Difference between OLD & NEW .25 BSA barrels
Rumours?
I have read on some different fora and heard on several occasions that the .25 BSA barrels aren’t as good as they used to be.
For instance on the first two pages off this topic:
http://www.talonairgun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=28679
One of the guys at my shooting club fitted a BSA .25 blank to his Edgun R3 Long.
But after shooting it swapped it back to the stock .25 Edgun/LW barrel.
Old BSA .25 barrels.
I own an ‘old’ BSA Lonestar in .25 caliber. Which shoots as good as a BSA .25 barrel should shoot.
If the shooter is up to it, it can produce ragged hole groups at 100m.
This is the rifle which took me to the third place overall of the 100m matches in the Netherlands 2013.
If i push a JSB King .25 pellet through the barrel of my old .25 Lonestar it looks like this:
Which shows exactly the same marks as shown on the left pellet in this picture by Wingman NZ:
New BSA .25 barrels.
However if i push a .25 JSB through the .25 BSA Scorpion SE barrel i bought last week it looks like this:
Sorry for the crappy photos. I dont seem to be able to take decent macro pictures with my Lumia 1020 yet.
Luckily, Veerkracht send me a photo of a .25 JSB pushed through another newer BSA .25 barrel (this was a BSA blank) which showed the same rifling:
I fitted the .25 Scorpion SE barrel in one of my other Lonestars, which i will take to the 100m range this evening to see how it groups.
Difference in grouping?
What is your experience with the difference between the old and new .25 BSA barrels?
Are the newer barrels as accurate as the old ones at large distances (minimal 50 meters)?
.25 BSA Blanks no longer available
FYI: BSA no longer sell .25 barrel blanks at the moment. ❗
Apparently since BSA offer almost all their models in .25 caliber nowadays, they dont have enough capacity to make .25 blanks to sell as spare.
Knibbs from airgunspares mailed me the following:
”.25 blanks are not being supplied as a spare by BSA anymore. So they will never be available again, sorry.
Thank you for your enquiry,
Regards,
Mark Knibbs.
John Knibbs International Ltd
Hillside
Shawbury Lane
Shustoke
Warwickshire
B46 2RR
01675 481006
http://www.airgunspares.com”
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Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
I have 3 bsa .25 Cal barrels, 2 old ones from around 10 years ago and one I bought from John knibbs last year, main difference is older barrels have much tighter bores around .243 and I have to use a custom pellet size to ease loading of normal pellets,
the new barrel from john knibbs is an insert crimped into a tube by the looks of it and bore size is huge,, pellets almost fall through, never seen anything like it, good news is I have lyman 257 mold and bullets are perfect size tightish to load but eased that by polishing a leade int the barrel, total pish for pellets though, :4:
I have a 22 and 25 cal blank turned and fit to Marauder actions. They are both about 2 years old, and are of the new style rifling. If anybody has a blank of the old style rifling, I volunteer to fit it and test extensively. Trade for a bottle kit perhaps? 25 cal preferred…:)
cheers,
Douglas
Guess mine were new type land & grooves but not with the marking on them.
The new ones do. They got BSA birmingham snallarms and the logo written on them.
@ Marc, thanks for the info. 🙂
What do you mean with ‘The forced in writing at breech end has restricted the bore.’?
All the BSA Blanks i bought from Knibbs over the years didn’t have writing or logo’s on it.
Did some barrelwork this weekend, and found the same. That’s not to say it is a bad thing.
Did 2 BSA blanks and 1 LW barrel.
Obeservations.
-Steel is different, old barrels were almost like free machining steel this is much grainier and seems to have a higher sensile strength. Machining finish is closer to LW than to the old style BSA.
-You can chop 15mm from crown end. The barrel actually gets looser after the chocke. Tool runout??
-Very long choke about 30mm
-The forced in writing at breech end has restricted the bore. If it were me and you don’t need the complete length I would chop that too! It’s about 80mm.
-Outside diameter of blanks is no longer a ground finish. But just as it came out of the forging machine.
-Bore runout is more as it used to be! About 0.1mm. Think that is because they skip the grinding now.
-Inside finish is pretty rough.
-Blueing is even worse than it used to be.
Will take a while before I can test but time will tell.
Also did a LW .25 blank.
Observations I made with that blank
-Inside finish is excellent! Very smooth!!
-Very nice little choke on the very end 5-10mm of the barrel
-Need very sharp tools to achive smooth finish even more so than the new BSA blanks
-Bore is off centre almost 0.2mm. If you dial in on the bore my indicator almost varied 0.4mm on the outside diam!!
If I’d had to choose just by feel I’d go with the LW, but only shooting both barrel will tell the whole story
Picture of pellets pushed through. From L–>R
-BSA old style
-BSA new style
-LW
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I also thought the bore on the new barrels would be to big for pellets. But i was surprised at the results.
I bought a BSA Scorpion SE barrel .25 (385mm long) and fitted it in a Lonestar.
It is a new style barrel, and i was very curious about its performance at 100 meters.
Below are the project and some of its first groups at 100 meters (indoor).
I’m quite satisfied with the groups. These were the first pellets i put through the barrel and groups are still improving.
(100 m, 10 shots)
(100 m, 5 shots)
Diameter of the 2 euro coin is 25.75 mm.
Both groups were shot lying down of a bipod, back of the stock unsupported.
I used JSB Kings (.25) at 250 – 252 m/s.