06-29-2017, 04:31 PM
Since I bought the Benjamin Trail NPXL 1100 going on a couple of years ago I have been reading voraciously on the net anything I can find about them. Basically it is a piece of crap. There are a lot of other fools like me out there though. The net is awash with descriptions of all the "upgrades" people do merely to get these things to shoot straight since apparently a significant number of them don't right out of the box. I am hugely embarrassed to be one of those who kept trying instead of just demanding my money back. C'mon, the things people do as fixes should have been done by the manufacturer, and that's IF the fixes actually work. I did send the gun back once. They didn't fix it, they sent me a new one. Before that they sent me a scope or two. My place is littered with broken scopes. The scopes always slipped in the rings until by various means like epoxying them in place or over tightening the rings til they dented the scope I got them to stay put in the rings. They then started to shift internally (break). Also the screws holding the stock on were never up to the task of withstanding the recoil. They would always get loose. After that as far as the scope was concerned the gun weighed half what it did and the recoil was twice as bad.
The gun supposedly puts out 30 ft-lbs per shot. Of course that is hype. I did see 25 ft-lbs a couple of times but it has been decreasing lately. maybe the gas strut is leaking. Anyway some youtube videos showed nearly 30 if they can be believed. My point is that this gun weighs hardly any more than several more proven guns that have only half the power. Like putting a huge outboard on a rickety old skiff it is shaking itself to pieces. Notwithstanding the posters out there who either inexplicably have had no problems or don't know any better, there are occasional posters who come right out and say it. One such poster after pointing out how ridiculous it is to do all these mods to a gun just to get it to perform to a minimal standard, said to give it up. Not worth it. Specifically, can't be fixed. The problem is in the barrel which has large sections so out of spec that pellets often fall through under their own weight.
Well that got me thinking. I tested my barrel and indeed although the pellets were tight at the breach they got loose further on and basically fell the last half of the barrel. But is this normal among air rifles, I ask myself? Tried the same test with my old Gamo 220. Pretty uniformly tight from end to end.
Well that really tears it. Apparently the wild fliers I routinely get are due in part to the barrel functioning not unlike a pachinko machine. Furthermore I discovered this not on my own but because others had the same experience. I had already torn the gun open and replaced the piston seal which was damaged from the rough machining and careless installation. The original breach seal had also been leaking straight out of the box. Due to these leaks the piston was probably hitting the end of the compression chamber and that was messing up the scopes. The stock screws are not up to the task, further aggravating the whole scope failure issue. Who knows, maybe the loose fit of the pellets is creating another leak to make the scope shock worse on top of allowing the pellet to leave the barrel in a direction other than where the barrel was pointed. All of this right out of the box.
No returning the gun now. At some point I decided to try my own fixes. The most dramatic was adding about 4 lbs of steel to the action. This also allowed me to fix the action to the stock with 16 screws instead of 3. It appears to no longer destroy scopes. They used to slide in the rings unless glued in or over-tightened. Now moderate tightening holds them in place with electrical tape as shimming between scope and rings. In the past the scope would creep like that. So that part is "fixed" if you don't mind a 15 lb gun, which is what it should weigh to keep the power to weight ration in line. Ironically the gun is shooting the best it ever has now. It should. However there are still flyers and even without the flyers I am lucky to keep the pellets on a 3" stick-on target at 15 yards. That's pretty dismal.
So as a reality check has anyone else tried pushing a pellet slowly through the barrel to feel the resistance at all points? It's not supposed to get loose at the end? This was probably the problem all along, right?
The gun supposedly puts out 30 ft-lbs per shot. Of course that is hype. I did see 25 ft-lbs a couple of times but it has been decreasing lately. maybe the gas strut is leaking. Anyway some youtube videos showed nearly 30 if they can be believed. My point is that this gun weighs hardly any more than several more proven guns that have only half the power. Like putting a huge outboard on a rickety old skiff it is shaking itself to pieces. Notwithstanding the posters out there who either inexplicably have had no problems or don't know any better, there are occasional posters who come right out and say it. One such poster after pointing out how ridiculous it is to do all these mods to a gun just to get it to perform to a minimal standard, said to give it up. Not worth it. Specifically, can't be fixed. The problem is in the barrel which has large sections so out of spec that pellets often fall through under their own weight.
Well that got me thinking. I tested my barrel and indeed although the pellets were tight at the breach they got loose further on and basically fell the last half of the barrel. But is this normal among air rifles, I ask myself? Tried the same test with my old Gamo 220. Pretty uniformly tight from end to end.
Well that really tears it. Apparently the wild fliers I routinely get are due in part to the barrel functioning not unlike a pachinko machine. Furthermore I discovered this not on my own but because others had the same experience. I had already torn the gun open and replaced the piston seal which was damaged from the rough machining and careless installation. The original breach seal had also been leaking straight out of the box. Due to these leaks the piston was probably hitting the end of the compression chamber and that was messing up the scopes. The stock screws are not up to the task, further aggravating the whole scope failure issue. Who knows, maybe the loose fit of the pellets is creating another leak to make the scope shock worse on top of allowing the pellet to leave the barrel in a direction other than where the barrel was pointed. All of this right out of the box.
No returning the gun now. At some point I decided to try my own fixes. The most dramatic was adding about 4 lbs of steel to the action. This also allowed me to fix the action to the stock with 16 screws instead of 3. It appears to no longer destroy scopes. They used to slide in the rings unless glued in or over-tightened. Now moderate tightening holds them in place with electrical tape as shimming between scope and rings. In the past the scope would creep like that. So that part is "fixed" if you don't mind a 15 lb gun, which is what it should weigh to keep the power to weight ration in line. Ironically the gun is shooting the best it ever has now. It should. However there are still flyers and even without the flyers I am lucky to keep the pellets on a 3" stick-on target at 15 yards. That's pretty dismal.
So as a reality check has anyone else tried pushing a pellet slowly through the barrel to feel the resistance at all points? It's not supposed to get loose at the end? This was probably the problem all along, right?