At this years Huntex event I was asked by so many people to "just give them a box of pellets, typically the cheapest..." My first question would be: what do you want to do with it? and the responses was almost the same: I just want to shoot some shit. The thing is that I had 45 variants of pellets and that was just the Cometa JSB range. Over the years, I've come to realize that choosing your pellets can make or break your Airgun shooting experience, for example: high performance pellets like ELEY or QYS is Olympic level for 10m shooting but terrible at 50m and JSB jumbo beast Diablo is perfect for hunting at 50m or 100m but not from the same rifle that you shot the ELEY's with at 10m.
So what do you need to know:
No 2 barrels from the same batch would necessarily like the exact same pellets. Just because your mate with the exact same rifle shoots 1 cent groupings with his hades, doesn't mean that yours would perform with the same pellets, it is a bit of trail and error.
FPS matter! And more isn't necessarily more in most cases. Essentially you want to shoot a 13gr pellet at 875fps more or less or a 18gr pellet at 900fps and a 7gr pellet at 500fps. Essentially you want consistency at the correct fps and fpe for your objective. Marketers love putting 1500fps on the box because the novice buyer thinks it's better and would never actually test it.
Are you target shooting or hunting, and if you're hunting do care about what's behind the target or not? The Cometa Ultra shock heavy is like throwing bricks at a rat and won't over penetrate but shit at shooting any good score on a target at 40m, the pollymag is also perfect for hunting but at shorter distances where a slug is more effective at longer distances. Flat tips are amazing for 10m target shooting whilst round tips perform better between 25 to 75m.
There is so much more to explain but ask around for a chronograph and measure your FPS with fpe before you buy a single more pellet, then depending on the outcome get a few different pellets at more or less 1gr and test the results. JSB even sell a box of mixed test pellets to help you choose "the one" and then hope you can get more of the exact same batch, which is a story for another time!
Be the shooter that others envy!
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