Johnny Muston from airgun shop R&K Stockcraft is supergluing Polo mints to the top of a wooden batten. Why? To check his accuracy with his airgun of course!
A pellet can just pass through the hole in the middle, but he’ll have to be super-accurate. “This is part of my mis-spent youth,” he jokes.
But how will we know if the pellet went through the middle, or simply missed the Polo altogether? Johnny moves a paper target behind the Polos, so we’ll be able to see.
He takes aim through the Hawke scope on his .177 Weihrauch air rifle, carefully squeezes the trigger and… smash! The first Polo explodes into white dust.
Another shot, another smashed mint. “Right, I’m going to go for the one on the left hand side now,” says Johnny. That one explodes too.
This is turning out to be harder than we thought. We set up another row of mints, and then… Hooray! The Polo is intact, and the mark on the paper target shows the pellet went straight through the middle.
The next Polo smashes, so Johnny goes back to the first one and repeats his earlier success – perhaps this is his lucky Polo.
Feeling confident now, Johnny switches to a .22 – “Less room for error,” he says. But it isn’t working. Shot after shot goes so close to the centre, but still smashes the Polo. “I’m really disappointed now,” he says, tongue in cheek. “I think I need to spend more of my spare time doing this!”
Is there a serious lesson to be learned from all this, apart from the fact that airgun plinking is tremendous fun, especially with targets like mints that react so well to a hit? Not really, except perhaps that the more you can practise with your airgun the better you’ll become.
Find out more at the R&K Stockcraft website.
