Well, the short answer is…Who Knows?
Here is the slightly longer answer. Anyone familiar with airguns probably spotted the AEA Zeus 72 caliber in my website’s artwork. This is one of the many guns I bought from AEA when I became the Texas/Oklahoma dealer a couple of months ago. So, I dove into making custom ammunition for these and began having work done on the website. Then I met one of my neighbors who lives a few miles away about a month ago and found out that he is a new AEA dealer. I have learned a lot in the last month and hope to learn a great deal about the airgun market for a long time to come. I have learned that it is a rapidly expanding market and that verbal contracts don’t mean much. I’ve learned that there are people in this industry who are making promises they cannot keep. I’ve figured out that a lot of the new products that are coming out from multiple manufacturers seem to be using the buying public as their R&D department and are using them to work out the bugs after the products have made it to market. Things like barrels that seem to loosen up on their own, FPE (Foot Pound Energy) numbers that seem very unrealistic, airguns brought to market with no apparent structure in place to supply any pellets, much less pellets that fit adequately and are designed in such a way to help them meet their FPE promises and stated purpose (Hunting, self-defense, etc.).
I suppose that is where I come in. I have no loyalty to any given airgun brand, I like many of the air rifles and pistols from many different manufacturers; in fact, my first large bore air rifle was the 357 Benjamin. For many years I have been into bullet casting and moving in this direction seemed like a no-brainer…I was definitely wrong. A rifle with a chamber pressure of 10,000 to 35,000 PSI can force just about any weight or design bullet down a barrel and make it fly true. Airguns on the other hand have a fraction of that PSI and much lower FPE; so, it becomes critical to figure out the lead hardness, weight, size, and diameter of a pellet, to seal the barrel from air loss/bypass and to meet the needs of a given airgun. This will rarely be accomplished with an off-the-shelf firearm bullet mold or the repackaging of readily available firearm bullets and calling them pellets.
I will be the first to tell you that I am not an expert in this field, but I am learning every day and investing time and money into new molds and testing new and different products for this industry. More importantly, I am always looking for your feedback. I will not know of a product issue unless someone tells me, and I will not know of a new product that is needed unless I see people asking for it.