Unboxing Feinwerkbau P700

Sometimes I absolutely love Germany. A wide variety of tasty meats, punctual public transport, lots of beautiful scenery, etc. At the moment, I'm really loving their attitude to air rifles. I had a firearms cert for an air rifle in Ireland up until recently. It took three months for that cert to come through, and it could have taken longer. The story is somewhat different here.

I walked into Frankonia, a large chain of shops which cater to the shooting community in Germany, last weekend to start the process of buying an air rifle. Had I the money then and there I could have walked out that day. As it was, I didn't, and their credit office was closed at the weekend. I did however get the chance to test fire the rifle, which they had in stock, with my size grip and preferred colour. We agreed a price, and I was to come back today to finalise the purchase.

Which leads me to:



It can also shoot pretty well:


...and looks something like this when all set up:


I've pushed the sights up as far as they'll go, which is to the maximum 60 mm allowed by ISSF. I'll need to measure it to make sure, but I trust FWB for now. As a side note, it's amazing to have that height in the sights. My neck no longer feels incredibly uncomfortable when in position. I still have a lot of drop to the cheekpiece, but that's always going to be an issue for me! I have about another 5 mm upwards adjustment in the cheekpiece before it just falls out:


Many of you are no doubt aware of my total and utter hatred of the FWB buttplates, so the first major thing to do was toss their piece of crap out and replace it with my own:


Which leaves me finally with something that looks a little like this;


There is one issue. And it was so massive that a very nice price was negotiated for the rifle. if you look rather closely at the following photograph, you might notice some slight surface scratches along it. I am more than prepared to live with those, especially since I didn't notice it until it was pointed out.


I'm very happy. It fits. It's new. The trigger is a little heavy atm, but that can be easily fixed. It's the nicest set up that I've ever had with an air rifle and it shows. The thing just sits steady in position. I'll be trying it out on the range soon, hopefully this week or the week after. Then we'll see how bad I really am.

Some more gratuitous shots:

New Year Resolutions

By that I mean goals for the year. Cycling, running, and, most importantly, shooting should all come along nicely this year, now that I'm settled a little bit in Germany. With that in mind, it's time to work out what I want to hit at some point in the year.

Piecing it all together in one giant calendar is actually kinda fun. I was originally thinking of splitting it all apart, having one calendar each for shooting, cycling and running, but I think this is better. Also, it should help me to not schedule things on top of each other.

After a pitiful year of shooting, it's time to make this priority one again. Unfortunately, there aren't a huge number of goals in late summer/early autumn time that I can aim for. The European smallbore championships are on at a really nice time, but they require qualification. I need a 587 in prone, or 1135 in 3p to make it there. Now, both of these are eminently doable, given good quality training. at 1033 in my last 3x40 match 2.5 years ago, I think this is where I could make up some good ground. Standing alone has the potential to raise about 15 points a string, if I get a decent set up. So that's 1100, with the balance to be made up with prone and kneeling. Doable, but not easy. The prone, OTOH, could either be reasonably handy, or incredibly difficult.

I've done some playing around with a pretend prone position at home, trying different right arm positions, and I think I've found something decent. It should allow good shoulder pressure as well as tucking the rifle in close to me. This will all be greatly facilitated by having the air rifle at home for training. Imitating my prone set up on that will allow training to be done at any time at home, which will be totally cool :)

For running, I'm going to attempt a marathon. I said I'd do it last year, and I just failed. I have two options later in the year, which is what I want. There's the Munich Marathon, on the 9th of October, and the Dublin City Marathon, on the 31st of October. There's nothing much in the way of shooting or cycling around these times, so that works out rather well. I'll probably enter one or the other pretty soon, so I have the time set in stone and I can update my calendar around that.

In the case of cycling, I have Operation M to worry about. This is a one- or two-week tour, planning to take in at least one epic climb. At the moment I'm leaning towards a one week tour, starting in central France in July. From there, head south and then loop into Switzerland, taking in the Col d'Isaren along the way. This is a 33 km monster of a climb, which will require much training. To the Alps!

I have a lot of plans for the summer, so I'm going to be looking for some things to round off the year towards the end. I've already said that I would like to do some time trialling, so I may have a look at that once the tour is over; change the road bike set up to a more aerodynamic position, with tri bars. Or I may be bold and look at building something up from scratch, depending on how serious I want to go with it. Ideally, I'd want to look at racing for that kind of investment.

Those are the rough plans for 2011. I'll be updating as I go, with only a few things that are set in stone. As I said, shooting is taking priority from now on, which means time and money. It may come to pass that nothing really comes of this year, but it should give me an excellent base for the following year in any case :)