co2 cartridges

i was always told by uk shooters that crossman cartridges were the best available however after tuning my gun and testing through the chrono walther cartridges give about 10fps more and only drop by 12fps by shot 30.
crossmans have reduced fps and a higher fps drop off from about shot 22.
these were just my observations and maybe i have a bad batch or cheap ones made to look like like crossmans

[ribbonstone]

CO2 is Co2...you either get the full 12ga. of liquid or you don't. Not real sure who makes what cartridges; Crosman's are marked as being made in the EU...older boxes (Copperheads) had a "Made in Hungary" sticker on them (but under that was still printed the "fabrique aux E.-U." notice).  It souldn't surprise me to find they're all made at the same places, just marked different for various companies (take a good look at canned vegetables at the supermarket...notice how many diffent brands all come from the same canning plant?)

Now back in the old-old days, they were marked as having 12.5gr....but th old ones had an odd crimp type seal that did tend to leak (like a little mini-bottle cap).  Worst were the old-old Daisy's painted a pale blue...the paint would chip and get sucked into the valves.

So on that note...it pays to make sure the cartridges are clean as you can get them before loading them into the gun.

[mikeiniowa]

Just wait until you start buying them in bulk quanities, out of 100 you will wind up with as many as 3 or 4 duds that have leaked or never got filled. Really screws up the testing, wind up tearing the gun down to see what you did wrong. What difference do you see when using two cylinders or just one? seems to be about a 10 fps difference.

[IJL]

Hey guys, seems to me that the easy way around this is to weigh the canisters before you install them. That way you know if they are filled properly. BUT that still doesn't account for the difference in M.V. I thought CO2 was CO2 etc, maybe some are more pure CO2 than others?

Just my opinion.

IJL

[Gene_SC]

IJL, good test on those Crosman cartridges. I always wondered about them being uniform in power. And I am sure that the quality control is not of top quality.. They may test one out of a thousand coming out of production. Also I am sure there is  a plus or minus tolerance on the amount of Co 2 being put in those cylinders also...

Gene

[ribbonstone]

Until this thread, I never did a web-search on CO2 cylinders...were a LOT more than I thought there were, being used for lots of differnt things. Bicycle tire inflators, confetti cannons, t-shirt cannons, muzzle loader ball ejectos, varius flotation devices, model car racers, wine openers, soda makers, etc.

Found 4gr. (never knew those exissted), the old 8gr.(were some CO2 guns made to take thse small ones), 12ga., 12gr. threaded necks, 16gr., 16gr. threaded necks, and the big 88gr. Crosman's.  I might have missed some along the way, but the varitiety of lables under which these are sold is astonding....got to be just a few c02 plants producting these things, just being supplied with cartridges with various logos printed one them.

As stated on a previous post, CO2 is CO2 and as long as there is some liquid left in the cylinder, the pressure is the same, for a given temperature, regardless of manufacturer.

On a slightly different tack though, my first CO2 gun was (still is) an RWS C225. Shooting it double action, I managed to bend something inside and sent it back to Dynamit Nobel for repair. One of their guys phoned me and said "You're using Crosman gas aren't you? I can tell because the gun is starting to clog with gunge." (BTW This is nothing to do with the mechanical fault which was my own doing). He suggested I should use Walther gas, or at least anything but Crosman. Could this be a reason for variations of velocity? I have no doubt that there are 1000s of people using Crosman gas without apparent problems, but the negative comment did come from an expert and he was not trying to sell his own product.
I am in the UK, Alfred Nobel was Swedish I think and Walther is definitely German, so surely no nationalistic bias there!

[ribbonstone]

Might be better...or more filtered...certainly hope there is something better about them to justrify the (at least here) cost increase.

The reason Dynamit Nobel didn't like the Crosmans was because they contain oil.
Walther cartridges are about 30% cheaper than Crosmans in the UK. Strange how people put "exotic" prices on imported goods isn't it?

[ribbonstone]

Excahnge rate + shgipping