Friday, October 6, 2017

Daisy 881 Quick Fix

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I pulled the check valve and pump cup from a donor 880 that seemed in good condition. All o-rings were replaced.
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That weird hard plastic or rubber buffer makes no sense to me.
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Some more detail on the barrel clamp, I found the barrel wiggled a bit, which means that air was leaking past the seal.
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Forgot to take a picture, but I ended up lapping the bottom of the clamp w/sandpaper on a flat plate until it made better contact.
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The gun wouldn’t hold more than one pump of air after reassembly, which meant that the check valve wasn’t working. So I decided to experiment and heated it and a round bushing up with a heat gun until they were moderately warm/hot. Then I compressed the seal (making the skirt flare out more) with the arbor press and held it until it cooled.
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As you can see, the seal on the left has taken a set and is larger in diameter than the non-working seal on the right. I don’t know how long this will last, but the rifle works now and my neighbor seems happy.
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Not a bad result for 10 pumps with a premier 7.9gr. pellet.

3 comments:

Paul said...

Thanks for this series, it brings back a lot of memories. Way back in the early 80's my folks got me an 880 through which I ran a ton of BB's and pellets, wearing it out in the process. Got the parts from Daisy and proceeded to wear it out again, after which I left for college and the old pumper disappeared.

If the barrel wiggles too much in the shroud, you can take a turn or four of electrical tape around the muzzle end, this gives a better friction fit to the front sight base which is where the barrel is supposed to mate up. Looks like you got the rear part of the barrel fixed well with lapping down the clamp.

There are better guns out there, even back then, but mine took all kinds of small game in the Amazon basin where we were raised. It taught me how to shoot and the principles of trajectory. I could hit about anything I could see, with from 2 pumps up to 10. The current crop of "880's" are plastic junk, but have heard of folks doing a transplant of the innards to the older metal framed ones.

Paul said...

Forgot to ask, is that the smoothbore steel barrel, or the rifled brass one? My guess is the steel barrel and the yellow tint comes from ambient light, but just a guess.

Nick Carter said...

It's the rifled brass one.