Air Rifles and Pellet Guns

......and the air-rifle barrel is actually capable of withstanding the over-pressure exerted by the burning diesel without bursting? Oh, good........

He actually does it a few times. I'm sure it wasn't his first time either :) the gun has to break down over time, it can not possibly be made to withstand the pressure. but it does work, i was almost sad i never thought of this as a kid. here is the link if interested.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLzEqfRVeOA

Reminds me of the time that my twin brother and I balanced a 12 ga shotgun shell on top of a BB gun and shot it. Not too smart, and no one got hurt; not even me, who shot the thing. Now that I look back on it, my brother was probably supposed to be hit by shot and other shrapnel that flew out sideways after the paper shell exploded. We learned to not do it again . . .

Jeeze! What an absolute stupid thing to do! If you wanted to do that experiment, you should have done it the safe and sensible way I did. Place a .45 cal bullet on a block and shoot the primer with a .22. Say, did I mention that I didn't know about Newton's third law till that day? Never forgot it since.

Interesting!

The "barrel" of a BB gun is usually just a copper tube inside a steel shell. An actual air rifle might have a steel barrel, but not tough enough to take the pressure of a diesel detonation.

It might be more interesting to use two pellets, and put the diesel fuel in between them. When the first pellet is fired, it compresses the oil/air mixture until it detonates, propelling the second pellet out of the barrel (and the first pellet back down the barrel, resisted by the air pressure.)

Hmm. . . make the first pellet a captive piston, use the recoil of the piston to power a mechanical injector and a feed mechanism, and you'd have the world's first liquid fueled semiautomatic rifle. Less recoil, too, since the piston sucks that up.

A Daisy Powerline is not a "BB" gun. It has a rifled steel barrel and uses an under barrel lever to "pump" up a compressed air cylinder. They have advertised muzzel velocities well over 1,000 ft/sec. Very different naimal from the typical Daisy "BB" gun.

and would not the fire rate be limited only by how fast the projectiles are fed. how many times a second does a piston in a diesel engine fire?

The Daisy air rifle doesn't have that much compression to do much damage to the gun itself, but if you were to do that with a high end precision air rifle, the higher compression would destroy the seals and O-rings. The manual for my air rifle is very specific about not using a flamable oil to lubricate the gun. Special oils are available for them.

The tube (barrel) in a BB gun may also be a rolled tube, with a length-wise split.

When I was a kid I met another who was missing a finger because he took a 22 cartridge and stood the cartridge up in a crack in the sidewalk and hit it with a hammer. He didn't really want to talk about it.

There were BB gun cowboy and indian wars among buildings sometimes.

Went hunting pigeons with bow and arrow, shooting arrows into the air, until the police chief met and told us to stop, for some reason I think that was Christmas morning. Then we went hunting rabbits.

Is that as good as the Estes rocket we "modified" to carry a shotgun shell less lead shot (substituted steel woll as a filler as I remember, and I seem to remember a tripple load of powder, dad was a reloader so we had ample supplies of powder...) Used a nail through the nosecone as a detonator so that upon impact the nail was driven into the primer? Its a wonder we are all alive...

This is indeed possible as I had a Beeman Hurricane .177 pellet pistol which I accidentally used the wrong lubricant inside the spring piston chamber and it ended up igniting, the barrel and cylinder were both stout enough to handle the pressure, and this happened on more than one occassion as evidenced by smoke coming out of the barrel after firing. some manufacturers suggest using only high flash point lubricants and to not over lubricate piston chambers in this type of pellet rifle, not that it would be damaging to the metal parts becuase most piston air guns are of higher quality than pump or CO2 and the cylinder and barrels are made strong - often the barrels are the handle to crank the piston. It may however damage the silicone or rubber seals if done too often. Given the low mass of most lead pellets, short barrel lengths of most air gun barrels, and the slow energy release of a diesling ignition compared to modern gun powder, the effect of diesling will not generate a substantially more lethal projectile over distance.

If you have a suitable air rifle, I believe this works well. You obviously need an adequate barrel to handle the higher pressure as well as a strong spring. My informant was an Afrikaans small arms dealer whom I met on safari in Botswana about 20 years ago. His advice was to put a drop of diesel in te the base of the pellet before compression and firing.

Believe that in the '30's a German firm of Weirauch (sp?) had a 'Barrakuda' (again, sp?) model that was manufactured to do just this. Think they used ether.

Any air rifle that cannot handle "Dieseling" as the Air gunners call it, is a dangerous weapon and should never be made or sold.....anything less than a solid steel barrel is less than acceptable.

The pistons need lubrication and most oils will burn in this manner, so dieseling is only to be expected.....

By the way, it makes the gun inaccurate as the unexpected pressure will cause the faster flying pellet not to "drop" as much, also the "amount" of extra power cannot be calculated accurately enough to allow compensation. Over short distances it will probably not matter, 20-30 feet.

Years ago I opened up the transfer port on a Weyrach .22 and the dieseling stopped, ins spite of an increase of about 8 foot lbs in power......I put this down to the fact that the standard transfer port was only around 2.5mm and I opened it up to exactly 5.08mm., (5.588 = =.22") as I did not want a pellet dropping back into the piston area when shooting into a tree for example......

The reason that I believe that the wider, funnel port stopped dieseling, is I believe that with the tiny transfer port the air is heated up considerably and sets the diesel on fire......the wide port offered far less resistance and the air was not heated up as much.....maybe with a proper (diesel) fuel, it might still have exploded, but I was only using lubricating oil....I did not want the effect as not only accuracy was made worse, but also the gun becomes very loud, not good for game hunting, though I did experiment with a home made silencer for a time which made the gun quite quiet (except for the mechanical actions), except when dieseling, when it was still too loud!!! Suggesting to me that I was exceeding the sound barrier with either or both the pellet or the gas from the explosion.....see diag below:-

I still have the rifle somewhere in the basement....Also a tuned 0.177 one too, there was a lot of "free" game birds in my garden in the UK 35 years ago!!! Pheasants and partridges......I shot the eye out only, killed the bird stone dead, and we did not find shotgun pellets wrapped in feathers in the middle of the meat when eating!!! I always refuse game birds shot "the proper way!"

A Hunter will say it was unsporting as the bird was still on the ground......!!! Who cares? I had a good scope for lowlight and was shooting max 30 feet, the eye was an easy target!!!

By the way, the person who thought two pellets with diesel between them might work has simply forgotten that for diesel to burn/explode you need air/oxygen.

I suspect that the only result might be a huge muzzle flash as the now hot/compressed diesel reaches the air at the muzzle between two pellets.....might be fun!!! As far as I am aware, there is no oxidizer in Diesel......it would become far too dangerous if it had I am sure!!!

Hey, you just converted an innocent air rifle into a "fire"arm.

As a kid I used to make tracer pellets for air rifles using match heads. I filled the pellet with scrapings from a safety match and glued on a layer of scrapings from a non-safety match on the back to act as an igniter. It worked well with the burn time well matched to the flight time. If it was filled with non-safety scrapings it would blow the whole lot out of the pellet when it was fired.