Tuning my Condor; Steps to speed up finding the sweet spot

Back in May I bought my first PCP, a .177 AirForce Condor. I had great hopes of having a powerful tack driver with lots of shots between fills. That didn’t happen out of the box, but because of the modularity of the platform I now have something that I’m very satisfied with, a silent .22 that will at least drive quarters at 35 yards. And in the process I’ve found a repeatable process for getting to a good tune on a complex system with many variables that all seem to interact to affect accuracy. Some of this will be different than what others have posted, for those new to the Airforce platform this is an alternate plan that you can try as well as what others are doing. I hope it helps.

First let me describe my rig. Blue Condor with the red tip safety and the spinloc tank, a home made baffle system that cost about $2.00 that reduces the discharge noise to almost zero. I have a 62 cu. in. jdsairman tank and regulator now set at 1950psi connected via an Airforce CO2 adapter, and the most recent addition – a supersear. Oh yea, and a poor excuse for a tripod from Airforce.

So here is my ‘tuning’ routine.

When I change bottles I adjust the top hat so that there is no play between the breach knob and the frame. This way the breach is in exactly the same place for each shot, trapped between the top hat and the frame. It may also reduce the ability of the breach to bounce as much when the valve slams shut.

Then I turn the power wheel to zero and start to shoot one pellet at a time and adjust the power wheel up one full turn with each shot until the pellet stops climbing. At this point I know that there is little advantage from going farther up on the power wheel from a trajectory perspective.

At this point I know that somewhere between the current setting and the setting two turns lower is where the trajectory flattens out. I now start to back down the power wheel 1/2 turn at a time until the pellets start to drop and I note this setting. I found that for me this will be the minimum setting because I don’t want to have to figure out trajectory when trying to hunt. I can only get sight lines out to about 50 yards because of the dense woods and with this gun anyway the trajectory stays flat that far with the JSP Jumbo Heavy pellets that I use most.

Now I shoot three shot groups and adjust the power wheel up half turns until the groups start to open up badly. This is the max power that the pellet will tolerate. I’ve tried going higher in power hoping to find another plateau but to date it’s never happened.

Lastly, I back down the power wheel about a quarter turn ( four points on the wheel’s dial ) until the groups get their best. I have found that temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure can influence the sweet spot a bit so if I start shooting and the groups open up from the start I may try going up or down a few points on the power wheel just to fine tune the gun to the weather.

I hope this helps some of the new folks when they are trying to get everything flowing smoothly.