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jlwilliams · Veteran Member

Been having fun with a Daisy 99 for a while, and that has got me thinking more about BB guns in general. An obvious question comes to mind. What's the most powerful BB gun out there? There are lots of pellet rifles claiming 1000fps and even some claiming 1200fps. Are there, or has there ever been a production BB gun that breaks a thousand?

Just curious, and I figure this is the place to ask.

jlwilliams · Veteran Member

I posted this same question on another forum, and asked a local airgun guru what he knew about it. Since this thread got a number of views, but no responses, I figure maybe some of you have wondered this same thing but none know. I'll share what little I have found.

As can be expected, there really isn't much out there. 'High performanc' and 'BB' don't find themselves together in many sentences. There have been a few one offs that were fairly punchy, for a steel BB. Some of the best BB rifles have been the older Benjamin multi pump rifles. In years past they offered a number of models with smooth bores. A smooth brass barrel does fairly well as long as the BB and the bore are a good match. The 3100 was a pump up BB repeater that has a reputation for having been a really good gun. Brass, steel, walnut and good quality controll add up to good results. I'm sure no one is too surprised about that. Benjamin also made a CO2 bolt action model called the 3030. It used an 8g tube behind the breach. It was aparently pretty powerful, for a CO2 BB gun. The modern gun that has the reputation as the bad boy with BBs is the Drozd. There are lots of guys modding them up and they can aparently be impressive.

There is also an Itallian gun worth mentioning, but it is debatable if it's really a "BB gun" because it uses copper plated lead not steel. The SM45 by Marocchi is a 90 round semi auto powered by an 88g CO2 tube. It looks like a hot performer, though it is a little outside the parameters of the question. Still, pretty cool and something I wanted to bring to your attention.

There have been some neat Chinese pumpers made. I didn't find much info about them. Only that they made some.

Anyway, that's all I have found. Just to reiterate, I don't think the persuit of a high performance BB gun is all that realistic. The question popped to mind, so I threw it out there.

Slavia · Moderator

0.177" lead BB's are available, so I suppose you could take just about any high-powered PCP gun and really make them zip.

Steel BB's are substantially under bore size (Beeman's catalog says down to 0.162"). I imagine that's so a cheap stamped action can feed them without jamming. I experimented for a while with BB sabots in a smoothbore Crosman 760. I took some plastic pellets, pried the lead nose out, and muzzle-loaded them as sabots behind steel BB's. (I also tried the Zimmersteutzen 4.3mm lead balls.) There was a modest increase in velocity, and no improvement in accuracy. Certainly nothing to merit the extra complexity.

My personal conclusion was to quit trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and to let BB's be BB's. (How's that for alliteration.) BB's have a place, certainly - they make repeating mechanisms cost effective, they're cheap, and they can be accurate at close range (like 5m).

By that I don't mean to say it's a stupid question, nor would I discourage anyone from experimenting. This forum is full of people that take airguns to ridiculous lengths. A 1500 FPS BB gun would be cool, if not just for the bragging rights.

crazycat98 · New Member

radar · Silver Status Member

Pellets lose accuracy before they approach mach 1. BB's aren't particularly accurate to begin with, and driving them to 1000 fps might just make it worse. Perhaps BB's being round don't suffer the same effects as much as pellets.

birdmove · New Member

I Know this is an older thread, but I am reading through the bb gun section.

The Crosman Comrade CO2 bb gun is rated at 600 fps. MrRuneRebel, on his youtube channel, chronies right at 600-604 fps. And it looked pretty accurate from his shooting. It's all plastic with a quick removable skeleton butt stock. It's designed to look like an AK. Currently sells for about $59.00 US at Amazon.

toadmyster223 · Senior Member

BBs aren't always super uniform, and non-lead BBs are just too light. They curve like a bad golf shot once they get going too fast. I recently saw plated lead BBs on PA- they might be worth a shot.

shawn706 · Member

Several years back Daisy listened to complaints from a lot of 5m coaches around the country that had been asking for a more powerful spring for the 499. I don't remember all the numbers as far as fps, but the spring they came out with was considerably stronger than the original. What it did to accuracy was not what was expected. With the original spring the BB rode through the barrel on a cushion of air not touching the sides. The heavier spring caused the bb to bounce down the barrel resulted significant loss in accuracy.