The EDgun Leshiy is pretty quiet to start with, but for many people in urban environments it’s still way too loud.  One thing I really needed to come to grips with was that basically every channel on youtube illustrates hunting and pest control with airguns at some pretty long distances.  Ted’s Holdover, Matt, and others routinely shooting 100+ yards.  While that sounds fun and all… it’s not the reality for many of us.  

Here's a few quick steps I went through, and you should too...

Step 1: Measure your yard.  If you are 40 yards and under keep reading.

Step 2: Measure your target.  If you are shooting Rats, Chipmunks, Squirrels, and even Skunks… keep reading

Step 3: Acceptance.  Repeat after me.  I’m not Ted or Matt.  I do not get paid to shoot airguns at crazy distances, and make others think it’s the only way… while I may shoot long for fun from time to time, my primary pest control / hunting / paper punching is 40 yards and under, and (this part is important) either a) my neighbor is an asshat, or B) I’m very considerate and want to keep things quiet.

Cool… now that we got through that ;) let me give you an update on my setup, and one you may consider depending on how steps 1-3 went above.

The first thing I did was tune the gun to the slowest possible speed without impacting accuracy and ability for a clean kill.  This resulted in a reg setting of 85bar shooting abotu 5550fps.  We all know the UK folks shoot lots of stuff in sub 12 ft/lb setups, so I used that as my benchmark.  Getting a .25 25gr pellet to shoot sub 12 is actually not that effective as the speeds are just too slow, and gives the rat, chipmunk, etc time to react (i.e. matrix shit).  I’ll save the conversation "why .25 cal” for a little later… just roll with it for now.  In this caliper, I ended up shooting the Leshiy at about 550fps (~17ft/bs).  The issue I was having though was reg creep after a few shots.  It would settle in, but the first few shots would group low.  Pretty easy workaround… dry fire a few times, but obviously that’s not ideal for a lot of reasons.  

My next move was to try the Sub 12ft/lb kit from HUMA Air.  The reasoning was that the standard HUMA reg was not designed for this type of setup, and was why I was seeing that POI change in the first few shots.  The kit comes with a low pressure version of the HUMA regulator, a tiny plenum, a reducer, a smaller (in strength) hammer spring, a shorter valve (you need to cut), and a valve return spring.  

This is where things went south for a month or so by the way… so I’ll talk a little about it.  The Sub 12 kit is really not designed to shoot above 12 ft/lbs, so I was pushing it a bit to start with targeting 15-17.  The first thing I did was accidentally set the pressure on the reg the wrong direction.  There is no min or max, so you can easily go the wrong direction and get yourself lost.  I didn’t own a reg tester (now I do!).  When I finally did test it, I was shooting the thing at 150+ bar!!  This caused me to smash a valve and blow out some o-rings.  Smash is probably the wrong word, as I really just bent it.  This made it pretty difficult to diagnosis actually.

I had a long chat with Brian (Edgun West) to try and figure out what to try/do next.  Out of the conversation came the following setup.  HUMA high pressure reg (just the normal Huma reg) + small plenum (from sub 12 kit) + smaller hammer spring… and obviously a new (short) valve + valve return spring.  I set the reg at 105 bar.  Shooting .25 JSB Kings at 550FPS I’m getting 41 shots from 245 - 105 bar).  This hybrid Huma reg is what did it (plus a couple new o-rings).

The setup is stupid quiet.  I mean just insanely quiet.  It’s still has plenty of power for rats, chipmunks, squirrels, and even a skunk at 17ft/lbs.  I have the Matador R5M setup for skunks and raccoons, but wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a skunk with the Leshiy setup this way.

Here’s a few chipmunks shots with this tune:

It doesn’t stop here though.  While I’m stoked with a tune option in .25, I have a custom .177 barrel coming.  My overall plan is to run the Leshiy in .177 at about 12-14 ft/lbs and .25 at 17ft/lbs.  With this setup, I'll get 80+ shots without the need for an extension tube.  This will be all day paper, rat, and chipmunk setup.  The Veles is setup in .22 shooting 18gr at about 650fps, and then finally the Matador R5M shooting 34gr MK2’s at 615fps.  I don’t like redundancy within this hobby… so now all my EDgun’s have a purpose! ;)

Cheers,

Tim