Jim Chapman Home
At the show I met with Director of Beeman Sales and Product Research Tom Chandler and Product Manager Dani Navickas to talk about the new Falcon additions to Beemans line, which as mentioned is already populated with many of the finest springers available. While visiting their booth, I had a chance to look at two of the rifles they were marketing, the Falcon C and Falcon R. Both are impressive looking pieces of hardware, but what really captured my interest was that both of these models wore full barrel shrouds. An offer was made that I be shipped a test gun to evaluate, allowing me time to get some hands on experience at the range to do some quantitative testing then do some small game and varminting to see how it handled out in my world.
The metal work is solid and substantial without being chunky, and the bluing is deep and rich. The receiver is fabricated from a sold block of aircraft grade #7075 aluminum. The floating barrel is a 12 groove match grade Lothar Walther, and the overall length of the gun is 43 ¼”. There are no open sights on this rifle, but I can’t conceive of using a gun this accurate with anything other than a good scope. The gun weighs in at 7.3 lbs without the scope, and is well balanced.
The gun is a bolt action, and when cycled indexes the 8 shot magazine. The gun can be loaded manually as well, which I find a desirable trait in a hunting rifle. The magazine on my older Falcon PF 25 was damaged on a hunt in South Africa a few years ago, and I had to feed it pellet by pellet. This was very difficult and I missed a lot of shots while struggling to get a pellet into a loading port not designed for manual loading. Ever since that time I’ve given points to guns that allow either loading option.
The trigger is a two stage adjustable that can be easily adjusted. The first stage is very smooth and it breaks crisply with little or no over travel. The trigger blade wide and has a good tactile response. The safety is located just behind the trigger in a recessed notch in the stock, and is easy to thumb on/off with hands in a shooting position.
The gun has a reservoir that fills to a pressure of 3000 psi and gives approximately 35 full power shots. Filling is achieved with the proprietary Falcon fill probe, and I used both the probe shipped with the gun and the one used for my PF 25 without problems. A nice feature on the Falcon R is a twisting cap that houses the manometer at the end of the air reservoir. The gun gets approximately xxx shots per charge in the .22 caliber rifle, more than enough for a day in the woods for most hunting trips.
This gun is a thing of beauty to look at for sure, but the performance in the field is what counts. My first step with any gun I intend to hunt is to take a variety of pellets that meet my hunting needs, typically a heavy roundnose for a powerful pcp, and shoot multi-shot strings for velocity measurements and groups for accuracy. It is cold around my neck of the woods at this time of year, so rather than the 30 and 50 yard distances normally shot I am constrained to the 25 yards available at my indoor range.
The pellets I selected to test included Beeman Kodiak Extra Heavy, Beeman Field Target Special, JSB Exacts, Weihrauch Magnums, and Beeman Double Golds. The highest average velocities were obtained with the Field Target Specials at 980 fps, followed by the JSB Exacts at 959 fps, Kodiak at 874 fps, Magnums at 871 fps and the Golds at 857 fps. With the exception of the Magnums at 27 fps, all the other pellets generated over 30 fpe, with the Kodiak Extra Heavies coming in at 35 fpe. With respect to accuracy, this gun is an absolute tack driver with all the pellets tested. The best group from each of the five pellets at 25 yards was less than .05” ctc, and all would easily drop into the kill zone of a squirrel.
I wanted to test the gun at longer range before taking it out hunting, but the weather was pretty miserable with icy rain drizzling down. So I drove to a field outside of town where the owner has given me permission to shoot, and set up a number of small 2”x2” steel plates at ranges from 20 to 65 yards. Sitting in the driver seat of my car, I shot 100 pellets with the rifle rested on the door of my car, with only three misses. I know this isn’t the type of quantitative shooting serious paper punchers want to see, but for me as a hunter it demonstrated that this gun is able to do anything I could ask of it when hunting. The Falcon R is accurate, powerful, and quiet …. I consider this the trifecta in a hunting gun.
In all the shooting I’d done to this point, which numbered a few hundred pellets, there was only one problem area. I experienced jamming when cycling the gun on several occasions, the bolt could not be fully closed and when pulled back the magazine could not be removed because a pellet was jammed between it and the receiver. I had to run a cleaning rod down from the muzzle to push the pellet back into the magazine before it could be removed. On closer inspection I found the cause of this was that the four screws holding the magazine casing together had loosened, but once tightened up the magazine did not malfunction again. The magazine on my PF 25 can be a little tricky to load, but with the Falcon – R magazine I’m able to get it loaded quickly and with minimal fumbling.
My first outing with this gun was on a squirrel hunting trip in the woods a couple of days after a light snow. Because this was a loaner rifle that I needed to send back to the factory after I’d finished with it, I could not mount swivel studs and had to carry it nestled in the crook of my arm or over my shoulder. While the gun is not a lightweight it carried well. Even better it mounted well coming quickly to shoulder, and with the ergonomic pistol grip and cheekpiece I was able to get a consistent hold from just about any shooting position. I had to take a fast second shot once when there were two squirrels up in a big shaggy oak, and found that I could cycle the gun rapidly without having to come out of a shooting posture.
The ,22 caliber pellets I choose for hunting were the Beeman Double Golds, all of the pellets tested would have worked fine. But having never used the Golds before, I thought it would be interesting to give them a go. The limit of squirrels I put in the bag on this hunt was taken between 25 to 50 yards. Two were taken with head shots and three with chest shots. The combination of an accurate and powerful rifle with an accurate pellet offering excellent terminal performance was a very effective small game rig. I’ve been able to take the gun out for a few pest control shoots at a friend’s farm and have found that my initial impression has held up.
So what is my final take on the Falcon-R as a hunting airgun? I think Beeman has a real winner here; the gun is ergonomic, the accuracy is really outstanding, and the power is everything you could want in a gun for taking woodchuck sized quarry out to 50 or 60 yards. What I thought was a marked improvement over my PF 25 was the shrouded barrel, which really makes this gun a quiet hunter! The trigger is one of the nicer production triggers I’ve used, though this is something I expect from any rifle wearing the Falcon name. The rifle is a beauty as well, the stock design, the wood used, the quality of the metal work, and the fit and finish are all of the highest quality
I’m taking the gun on a jackrabbit hunt out west in a couple weeks, then it will be time to send it back to the factory …… unless I can convince my wife that the 70 or eighty guns down in my gun room need one more to complete the collection (until the next outstanding performer comes along). In all seriousness though, I am considering whether it might not be time to trade up from my PF 25.