Marvin,
I got to thinking about the barrel cleaning you mentioned, and while I had pulled a patch or two through it, I hadn't done a thorough cleaning, so here's what I did.
Best way I have found to clean these little spagetti barrels is to pull the barrel and use a 1/8" dowel to push patches with goo-gone through them till clean, then followup with a couple clean patches. I could do the same without pulling the barrel, but I always worry about getting gunk on the transfer port and pushing more gunk into my breach. So I:
pulled the scope, stock, shroud.
went to pull the barrel band and realised Crosman never put a top set screw in my barrel band, interesting.
pulled the barrel band and "plink", the barrel was pointing North about an 1 1/4" off the airtube at the muzzle....doh!!!
took everything down to the airtube and trigger group.
sent a half dozen goo-gone patches down the barrel, followed by a couple clean ones. Barrel wasn't too fouled actually.
chucked the transfer port up in a pair of vice grips (lightly), and ran it across some sandpaper till I had lost a good 1-1.5mm off of the end that goes towards the barrel. Polished up with some 800 grit and cleaned of rough edges and gunk.
re-assembled and replaced set screw in barrel band that Crosman never installed.
rescoped, charged with air, and took out to the yard with some Crosman 10.5 grainers for testing.
First shot at 15 yards was 2" high! I know removing and replacing the scope will do a bit for POI, but not 2" at 15 yards, and the scope even after the previous fixes was still fairly close to max elevation, after re-sighting it is darn near in the middle. I don't feel any blow-by at the transfer port, so I assume it is still sealing just fine. After rezero I shot a 5 shot group that was within 1/2". Still not perfect, but MUCH better. Knowing that this barrel is as clean as it will most likely ever be it should improve with a little seasoning I suspect. Looked at the crown much closer and it really isn't too bad, although a little lathe work would make it perfect, I may opt for just a little polishing with an old brass bolt handle and some toothpaste to avoid dragging my home projects into work. So I guess I found out on my own what Chris was just describing about the transfer port being too tall, and I would not have gone in that direction if I was following Marvins advice and doing a good barrel cleaning. So the "banana barrel" was still there after I removed the second barrel band, just not as bad, but still plenty bad apparently. I considered leaving the top barrel band screw out to allow the barrel to slide fore/aft with any airtube changes, but it looks like it's ok right now, will have to experiment more. I think David Kirby described these guns perfectly, "they're like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get". Anyways, thanks guys, if it holds air like it has been for the last half day then it will be 100% fixed. Going next weekend to the place where we are holding the NTAGM shootout in April, so I will be able to stretch out my shooting distance from 0-100 yards, should know exactly what this little shootin' stick will do by then!!!
