to weighing my pellets, before I started weighing I didn’t get this tight of groups they were good but not this good. I have heard so many people say that weighing doesn’t effect accuracy and to those people I can say this, your wrong. I can prove it, not only in group size but in just the fps spread that you get when pellets aren’t sorted. You can’t get a really close fps spread if your pellets vary in weight as much as .6 grains. This has nothing to do with your gun or with the regulator it has to do with the laws of physics. Weight will effect speed period. Which will effect group size. In my experience JSB exact 18.1 can very as much as .6 grains per pellet.

I use this to weigh my pellets. It was hard to get it to work at first and I almost returned it, but then I read the manual again. At first I would weigh a pellet and set it aside and then come back and weigh it later and it would weigh different. I was perplexed at first but then I realized that you get better results with the powder measure tin sitting on the scale and then zeroing the scale and weighing the pellet. I think it has to do with pressure being applied before just plopping the pellet down. Also zeroing the scale each time you weigh a pellet. I also check calibration every 50 or so pellets to make sure its still right on. After doing all this the scale works great. Even if it’s the wrong weight say by really really accurate standards its ok as long as I can group the pellets by the same weight even if it technically isn’t exactly correct.

I don’t get too crazy with this weighing stuff because it can get nuts to weigh stuff down to the .1 of a grain. So I’ve learned to weigh according to 3 different categories, light, medium, heavy. That is to say that a pellet can be grouped together if it weighs within .1 or .2 grains of each other. So say with JSB 18.1 I will group 17.8, 17.9, 18.0 all in one group then move on to the other 2 groups. I feel this is good enough, maybe if I was shooting competition I might get real nuts with it. 🙂

This is my gun, as you can see it is very stock. Except for the air tank and regulator. My regulator is from Pure Energy which makes regulators for paintball guns. I took the regulator apart and changed the springs and added nylon shims I also replaced the burst disc to airgun levels of 3k for regulator 5k for bottle. I bought this to test and it turned out to be a really great regulator base to start from and build my own. The tank is huge I get lots of shots. I won’t go to much into regulators but they do make a big difference. I so far have tested out 20fpe and 25fpe and I think 25fpe is more accurate. I will be building another regulator to shoot 900 FPS so I don’t know the accuracy yet at that speed. It takes time and a lot of work, but that’s part of the fun for me.

Overall I’ve been lucky. My scope is a Barska 4-24 X 44 AO swat style with a fine wire reticule. It works very very good the turrets work correctly, it’s poi. never changes on its own, the glass is very clear. Yes its a cheap scope but I really like mine. Most people in my experience don’t know how to work their scopes at all I can tell the second they pick up a gun or scope whether they know what their doing, just by what they’re looking for the scope to do or have. Without a good scope “forget about it”.

Ive been lucky with the gun itself it has a very nice barrel on it. The day I brought it home I put a bore scope through it and was very pleased, ran a rag through it and it was completely clean.

As you can see I measure almost everything I do and I’m not done yet with this gun. It’s a lot of work to properly get a gun going so my advise is to keep at it, keep shooting my friends!!!!!!!