Bought a Squires-Bingham SB20 for about $50 when a local discount joint went out of bidness in the '80s. Figgered it would make good cheap "swap fodder." But you don't swap off a gun that shoots THIS well out of the box, no matter HOW ugly it is.
![Air gun Material property Gun barrel Wood Trigger]()
Best "sleeper" you ever bought?
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Erma-Excam RX22 bought new at a gun shop for about $85 in the mid-'80s. This is a PPK lookalike, not a copy or a clone. Although it looks and feels exactly like a PPK, it's a completely different design and NO parts interchange including the magazines. I was delighted to discover that it was at least as reliable and accurate as my real .22 PPK and had better trigger pulls (SA and DA) to boot. Its major weak point IMHO was a horrendous amount of trigger overtravel after letoff--I fixed this with a blob of green epoxy putty. Ugly but very functional.
Later in the '80s I bought a buttload of VERY cheap Argentine-made .22 ammo called Concord or Concorde. It came in both standard velocity (green box) and high-speed (red box). The green stuff was okay plinking ammo--actually better than Rem Thudbolts--but the red stuff would lead up a barrel in 50 rounds so bad you could barely see light through it. I decided to dispose of this backbirth ammo in the RX22 simply because the gun was so easy to strip for cleaning. I'd put 50 rounds through it, take off the slide, run a USGI M16 bore brush through the barrel a couple times (which would knock out huge chunks of lead), put the gun back together and do it again. In this manner the little gun chewed its way through about 2000 rounds of this junk with no problems and no complaints, a feat that has always impressed me.
![Photograph Air gun Trigger Revolver Wood]()
Later in the '80s I bought a buttload of VERY cheap Argentine-made .22 ammo called Concord or Concorde. It came in both standard velocity (green box) and high-speed (red box). The green stuff was okay plinking ammo--actually better than Rem Thudbolts--but the red stuff would lead up a barrel in 50 rounds so bad you could barely see light through it. I decided to dispose of this backbirth ammo in the RX22 simply because the gun was so easy to strip for cleaning. I'd put 50 rounds through it, take off the slide, run a USGI M16 bore brush through the barrel a couple times (which would knock out huge chunks of lead), put the gun back together and do it again. In this manner the little gun chewed its way through about 2000 rounds of this junk with no problems and no complaints, a feat that has always impressed me.
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