Group:
Several years ago, I bought a Gamo Shadow on the off-chance that it might not really be the POS product that some on the Internet had made it out to be. It's no secret to those of us who visit forums like this that Gamo gets a bad rap among certain segments of serious airgun enthusiasts. Some of the posts I'd read on boards like this would lead one to believe that a Shadow would only put out half its advertised velocity, would be so rude on firing that it would rattle a shooter's teeth loose, and be so woefully inacurrate that hitting the mark would have more to do with happenstance and chance than any skill on the part of the shooter.
If Gamo rifles were really that bad, though, how could Gamo have gone from a blip in the marketplace to virtually dominating it in terms of sales? If the products they sold weren't at least servicable on some minimally acceptable level, it would seem that they wouldn't sell, regardless of cost or availability.
My curiosity was roused by all of the negative posting on Gamo products that I had seen on the 'Net. A visit to Wal-Mart kind of poured fuel into that fire, when I read some of the specs of the Shadow that were printed on the box. After years of humping nearly 10 pounds of scoped .20 R-1 across the desert, the 6 1/2 pound Shadow seemed like a breath of fresh air. With visions of scrambling up steep slopes to the high rimrock where chukar live dancing in my head, the question "what if?" kept coming to the fore.
What if this lightweight Gamo rifle really wasn't as bad as some would have one believe?
Wal-Mart's generous return policy took the financial risk out of finding out. If I really hated it, I could exchange the thing for a refund and move on.
When I got the rifle home, I scubbed the bore with a mixture of Simple Green and rubbing alcohol. I seperated the action from the stock, degreased the stock attachment screws, and re-assembled with blue Lock-Tite thread locking adhesive. I mounted a 4-12 Simmons Pro-Air A.O. scope to the rifle in 2 pc medium SportsMatch ring mounts, backed with a Beeman Professional "scope stop." A few days later, I took the rifle up to my 20 acre hunting camp bordering the San Bernardino National Forest, and proceeded to find out just how bad a Gamo really is......
And it really was pretty bad.
The firing behavior was downright rude, with a significant amount of twang and vibration unlike that experienced with any other spring-piston air rifle I'd ever shot. It was so bad, in fact, that the rifle ate up the Simmons Pro Air, which cost more than it did, in relatively short order. If this would have been my first foray into adult air rifles, it might well have been my last.
But it wasn't. I'd been down this kind of road before with Beeman-branded rifles that cost over two times what I'd paid for the Shadow when I had bought them 20 years ago. When I bought my first adult air rifle -a Beeman/Webley Omega- the fellow at the shop I bought it from told me to expect the sort of thing I was experiencing with the Gamo, and he was right. With shooting, the harshness and dieseling would go away, and accuracy would increase.
Leaning on that experience, I removed the busted scope from the rifle and kept on shooting.
After 500 shots, the dieseling was largely gone, and I was getting groups, rather than patterns, in shooting the rifle with the supplied open sights. The twang was still there, but I expected much of that to be a by-product of the synthetic stock lacking the dampening quality of beech wood. After that first tin of Kodiaks, the rifle started to show some potential.
The closest city to my hunting camp is Hesperia -a community of 75,000, about fifteen miles away, which sports a Wal-Mart. So down the hill I went, hoping that they might have some sort of scope I could mount to the rifle that would let me extract what it was capable of, at least for the weekend.
I bought one of the 4-12 Bushnell Sportsman A.O. scopes they sell, drove back up into the mountains, and mounted the scope to the rifle under a hissing Coleman lantern.
The next day, I sighted the scope in and proceeded to polish off another tin of Kodiaks.
Midway through this second tin, it was clear that this was not same rifle that it was when it came out of the box. The cocking was now butter-smooth aside from the "Webley slap" needed to break the detent lock. Even the trigger, while nowhere close to the same league as the "Rekord" unit of an R-Series Beeman, had lost much of the annoying "ratchety" feel. The rudeness of the firing cycle was mostly gone, and the dieseling had stopped.
On the 10 Meter target, the Gamo was grouping .17 to .19 ctc for 5 shots with the Kodiaks. In moving to the 50 yard target, I had no trouble keeping 5 shots within a 1.5 inch circle.
The chronograph revealed that Gamo wasn't kidding about the power potential of this rifle. It would spit out Kodiaks to the tune of 850 ft/s + with power hovering around the 16.5 ft/b mark.
Time to go hunting.......
My hunting camp was once covered in pinion trees, but a wildfire back in '94 and another in '98 converted it into desert scrub habitat that is now home to jackrabbits and quail. Jackrabbits can be shot year 'round in California, so with evening approaching on my second day of shooting the Gamo, I decided to do exactly that -find a jackrabbit and, hopefully, take one.
I had no trouble finding a jackrabbit, and dropped one with a brain-pan shot some 45 paces away.
In walking my fenceline, the light weight of the Gamo definitely added joy to the experience that my R-1 didn't. Another thing that I grew to appreciate right away was the Gamo's safety, which, unlike that of an R-Series Beeman, is in a convenient location, is silent in operation, and can be re-applied without having to re-cock the rifle to do it.
I decided to keep it, and I'm glad I did. I used the rifle for three upland game bird seasons, and it never failed to perform. Yeah, it was a little tougher to shoot than my R-1, due to the comparatively light weight and poor trigger feel. But it wasn't impossible to score hits with under field conditions.
In camp during the hunting season, my shotgun-toting friends that I hunt with all prefered the Gamo over the R-1. That might sound far-fetched to us who are really into this stuff, but that's the way it was. The Gamo was viewed to be a lot of fun for few dollars, while the R-1 was deemed cumbersome and heavy, and tiring to use. For guys whose idea of plinking was a brick of .22LR and a Ruger 10/22, the Gamo trigger felt positively match-grade, while the tirgger of the R-1 was so "so light, it's scary."
Perhaps Gamo knows their market, after all.
I personally know ten people who bought Shadows after shooting both my Shadow and my R-1. No one bought an R-1 after shooting it. In a couple of cases, a few of my pals actually left camp in the afternoon, drove out of the mountains into town to Wal Mart, and came back with Shadows of their own a few hours later!
After the first weekend of shooting my Shadow, I took the whole family up to my hunting camp so that my wife could try the Shadow. She absolutely cannot shoot an R-1. I still had my Omegas when we were first married, and she couldn't shoot them, either. She couldn't cock them, and found their overall weight to be a monumental burden. She liked the Shadow so much she requested one of her own, which she still enjoys shooting.
I no longer have my Shadow. I gave it to my brother in law as a birthday present and he was happy to get it because he didn't want just any Shadow -he wanted mine, and kept offering to buy it from me.
I've since moved on to a pair of R-9's, and as much as I like them, I have to honestly admit that for the kind of shooting that I do, I found the Shadow to be totally satisfactory, once the rifle was broken in and settled down. Even the trigger was something that I had no trouble working around.
If all I did was target shoot, I'd personally like a little heavier gun. I wouldn't use a Shadow in a formal competition, either. As a field rifle, though, the Shadow really does have a lot going for it. This is especially true if you are looking for a rifle for your teenage son or daughter to shoot, or a rifle for your wife to shoot.
Gamo advertises 38 pounds of cocking force. Beeman advertsises 40 pounds for an R-9. My wife can literally shoot her Shadow all day long. If she spends an hour with one of my "Nines" she is done for the day. The Shadow cocking effort feels lighter than advertised, while the cocking effort of the R-9 feels every bit of 40 pounds.
Yeah, the trigger of the Shadow leaves much to be desired, but hopefully "Charlie Da Tuna" will keep providing a fix for that.
I literally don't know of anyone personally who has a Shadow and regrets buying it, and I know about ten people who have them and enjoy using them. It would seem to me that they offer a lot of shooting pleasure for the money, and with the tirgger fix that "Da Tuna" offers, I'd personally rather have a Shadow with his tirgger in it than an RWS break barrel. Not that the RWS guns aren't good, mind you. But I wasn't kidding when I said that I found much to like about the Shadow, either. So for me, it isn't a question of one being better than the other, but which one I personally prefer.
Keep your chin up, Gamo shooters. If you've got a Gamo and actually like it, you aren't the only one out there, in spite of how things might seem elsewhere in cyberspace.
-JP
