daisy powerline 7856 review

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Picture courtesy of Steve Towler.

Average Ratings

Accuracy	8.1/10
Handling	8.8/10
Value for Money	9/10
Overall rating	8.6/10

100% Recommended8 out of 8 Reviews

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By Numb Nut. on 17th Sep 2002

Numb Nut.'s Ratings

Accuracy	5/10
Handling	8/10
Value for money	9/10
Overall value	8/10
Numb Nut.'s recommendation

Good Points

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

Bad Points

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

General Comments

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? :)

Total Respect: +5