TargetTalk

At last years match, a lot of coaches and myself brought up the desire to be able to use ball bearings at the Daisy National. Later on they sent and email asking if we'd be willing to pay extra if they sold them. Later they asked us to send a sample of what we currently use.

Since them I've not heard anything else, but looking the match program for this year it says "Only Daisy Ball Bearing BBs shall be used for the DNBBGCM.".

Does anyone else know any details about the new ammunition?

Yes, spoke with Denise Johnson at Daisy last week. They are going to send samples of their ball bearings to the teams as they receive their entry to the Nationals and they will be available "soon", no date given. I also sent samples to them as well. I will not have to hand size bb's one at a time anymore. Now if they would just make those shot tubes better, LOL.

Thanks, we'll see you at Rock Eagle this weekend for Air Pistol & Rifle with BB next weekend,
David Haire
Tift County 4-H Shooting Sports

I'm no longer shooting 4H BB team, but when I did in 2001 I tried to find an inch or metric ball bearing to fit my son's 499, all to no avail. Do you mind if I ask what size these bearings are ?

11/64. undersized but very consistent. I begged the first batch I got off David 5 or so years ago. Haven't looked back.

shawn706 wrote:11/64. undersized but very consistent. I begged the first batch I got off David 5 or so years ago. Haven't looked back.

Here is a link where you can buy precision .177"/ 4.5mm 52100 alloy steel balls.

https://www.mcmaster.com/#9292k38/=1dykkou

Wow - $5.52 for a pack of 50. Are they giving away a new F-150 at nationals? That's 2.5 times higher than the best match pellets. I'm not a BB gun guy, but is this what it takes to compete at this game??

We order ours in bulk from Thompson Linear. It's $135 for 15,000 precision ball bearings.

And, yes, it is vital to shoot precise ball bearings to be competitive at the highest level.

I wasn't able to attend National's this year with our team, but our coaches who took the team were pretty impressed with consistency of the Daisy issued ball bearings. The only issue was cleaning some of the oil off of them in an effort to keep from gumming up the shot tube. Kind of funny though - at the 2017 Nationals I was accused of using illegal ball bearing ammunition because I was using ammo from a 35mm film container - which was hand sorted Daisy issue BB's. This forum might be shedding some light on who actually was....

Actually, the top competitive teams have for years sorted daisy bbs by hand for nationals. It is an amazingly hard and long process. It takes weeks to get enough for a team. Last year (2017), I went through 12,000 bbs to get 150 for my child to shoot.

jgo wrote:Actually, the top competitive teams have for years sorted daisy bbs by hand for nationals. It is an amazingly hard and long process. It takes weeks to get enough for a team. Last year (2017), I went through 12,000 bbs to get 150 for my child to shoot.

That sounds like the same amount of fallout we saw too.