There's a lot of reasons why I might like any given airgun.... it might be familiarity with my well-used Shadow, the excellent power and trigger of my Panther or RWS94, or the light weight and accuracy of my MP513. Most guns have something interesting or at least mildly engaging about them.
The Industry Brand QB57 is no different. The basic mechanism is that of a sliding-breech sidelever with a crude anti-beartrap, but its conventionality ends there. It is a carbine of the "bullpup" style, with the rifle's action set so far back in the stock that it almost reaches the shooter's shoulder. This necessitates a straight line stock with no opportunity for a formed grip behind the trigger, so it uses a pistol grip located under the loading port. The rear buttpad can be adjusted to better align the sights with the natural position of the shooter's eye.
Forward of the trigger guard is the feature that really marks the QB57 as unique... the large, knurled nut that allows the barrel to be removed from the stock. It's a standard thread (not a quick-release of any sort), but it does pop on and off fairly quickly. Whenever a barrel is made to be removed like this, there is almost no hope of a gun retaining an accurate "zero" with any sort of sighting mechanism mounted on the receiver, so Industry does the smart thing. All that stuff is mounted on top of the foregrip, which is attached directly to the barrel. That way, the sights always stay in alignment with the barrel itself... and should not need routine readjustment.
Since the top of the stock is a straight line from the receiver back, the receiver and the barrel don't 'rise' to the shooter's eye level. So Industry does the next best thing... they raise the sights and the scope rail a couple of inches (ala the military M4/M16). The rear sight consists of a notch formed into a fairly long blade that folds down and out of the way when a scope is used. The rear sight is adjustable for windage only. Elevation adjustments are taken care of by the front sight, which consists of a small blade perched on a machine screw that is threaded into the plastic sight mount.
The trigger is none too sophisticated, but certainly acceptable on a low-end gun. It adapts the Theoben-style (Gamo knockoff) sear to a remote trigger mounted a few inches ahead of it, and incorporates the Gamo-typical adjusment screw for sear engagements. Unfortunately, however, this adjustment is by necessity located at the actual sear end of the mechanism, not the trigger - which means that the stock has to be removed before the trigger can be adjusted.
The rifle is not particularly light - at 2 oz. shy of 7 lbs (without scope) it is heftier than its 31" overall length might suggest. The bullpup design permits the use of a full-sized powerplant of moderate energy and an overall barrel length of almost 18" (although the last 2 inches of this is really a plastic shroud). Pull length is on the shortish side at 12.5", and the rifle is quite unique in that the center of gravity is actually located behind the trigger. Say what you want about this gun... but nobody will ever be able to call it nose-heavy!
This particular example was purchased as part of the 'Deluxe' package, which included a hard case with form-fitting foam inserts. At 22" wide the case was larger than I expected, although I should have been able to guess its proper size fom the known size of the gun. It also included a cheapie 4x20 scope (retail $7?) and a tin of Industry Brand airgun pellets. As for those pellets - every bad thing you've heard about them is true. Don't use them in this gun - if you want to shoot them out of something, use them in a breakbarrel. That way the grossly undersized ones will make themselves known by falling straight through the barrel! In this gun they'd just lie in the breech and let the piston slam hard because of the lack of barrel-to-pellet seal.
The gun I received had two major flaws right out of the box. The most obvious one was the front foregrip was not aligned with the body of the rifle, everything was canted several degrees to the left. The next problem didn't make itself known until I spent some time shooting it - if I screwed the barrel down tight with the gun uncocked it became very loose when I cocked the gun. If I then tightened the barrel the breach didn't want to close.
It turns out that the barrel alignment pin (it determines the clock postition of the barrel) was installed in the wrong place, accounting for the misalignment. Also the section of the barrel that extends rearward into the gun was too long, preventing the breech from closing properly. Fortunately I was able to kill 2 birds with one stone, so-to-speak... an additional spacer (approximately .080") under the existing barrel stop ring cured the insertion depth problem - and adding this spacer made it necessary for me to redrill the hole for the alignment pin. When I redrilled the hole I was able to make sure that I indexed the pin properly, which cured the misalignment.
With these problems straightened out I was finally able to start shooting the gun for real. Needless to say it took several dozen shots to work out the crap factory oil and get it to stop dieseling. I mounted a Powerline 3-9x32 scope on it and started running a number of pellets through it. Unfortunately my initial results were rather disappointing - I couldn't get better than a 1/2" 5-shot group at 10 yards despite trying several different types of pellets. I tried a better 3-9x40 Centerpoint AO on it with the same results.
I was about to give up on the rifle when I decided to try it with the open sights. Sometimes I just don't have good luck with scopes, and the fact that the scope sits so far forward on this gun does make it awkward to get your eye at the correct distance from the eyepiece. Not sure whether this might have induced significant parallax - but for whatever the reason the open sights worked out better for me. I was able to get both Chinese Domed pellets (the ones sold by BAM dealers) and Gamo Match pellets to group about .35" over the same distance. Since the rear sight on this gun is closer to the eye than, say, the typical rear sight on a breakbarrel it sorta fuzzed out for me - so I strongly suspect that the gun is able to do better than that.
When I sent some shots over the chrony I was pleasantly surprised... it shot 10 CPL's at an average of 714fps, with a 4fps spread low to high. Since then it appears to have slowed down a bit, but the energy numbers still show a powerplant efficiency a little over 30% and over 8 ft-lbs of energy.
As for the rest of the gun's behavior and shootability... well, it is generally pretty good. There is a bit of harshness and spring noise to the firing cycle, and this seems amplified because the shooter's ear is so much closer to the gun's powerplant than it is on most springers. But it's not overly objectionable. Better than the last couple of Gamo's I bought, that's for sure. The trigger (as mentioned earlier) is a clone of the Gamo mechanism, but frankly it too feels better than some real Gamo's I've tried. It is a little creepy in the second stage, but due to the trigger's design and the possibility of softer metals used for the sear parts, I'm reluctant to adjust it out for safety's sake. Effort is reasonable at about 3 lbs, and it is fairly smooth. As it wears in, I do suspect that it will get better. This is only the second time I've tried an Industry manufactured Gamo-style trigger. The other was on a TF25, and had a decent feel to it as well.
It is a reasonably comfortable gun to shoulder, and the gun's balance makes it feel less heavy than it really is. The pistol grip does have an interesting feature - it is hollow with a little sliding door on the bottom that can be used for, I presume, pellet storage. Speaking of pellets - this gun seems to be a bit tougher to load than other sliding-breech gun's I've owned in the past (Fast Deer, B4-2) and I suspect that the port area isn't cut out quite as much as it is on other rifles. And loading does get more awkward with a scope.
Finish on the gun is nothing to write home about. Not the worst I've seen, but definitely a notch below, say, a Crosman Quest or most BAM rifles. This seems to be true of Industry brand guns in general, so it's no great surprise. The wood doesn't look bad... the dark coloring with a slightly reddish hue is certainly far better than the old orange-yellow painted finishes of the B-2's and B-3's. Can't tell if there's much wood filler in the stock.
In summary the QB57 (or, at least my example) has proven itself to be a decent if unusual gun. It is good to see cheaper Industry guns shooting well (my QB51 was another one), even if they are still coming through with some significant quality control issues. After all, setting them straight is oftentimes that's half the fun for a hobbyist! And at the $35 I paid (now $43, I believe) I cannot get upset over a few problems. Besides, I'd much rather the gun come through with problems I can fix than with ones I can't (like a badly bored barrel). Granted, that $35 was a 'wholesale' cost... normal retail is, I believe, closer to $60.
However, there ARE retailers selling them for far more than that. Are they adding any value to the gun that warrants a $100+ price tag? I have no way of knowing. The rifle is a medium-powered springer with good accuracy. If an extra $60 means that someone has gone through the gun to make sure it doesn't have a damaged piston seal, that everything is machined and assembled properly, and that it performs adequately - maybe so. Especially if the gun's size and/or breakdown features are important to you - and you are not much of a tinkerer yourself. Just make sure you know what you are getting before laying out the extra dough...
Pictures are:
1) QB57 in it's case. The included scope and pellets are missing from the picture.
2) QB57 out of its case. The rear sight is folded down
3) QB57 assembled. The rear sight is extended
4) The repair I had to make to the barrel: the wider spacer is an old spark plug washer! You can see the old indexing pin hole next the the new pin and hole.
5) Adjustable butt pad.
6) Compartment in the pistol grip.
