The UK Goverment’s Lockdown came just as the warm spring weather arrived, giving me no chance of a spring clean up of rabbits on my permissions. With travel restricted and exercise limited to an hour a day away from my home, it has been a busy time sorting out my garden for the coming growing season and doing those “get round to it one day” jobs around the house.

Unable to go shooting, I have decided to start a maintenance program, by first checking out and oiling my air rifles, while giving the woodwork a going over with boiled linseed oil.

My first rifle on the list was the CZ Relum Z-2 .177 break barrel springer, that I have owned since brand new. It is over 50 years old, yet the barrel feels as smooth to lock into position as when new, with no sign of play anywhere. Some years later manufacture of an identical Relum, renamed the Telly, was switched to Hungary, where one hopes that the quality was maintained.

It still lives in an equally old gunslip, that I made at the time. Test firing the rifle to hand, put five pellets in a target board within a 20 mm circle at 15 yards. Not bad for an old springer. Ten years ago, I overhauled the mechanism, replacing the spring with a similar diameter OX spring and replacing the leather compression washer with a PTFE item. The result was transforming, with a test over a chronograph at well over the legal 12 ftlb limit, able to punch through 3/8 ply, well up on it’s previous life, but not legal in the UK.

My remedy was to put a steel mandrel through the centre of the New OX spring and grind the outside diameter against a grinding wheel, the friction of the wheel keeping the spring rotating, reducing the the diameter evenly along its length. I had to keep rebuilding the rifle and testing the speed of the pellet over the chronograph, the foot pound measurement being a calculation of the weight of the pellet against it’s speed over the chronograph as it leaves the muzzle when fired. The speed reduced as more of the spring was ground away, becoming a dab hand at removing the rifle end cap to release the spring each time, eventually stopping when a consistent figure of 11.6 ftlb was reached. Legal and powerful.

A VIEW OF THE REGROUND SPRING

In the past I had used the rifle on rats and squirrels at very close range, but it has come into its own again in recent years for popping off feral pigeons in a couple of barns. It is light weight, being easy to keep aloft, while being quick to cock and load. A shot anywhere in the upper breast brings the pigeons spinning to the floor.

The stripdown was just a case of removing three slotted screws and sliding out the rifle action from the wood work, which was treated with a light covering of boiled linseed oil applied with a muslin cloth, the oil thinned by placing the bottle in a saucepan of hot water for ten minutes. Hung on a hook in the workshop, it was touch dry the following day.

Removing the 6 mm main fixing bolt, I saw that it had sheered, probably due to the increased shock load on firing.

Rooting through my many metric screws in the various boxes on my workshop shelves, I found a 50 mm long x 6 mm countersunk allen screw, which I cut down in a vice to the original 40 mm length, making sure to screw a 6 mm nut onto the remaining length of thread before sawing. Being hardened, it knocked out a new blade, but after a quick grind of the cut end, then unscrewing the nut to reform the end of the screw, I was back in business. Being an allen headed CSK screw, I was able to tighten the main screw harder than the original slot head.

With the action exposed, it was easy to reach all the moving parts with my preferred Bisley Gun Oil aerosol spray and reassemble, ready for more accurate years of use.