Alright if you’ve been wanting a good quality airgun for your teenager or for your own self, you may have taken a gander at the Crosman 1077. How does it do and is a worth buying?
The Crosman 1077 is a good airgun that fires at 683 fps. It is suitable for teenagers and adults alike and is a gun worth buying. It is best a target work, as its power level and caliber make it not ideal for small game hunting.
Shooting this gun is a pleasure, but is it a gun that I would recommend?
Would I Recommend This Gun?
I do indeed recommend this gun for really anything but hunting. It would do well at small pest control, but because it only comes in .177 caliber, it is not ideal at handling small game hunting.
Target work with this gun will be a bit of a challenge, as maintaining a shooting rate that will give you consistent accuracy is a bit of a challenge, but for its price tag of $73, its a fair bit that you get out of your money.
But otherwise, yes, I do recommend this gun to any aspiring plinker, provided you have plenty of CO2 cartridges
Core Features
Coming with a standard rifled barrel, which helps accuracy, the barrel is shortened to help scale the gun down so that youngsters might not be as awkward while wielding this. They have enough to feel awkward about.
The whole body of the gun is encased in a plastic that lends it a synthetic feel, without it feeling cheap, and also keeping the weight down– at a nice 3.06 pounds of airgun.
With open sights, the gun is ready to be shot immediately after purchase, but if you want, you can use the standard dovetail rails to mount a scope that you favor. The rails are made of the same plastic that covers the rest of the body, so do be careful to not tighten your scope too much, or things may break.
A magazine comes with the gun, kind of necessary if it is to be a semi automatic, which is actually a really nice feature. Most airguns take come kind of cocking motion, which can get tedious, especially after a day of shooting break barrel springers, but the semi automatic nature makes this gun and others like it a bit of a breath of fresh air.
The magazine of course is a rotary device, with two parts. One is the housing for the actual disk that contains the pellets, while the other is the disk that contains the pellets. Amazing, I know, but with a 12 round capacity, the magazine will keep you shooting for a while.
Speaking of the gun being semi automatic, in order for the gun to be able to shoot like that it needs to be powered by CO2 cartridges. This of course comes with the advantage of being able to shoot faster than a lot of other airguns at the cost of being less powerful than most airguns.
That of course also makes the gun suitable for certain niches, like target shooting, as sometimes you don’t want your airguns to be too powerful, or else they might not be suitable for children.
In order to fit the 12 gram CO2 cartridge, you unscrew a bolt under the barrel, and its like a giant bolt, hard to miss. Then you simply insert a cartridge into the hole that is magically now there, with the thin part of the cartridge there first, reinsert the bolt, and screw it tight. This punctures the cartridge and charges the gun. Pretty easy.
Because CO2 (like all gasses) cools as it expands, the more you shoot in rapid succession, the less powerful the cartridge becomes until it warms back up. This is not a huge deal, but if you pull the trigger as fast as you can instead of waiting a few moments between shots, your shots slow down, and it is harder to group them together.
The trigger could be better. It is a long, hard pull with a plastic feel to it. Its not a highlight of the gun, but is not terrible. The safety is in my favorite style, a simple button that you push from one side of the gun to the next. Not much to remark on there other than its simpicity.
Performance
Okay, so the ever present question about just about any airgun: How does it perform?
Well, this airgun works fairly well in terms of power. It definitely has enough energy to kill birds, coming out at about 8.74 fpe. Our chronograph was telling us that our 8.44 grain pellets were moving at 683 fps, which is actually much higher than the advertised muzzle velocity, which was 625 fps.
I’m not sure why this is the case. It is possible that because it was a hot day the cartridge was able to spit out energy better, it is also possible that our pellets were lighter than the ones that Crosman were using, but whatever the case was, this is one of the few airguns that I am aware of where the speed we got from our testing was faster than the advertised fps.
Like I do with all of our airguns, I took it out to the range at 25 yards. Again it was a pleasant experience, but I wasn’t too impressed with the accuracy of the gun. I was using open sights, and my shot groups were wild, almost covering the whole target. I wrote it off as the gun was just not very accurate and open sights at 25 yards was perhaps a bit too much for the gun to handle.
Knowing that I was being unfair to the gun being unfair to the gun, a few days later I fit a scope to it and took it out to the same spot at the same yardage.
My shot groups this time were much closer, but still kind of large, about twice the size of a quarter. Maybe it was me, but with a good airgun I can shoot a dime consistently at 25 yards pretty well, so I don’t think my poor skill was what was keeping it from being very accurate.
I did notice that the less time that I took between shots, the less accurate those shots were. I can probably convincingly explain this in a few different ways, but the one I think is the case is this: the quicker your shots are, the less time the CO2 cartridge has to warm back up, as each shot that you take cools that small tube of compressed air down.
A colder cartridge means less energy per shot, which also means less velocity per shot, which means it will drop more than your last shot before it strikes the target.
I could probably also explain this by saying that pulling the trigger too fast can shift the gun by slight degrees that add up. being a semi automatic probably doesn’t help either. Whatever the case, take some time between shots to let your CO2 cartridge ready up and for you to make sure you are on target.
As far as noise goes, this gun lands squarely in the average volume range for BB guns, coming out to be about 97.4 db, where the Red Ryder weighs in at 92 db, and the typical springer airgun comes out at at least 110 db.
If you are not familiar with the decibel scale, an increase of 10 db is actually an increase of ten times the volume level. A sound of 110 db is not 1.1 times the volume of a 100 db sound, it is 10 times the volume level. 120 db is 100 times louder than 100 db, so if you are familiar with a typical springer airgun, you can correctly imagine that this is not actually all that loud.
Things I Like
Even though I suspect that the semi automatic nature of the gun helps to make it less accurate than it could be, I am a big fan of it. No gun can be good at literally everything, so having guns able to fill each niche that may come up is a great thing.
I adore being able to load up and go to town on those annoying soda cans that keep piling up without having to stop and reload between each shot, just line up and get to work.
I also appreciate how the insert for the cartridge was implemented in a way that looks good. It works where it was placed, just under the barrel, and doesn’t look awkward. Perhaps that is something really small, but I like it nonetheless.
The magazine capacity is another piece of the gun that I like a lot. It feels good to have 12 rounds at the ready that you can use in between fill ups, and I like it a lot. It isn’t very hard to get ten or more round in a magazine, but 12 rounds in a semi automatic feels pretty good.
I mentioned before that the simple button safety is my favorite, and that is because of its simplicity. I like it, and it works well in the Crosman 1077.
The weight is another thing that I like about this gun for sure. There is little kickback to speak of– so little, you won’t register it when you shoot, so the gun can afford to be a lightweight piece for sure, which makes it easy to pack around with you. I doubt that you will go backpacking with this thing, but you may appreciate the lightweight too while ou ton your adventures.
Things I Would Change
I admit, I’m not a huge fan of the plastic dovetail rails. I know that it is not a huge deal that these are made of plastic, especially since this gun has very little kickback compared to many other types of airguns (cough cough, springers), and that this gun is supposed to be cheaper anyway, but the fact that its not a really solid piece does disappoint me.
This helps to keep the weight down to a nice three pounds, definitely a nicer piece to be lugging around on your adventures, but I don’t know. I have my opinion, and no opinion is objective, so you may ind that you like it.
