Daisy Powerline 7856 Review

Overall Rating

Cheap and cheerful! 4x15mm telescopic sight included! Quiet and light. Multi-stroke pumpup therefore variable power - suitable for indoors or small gardens. Recoiless.

Plastic construction. Feels flimsy. Poor accuracy for a recoiless air gun. My daisy 717 pistol shoots far straighter.

I bought this Daisy Powerline 7856 air rifle for 28UKP from JS Ramsbottom.
My expectations were somewhat low given the tiny price tag. Quick note about the model number, the 7856 is basically a 856 with a daisy 4x15mm telescopic sight thrown in.

The rifle features plastic construction where most rifles would have wood or even metal. This is off course to be expected for the price of this rifle. I was pleasantly suprised by this rifle, you seem to get an awful lot for your money, but on closer inspection you begin to see the cost cutting measures. The barrel is sleeved - a thin outer tube made from rolled sheet steel over the real barrel which is a very slender 7.5mm 'drinking straw' affair - although it is rifled steel to be fair.

There are open sights featuring adjustable rear sights, a sliding ramp adjustment for elevation, and windage adjustment handled by loosening a small screw and shuffling the notched metal plate from side to side. On my particular rifle, the rear sight was bent to the left, some wrestling with a screwdriver and careful re-alignment (bending actually) was necessary to straighten this up.

The muzzle velocity is quoted as 650fps (0.177 only) for BBs and slightly less for pellets. I was unable to check this but don't doubt these claims. There is also a BB reservoir style magazine fitted in the receiver, a sliding hatch covers the hole. In my tests I stuck with pellets (which have to be loaded manually) I wanted to get an idea for the gun's accuracy (besides I had no BBs handy).

Loading is accomplished via a bolt action feed, where drawing back the bolt also cocks the internal valve hammer. Dropping a pellet into the loading channel can be rather hit and miss, sometimes the pellet ending up back to front. A little bit of practice does help here, however.

Pumping up the rifle is effortless, the plastic forestock doubling up as a pump lever in the usual multi-pump configuration.

A manual safety catch (cross-bolt style) is fitted just ahead of the trigger guard. The trigger pull is just right for this sort of rifle, short travel with light pressure, you can easily maintain the crosshairs on the target while firing, the absence of recoil allowing you to watch the target for the pellet's point of impact.

That brings me to the only real disappointing feature of this otherwise value for money rifle, accuracy! Or rather the lack of it. Attempting to produce decent groups with this rifle was very frustrating, even at 6 metres. When firing 6 shot groups there would be some pellets finding the same hole on the target, but many of pellets would just unexplainedly miss by an inch or so. After firing many hundred pellets this little problem continued to be present. In disgust I removed the telescopic sight and tried grouping with open sights but to no avail, useless! Was I expecting too much? Probably. I tried various flat and round headed pellets but none of them produced a reliable group. At one point I fetched my Daisy Powerline 717 pistol and fired some groups. There was no comparison, the pistol producing a group the size of a 5 pence piece effortlessly. Surely a rifle with a longer barrel could match the pistol's grouping ability? It just wasn't to be. It seems this rifle was built to hit tin cans.

I should mention that in my tests, I used 5 pump strokes on an indoor range. This gave ample power for my 6 metre range. Full power is achieved with 10 strokes.

After a couple of days of attempting to treat the daisy 7856 as a target rifle, I eventually gave up and started dismantling it. Actually I didn't really give up on the rifle for target work, I just wanted to see why it wasn't able to shoot straight. Not being very techie about the finer points of sharp shooting rifles, I concluded that it was probably due to the worst example of a barrel crown that I'd ever seen. Now...who can lend me a lathe? :)

Members' Comments onNumb Nut.'s Review

• knotty. on 10th Oct 2002

  An excellent review. One inch groups at 6 metres using this rifle that's GOOD. If you manage to get hold of a lathe and improve it please let us know. I know they are both made by Daisy but the 7856 is no target tool unlike the 717 pistol which according to legend once won a silver medal at the olympics !!!! I kid you not...

• Numb Nut. on 11th Oct 2002

  Thanks for your comments! I didn't go into much detail about the barrel but the barrel crown is funnelled out which is bad news when looking for accuracy. The barrel is also only held at both ends, the rest of it floats. When shooting this rifle, the point of impact moves around every few shots. Its incredibly frustrating to shoot 2-3 shots into a small group and then the next ones to go elsewhere on the card!!! Anyway, I decided to chop the funnelled section of the barrel off with a hacksaw (less than 1cm chopped) and recrown it by filing it flat. Didn't make much difference however! I think the problem is that the thin barrel flexes and vibrates a little bit, perhaps randomly when you fire, thus changing the point of impact. What I want to do next is to fill the gap between the barrel and the shroud with some sort of dense-ish material - maybe that'll help. Just noticed that JSR are now selling these rifles 2 for 45 pounds! If you're new to airguns, you can't really go wrong! :o)

• Joe bagadohnut. on 26th Nov 2002

  I found the same problem as the dude's other comment, when you think you have perfected how to aim, there is a pellet that shoots astray. It isn't as far as the other guy said, but it is slightly noticeable.

• joebagadohnut. on 28th Nov 2002

  Are you saying you have trouble aiming with the scope? Or with the regular dove tail sightings? Just curious, I just recently bought the gun. As soon as I saw the scope, I HAD TO put it on right away and see how it works. I find the scope is great, except is very hard to use at close distances....

• poo man. on 27th Mar 2003

  thanks a lot. i was going to buy two for fourty quid from jsramsbottom, but after seeing these reviews i decided not to. Is the aiming really that bad or were you just holding the gun the wrong way round?? well im gonna get it any way coz i know i can shoot straight, unlike some people who just blame it on their guns!!!
  

• joe bagadohnut. on 28th Mar 2003

  After putting the scope on THE RIGHT WAY, i have seen the light......
  
  and after sighting the scope from a good distance away, i find the gun to be incredibly accurate.......
  
  i can hit a tennis ball size object almost 9 out of 10 times from 30 metres or so.......
  
  as long as the scope is sighed PERFECTLY, then your gun will operate with incredible accuracy, but if you are too lazy to sight it in properly, its a waste of time.
  
  peace

• Glenn. on 23rd Apr 2003

  I agree about taking time to sight in the rifle and scope. I've owned this rifle about 4-5 months and adjusted the scope on three separate occasions, and my groupings have gotten much tighter, although I still get stray shots regularly. (although still within the target circle!) As long as your expectations are realistic, this gun should make you happy. Its a great value and reasonably accurate and powerfull, but will never win any awards.