Pellets 101 - A Guide to Choosing the Right Pellet.
Once you have selected the caliber airgun you are going to go with you now must choose which style of pellet best fits your needs. There are four basic pellet styles to choose from, Woodcutter, pointed, hollow point, and domed.
The first thing you should consider is what will you be using your airgun for, much like we did when choosing the right caliber of your airgun. Again here are three main uses for airguns, plinking or general shooting, competitive shooting, and hunting.
For paper target competition there is only one choice when it comes to a pellet style. That is because there is only one style that is allowed, that is the flat-nosed woodcutter. One of the main reasons woodcutters have come to be recognized as “the” pellet to use for paper targets competition, is simply because the clean “punched” hole it makes in paper targets, which makes scoring very easy. As opposed to other pellet styles such as domed, pointed, and hollow point that tend to make more of a rip in the targets, which when scoring can make things a bit less clear cut. The woodcutter tends to lose accuracy above 900 fps, so keep it under that and you should be right on target.
For hunting you can use a few different pellet styles depending on your shooting conditions, the most influential are distance and wind speed. However there is one style that really sticks out as being the most effective when it comes to hunting, which is the hollow point pellet. The hole in the tip of the hollow point pellet allows the pellet to expand and hit the target with much greater force. When the pellet hits the target with its newly expanded width it does not just hit the target and easily pass through, it sticks into the target causing a great deal of damage to the vital organs. You see a lot of pellets pass straight through their targets, especially when hunting with pointed pellets. In most instances the animal will simply be wounded and run off to only suffer a prolonged death, which in a lot of cases occurs several days later due to infection (No one wants to see that happen). If you are hunting at very long distances a good substitutions for the hollow point is the domed pellet. The domed pellet has a more aerodynamic shape that allows it to be more accurate at longer distance, and it also has a great deal of knock down power.
For plinking and general shooting the most important thing is to find a decent inexpensive pellet, the RWS Hobby and RSW superdome are one’s we recommend. This is an area that you can shop around on and see what works best with you.
The biggest thing to keep in mind when choosing the correct pellet, is that every airgun is different. You need to get out there shoot a wide variety of pellets, in till you find on that really works best with your airgun. RWS makes a great pellet sampler, this is something that is very cost effective in the process of selecting a pellet that works for you.
Here are a few links to some of the products we discussed in the article.....
