 Hey folks back again for the sixth and final installment of myself talking to Tom Gaylord the godfather of airguns Today we're gonna be talking about how Tom and I got started in airguns Respectively and where we've seen the industry go in that time and where we think it's going in the future Kind of doing some reminiscing with one another about air guns gone by in the past Reminiscing about the nice weather we had down in Texas since we're starting to get nice weather up in Cleveland here again And just thinking about how great it was to get to sit down and talk to Tom I hope you guys have enjoyed the series again. This is the last one. So hopefully you enjoy it Let us know in the comments if you did maybe we'll do something similar in the future Don't forget to like and subscribe. We appreciate it a ton. We'll see you at the end For the folks that don't know. Yeah When did you get into the air gun game? Cool. Good question 1976 holy cow now I had air guns as a kid like most American boys do I Had some Benjamins. I had some daisies. So I'm not including that but in 1976 I was in Germany serving with the army and I bought a Diana Model 10 recoilless target pistol and that started me shooting target air pistol and I actually had I was a nationally ranked Air pistol shooter for a while a very brief while tough thing to stay on top of that. Yeah, yes, and I didn't So I've been around since then But I really got into it when I started the air gun letter in 1994 and Then when I started my blog in 2005 I'm in it every day. I write a blog every day. So probably starting in 94 and Progressing and then suddenly boom in 2005. That's what I've seen and What I've seen is we've gone from I remember when the first Modern PCP was introduced. It was a day state and Day state took one of these capture guns that shoots darts in the animals and they said What if we put a 22 caliber barrel on it and they came out with a gun they called the day state Huntsman Now I never had one of those but I had the next generation of those And it was a fairly straightforward gun cost six hundred dollars in the 90s Which would be a lot more today. Yeah, sure, but it was very accurate very interesting But all PCPs were expensive in those days I Shot field target in the late 90s. I started with My I actually started with PCPs. I started with the day state. What was it? Huntsman mark to sure I think I Got from Rodney Boyce brand new nice gun and then Gary Barnes made me a custom rifle that I competed with But then I got a TX 200 and I started shooting Springer And I was the guy Tyler who held the bell curve down on the low end so that people could win In a 60-shot match, I was the guy shooting 45 Stopping well on my best day. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't a good shot. Yeah, I was an okay shot They're a pistol a little bit better at but anyhow, that's what I've seen and then the 90s. I remember when Pyramid air started. All right, so hang on. Let's back up a second though. All right back up Let's talk about when spring piston guns became real in terms of power Because this is something I think there are a lot of people out there that Don't know the backstory I suppose of really where the first kind of what by today's standards is not the most powerful thing But where like a magnum spring piston gun started. Okay. Yeah, I've written a lot about this It was in the early 1970s and there were a couple of companies that were vying for and in those days the magic mark was to go faster than 800 feet per second and you had Diana in the United States imported by RWS you had Bsf who went out of business in the early 1980s And you had Virach the Virach had the HW 35 that they still make And it if it made 800 that was the best it ever did it It just couldn't quite make it the reason was the the piston stroke was too short But the the Diana 45 had a nice long piston stroke and it went over 800 The Bsf the s 55 the s 60 the s 70 and I think they went up to the s 90 those all went over 800 if they were taken care of and Then along comes this company out of Germany called FWB fine vert bow and Up until that point. They'd made target guns. Yep, and nobody feared flame vert bow. Well, they made a model 121 and It was cool, and they made it in 177 because they like 177s and it shot in the high sevens and They said what if and they tweaked it and they came out with the FWB 124 and that thing went over 800 no problem And that was when it happened that started what I called the horsepower wars. Yeah, which are really the velocity war. Yeah 800 wasn't enough anymore because quite a few companies could do it so along comes Dr. Beeman with his Beeman R1, which was also the HW 80 and that produced 940 feet per second and that was pretty good and then the next year he Supertuned it and it was doing a thousand feet per second And then he laserized it and it was doing 1100 feet per second And then I think it was 1986 Out comes Diana with these side levers now and they're doing 1100 feet per second right out of the box and Then came Gamo and Gamo said that's not fast enough for us And they started pushing the velocity Well, they advertise them at 1600 the fastest I ever saw was 1475 but it doesn't really matter Once the horsepower or velocity wars started They didn't stop still haven't no no now the big deal is to get larger caliber pellets Going that fast. Yes, you know and PCPs have changed that a lot. Oh, you have they ever. Yeah As the market started to transition into the PCP game Yeah, you know, so I'm trying to get you up into my time, which is like late 2000s. So You know Airarms day-state and a handful of other small British manufacturers really started PCPs from the ground up in the early 90s And a lot of those guns the crazy part like I have an NJR 100. Yeah, it was made in 94 Yeah, I have a Ripley AR 5s, which has 1991 scratched into the side of it, right? So, you know, these are like air loom, but they're also by today's standards like top-tier still PCPs Where did that really start to catch on I was at the shot show And I met a guy by the name of John McKaslin and he had this gun. Oh John you're not gonna like this it was called the gun power stealth and he was building it for the UK market and He had his UK Salesman there really was the importer in the UK and Come to find out these two guys were buddies and The guy from the UK had brought a gun over and showed it to John a couple years before and said isn't this cool Well, it wasn't cool at all. It was horrible and John said I could build a better gun than that and the guy said I'd like to see you try So John went home and he did he built a better gun than that and The guy said I could sell these and he did gunpower stealth Well, I was at the show. I said I want one of those gunpower stealths Well, they're only 12 foot pounds because the UK has a 12 foot pound energy limit on their air guns Without a license you can get a license you go higher John said you really want just 12 foot pounds. I said well, no I want more But that's what you got. I'll buy one How do I buy it? Do I have to write to this guy in the UK and that actually threw John for a loop? He hadn't thought that far ahead Well within a couple of years he came out with the Talon and The Talon had a power adjuster on the side because Americans like power Yeah, and he didn't have to worry about 12 foot pounds anymore And then he came out with the Talon SS and now we're up to your era. We're up to about 2001 So and at that point, it's really you have Air Force in the PCP game You have the Europeans which are the high-end, right? Absolutely You have probably FX starting the OEM guns for Logan or vice versa. However, that situation worked I don't know it either. Yeah, so you got like Air Arms. You got Daystate a handful of others And then you have Air Force and the Koreans. Yeah, right, which we're a thing, you know, you have, you know, that's right I didn't even mention the Koreans. They were there. Yeah. Yeah, and also building very powerful guns some innovations in terms of repeaters And of course, we can't forget the 10-meter companies Walther, Anshut, Spinework, Baal We're all doing PCPs at this point, but all relegated for the most part with the exceptional one or two to, you know Your five six foot pound Olympic Target, yeah So as the 2000s kind of progressed, right? You know, we talked about this with, you know, Crossmen and Benjamin coming out with the discovery And obviously how, for lack of better phrasing, game-changing that ended up being along with the Marauder What did that cause? Because the ripples of what happened, what Crossmen and Benjamin did with those guns We're still kind of feeling today and we're still living off of today I mean people don't realize the the Marauder's been on the market for 12 or 13 years and and has, for the record, been an incredible seller through that time Even as they've evolved it as it deserves to Sure It's a good gun Sure Yeah, you know Well, and under the under the table Crossmen is starting to rifle their own barrels They're learning how to rifle barrels. They're doing a great job Suddenly they don't have to buy aftermarket barrels That makes it less expensive for them to produce That's a good thing too Sure So there's a there's a lot that's going on Everybody points their finger and says, oh, it hasn't changed yet Well, it has changed True It's not in ways people can see Yeah And sometimes like the Armada you can see it Um What has it done? It's woken up the air gun world Just prior to political situations turning bad Firearms becoming difficult Well, not difficult to acquire Ammo getting difficult to acquire Buying firearms because they thought they weren't going to be able to and that Remember like the toilet paper shortage? Well, we had a firearm shortage And the prices went up and your $900 AR was now a $2,500 AR Well, air guns, they're good We didn't know that And now they're really really good And then along comes FX and raw and day state with all these Wompty Doodle really powerful accurate guns at 100 yards and beyond We ain't going back No, no, we're not When I started in this business and I'll say I started in 1994 with my air gun letter Newsletter I estimated because nobody knew that there were 15,000 active air gunners in the United States There were probably millions of people who owned air guns, but they were in a closet someplace Today Hundreds of thousands We have broken through that that glass ceiling Why because firearm guys have come over to air guns They've seen that they are so capable and you don't have to give up your firearms You can still have your AR But it's a lot cheaper to shoot that accurate PCP When you can get the pellets Yep Then then that 5.56 AR when you can get the ammunition or afford it So that's what's happened That marauder and that discovery they they busted us right through the glass ceiling at the very time When firearms were gonna and ammo were gonna get hard to come by Sure It didn't happen the same year obviously it happened over a period of time But the period of time was kind of condensed Yeah Yeah, it happened very quickly it's still kind of happening I mean, you know as we see some of those crazy high-end features get trickled into You know a lot of those lower priced offerings What what else has changed because like for me I think it was 2016 2017 Compressors Just Changed everything again and there were you know I've been asked before what were the biggest changes since like I've been with pyramid air, right? I was transitioning from our sales team into like kind of my current role on the product side and The air venturi compressor comes out the big one. Yep, and the Air Force Texan come out Those single-handedly Changed the landscape of our sales Dramatically Because all of a sudden you had a big bore gun That was like really powerful. Well, you know four or five hundred foot pounds at the time in the 45 45 57 It was a monster, you know, nobody was even close to it, you know, uh, no, sorry Umarex had announced the hammer, but you know, we hadn't seen it yet Well, you and I had seen kind of it What it was where it started anyway, yeah, and uh, and you know But Air Force beat everybody to the punch was something that was like really powerful and made it available to everybody And you needed air. Yes, and there was the compressor and prior to that those compressors that could fill a big tank Were three grand. Yeah, and all of a sudden you have one for sub 1500 bucks And it does it in under an hour, right? Like it was it was pretty quick and Um, those two things at least in my time and then obviously the subsequent other compressors that have come out And your your personal compressor units like the nomad the travelers, you know, all that stuff Um have have further changed the game You know and those like for me those are probably the big ones and then obviously seeing all the Adjustability Because you know when I first got into air guns having a regulated pcp meant you had something that was worth worth some money and That was all well and good But you didn't know what you were doing with it. You shot the gun as it came There were no adjustments. You weren't playing with hammer springs You weren't like messing with regulators and and all this stuff and all of a sudden, you know You have companies like air arms like fx that start putting power adjustments onto guns Um, you know and obviously like day states got their electronics and stuff Which you can adjust things as well and then you start to see that stuff trickled down And now we have adjustable regulators that you can mess with while there's air in the gun, you know It's it's really Wow, you know just crazy crazy crazy Well Let's not overlook ammunition Sure, dr. Beeman told me that H&N had told him That they were down to such accuracy when they were making pellets that to go any better. They'd have to make them More accurate at the molecular level Well, that wasn't going to happen But somehow jsp redesigned a pellet That turns around and now the raw and probably other guns. I know the raw plenty of others. Yeah cowabunga So Ammunition has changed the slug game Is really coming up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and everybody wants to shoot slugs. Yeah, why? Because they're heavier. They buck the wind better. Are they as accurate? Not yet It depends if you if you got the right barrel for them They're a handful of guns out there that shoot them incredibly well Lead free pellets. I can remember when lead free pellets was a joke Yeah, you couldn't shoot them worth a darn. You couldn't hit the no and now they make target pellets Uh, uh, what's the light? Um, you got hnn's green line. You have predator gto's both of them are In a lot of cases just as accurate as their, you know, lead counterparts in many guns I always test them in my target guns and sometimes they come out on top. Yeah Yeah Now the problem with them is they're usually made out of 10 and 10 costs like four or five times as much as lead So they're very expensive for 500 pellets Uh, don't know a way around that Maybe maybe you guys can figure out how to make paper mache pellets Ah, somebody'll figure something out. I'm sure make a pellet that you don't that you can reuse over and over and over again But the barrel has to be changed on every shot I don't know if that's the right answer, Tom Well, look, you know for me, I just think that there's been Especially in the last like five or ten years Just an incredible amount of Growth and also diversity you have a lot of companies coming into the game I mean, you know, who would ever thought that we'd see a like a manufacturer like a sig Um, you know actually get into air guns and and do it or attempt to do it Right, you know and actually dive in and and build stuff in house and and produce innovative guns It just wasn't really a thing. It was always an afterthought, you know for a lot of these companies It was like here it take my name and and you experienced air gun manufacturer over here make my air guns, right? Um, which is fine. I'm not I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that Obviously with like the replica game, you know Umarex is the king of the replica and they've done an incredible job doing that for so many firearms companies And crossman does it. I mean, there's a bunch of different ones out there Um But just to see the the breath You've lived through it. Yeah, you came in right at the beginning of all this explosion Yeah, well, I have but I also saw it before I was in the sleepy days before it exploded You came in right as it was starting to explode. Yeah. Yeah I'm I'm just curious to see where we're going Because you know, it's hard to see sometimes when you're in it You know, you're working on what you're working on and you know, you kind of get some insight Like you and I get get some heads up on things that are being talked about and and what I'm saying Tyler and folks who are watching Is we ain't done yet. Hmm stuff is still happening right now Oh, I got one for you real soon actually Oh, cool. Oh, yeah, and it's not what you're thinking either Thanks for joining us on this six-part series where we talked to Tom Gaylord about all things air guns Hopefully you guys enjoyed a look back into Tom and I's air gunning past If you did let us know down below in the comments if there was anything that stuck out to you through the series We'd love to hear your thoughts. Maybe we'll do it again sometime soon for now though I have to get back to work because uh Well, gotta work for a living. I don't get to write about air guns all day like Tom does So thanks again to Tom. Thank you very much to our friends at air force for helping us get this done Giving us the space to do it to john mccaslin yvette hicks camera brinker hoff. We appreciate it a ton Couldn't have done it without you guys and speaking of tun tun jones. You too. You're the man Tom, thank you again for your time, man. I really appreciate it brother and uh, we'll see you guys soon later