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: