Fueled by the need to tinker with another gun, even though I have several in pieces at the moment, and by Shawn’s recent posting on his KLB-3 Fast Deer, I decided to get one of my own to do a bit of ‘turd polishing’ this weekend. At $30 shipped, I figure even if it were a complete bust, I’d still have a plinker gun to shoot cans with at 10 yards.
I ordered my Fast Deer and it was shipped directly from Xisico in a single box, quite poorly packed. I’m surprised that the gun didn’t get damaged in shipping, but all was well with it when I opened it up.
Initial observations
I had to lay out a towel on the carpet just to open the bag the gun was packed in due to the amount of grease. It was literally dripping off the gun as I pulled the last clinging remnant of plastic away from the stock. Upon wiping the gun down a bit…ok, a lot… I found a nice stock with no obvious wood filler or dings. The finish was poorly applied and had run in several places, though. The metal was somewhat blued, although not evenly and had several small nicks in it. The action was loose in the stock, but was easily enough fixed by tightening some screws.
Firing
I fully expected a huge diesel, but still had to fire off a few out of the Fast Deer for some baseline comparisons. Cocking and recocking was rough. Loading a pellet proved to be tricky as the breech end of the barrel was a bit oversized, allowing the pellets to fall backward into the loading port. I finally used a small Allen head to push the pellet up about 1/16 inch in the barrel where it caught on the rifling. My first shot, I had to check to see if the safety was on. It wasn’t. I pulled the trigger a bit harder and was rewarded with a spray of grease and a loud pop. The trigger pull must have been 8lbs or more. I reloaded and fired several more pellets with the same results. There was no twang, however and recoil was minimal. The lack of twang really surprised me and gave me confidence that I’d be able to make a nice little shooter of this gun with some work.
I ran a few shots over the chronograph and shot a couple of groups. Groups at 20 yards averaged around the 2 ½ inch mark for 5 shots. Chrony numbers went from a high of 780fps using CPL’s to a low of 610fps once it finally settled down a bit, although it was still dieseling a touch..
Tear Down and Tune
Tearing down the Fast Deer was uneventful and due to the large number of posts regarding tear down instructions, I’ll not go into the procedure. I broke the gun down as far as possible and then went through the laborious task of cleaning grease. Denatured alcohol helped tremendously in this task and I went through around a quart of it.
The Fast Deer had some severe barrel droop to it so I decided to try a technique I had read about but never tried. I laid the barrel down on a sawhorse and laid a section of 2x4 across it and gave it several hard whacks with a hammer. I couldn’t tell much of a difference, and had hoped I had not ruined my barrel. During my test shots, I was about 12 inches low at 20 yards even after using all the up adjustment on my scope. Perhaps this would allow me a bit more adjustment; if not, I was going to use adjustable mounts.
I wanted to make the Fast Deer as pleasant to shoot as possible and really was not concerned with power. I found that my old Beeman R7 spring was the correct size for the Fast Deer and actually fit the rear guide much tighter than the stock spring.
I polished the trigger, which is a direct sear type and applied Moly lube as I didn’t have any powdered Graphite lube as had been suggested to me. I did, however, replace the trigger return spring with a much lighter spring out of a ballpoint pen.
After plenty of polishing and deburring of stamped parts, as well as applying the proper lubes (clear tar to the OD of the compression chamber, Moly on all pivot points, Silicon grease on the leather seal, Heavy tar on the mainspring) I finally was ready to assemble my Fast Deer.
Post Tune
After reassembly, I took some test shots and found a very nice firing cycle. There was no dieseling and very little recoil. Certainly less recoil than any of my other springers. In fact, the firing cycle was very similar to my tuned R7! The trigger was nice and crisp at an estimated 2lb pull.
I mounted a Leapers 3x9x40 scope and went out for some test shots. At 20 yards, I was happy to see my first shot was ridiculously high and that the barrel pounding seemed to work. After some adjustments to the scope I fired this nice 5 shot group.
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I then ran some shots over the chronograph again and found that I had indeed lost a little velocity. I was shooting a very consistent 585fps with a 3fps deviation over 10 shots using CPL’s
On to the Stock
The factory stock actually had a little bit of grain to it showing dimly through the orange Chinese finish and so I began the task of stripping away at the finish, being careful not to remove the stain as I went. About 30 minutes with some 600grit sandpaper and a maroon Scotchbrite pad was all it took to cut away at the finish and remover the ‘runs’ from the previous finish. I then hand applied a little Royal London Oil and let it dry. Once dry, I started searching for a buttpad to replace the factory model and hopefully give me a little bit longer length of pull as the Fast Deer had a bit of a short pull to it. I settled on a HW97LK pad I had laying around that fits fairly well. It does overlap a bit, and I may shave a bit off it later, but for now, the Fast Deer is complete. My ‘turd polishing’ effort rewarded me with an accurate and pleasant shooter that’s not too hard on the eyes.
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