One of our most watched YouTube videos last year was regarding the new Lightning CLX from BSA, a stunningly beautiful rifle with a couple of issues that prevented it being a world beater. We planned to strip our version to see why the recoil was so harsh, and the trigger performance so poor. These two things combined made it very difficult (not impossible, but very hard work and requiring perfect technique EVERY shot) to get consistently accurate groups. Our example was snapped up before we did any further investigative work. A customer has engaged us to continue this work with his new rifle to make it into the “forever” gun many of us wished it to be.

I have now stripped the rifle, a commendably easy process, well done BSA. Unfortunately, the praise for BSA ends there. Oh, BSA what were you thinking?! What a terrible design!!

It’s almost like they have been so adamant in their defence of the Lightning range and that they aren’t terrible rifles, with their skirt latched pistons, that they HAD to stick to that template for this rifle too, when they could have done what everyone else does with decent springers (and they themselves did for decades with Airsporters, etc) and designed it from the start with a latch rod.

They have chosen not to, and as a result have engineered in a whole smorgasbord of compromises to get around this poor decision. The problem with a skirt latch piston is that it introduces a rocking force on the piston when latched back, which introduces a bending force on the mainspring which will generate accelerated wear on both components and vibration and noise between them on firing. To get around this they have had to use a thick plastic liner in the piston to mask the “twang”, and then the really big issue: To try and prevent the spring from buckling (natural tenedancy with the rocking couple induced by being skirt latched) they have chosen to use a short metal spring guide at the rear which engages with a solid metal “top-hat” with a huge extension on it that inserts itself through the spring guide on cocking. This piece is made of solid steel and weighs nearly 100g!!! This requires a 35 coil mainspring of 3mm wire to drive it! I imagine that they haven’t just used a long engineering plastic rear spring guide with a matching top-hat (pretty much standard now) because the strong rocking couple from the skirt latching and super stiff mainspring would break them. Potential solutions to trial will be binning the front weight and fitting a TX spring with plastic guides (I suspect this will work, be pleasant to shoot, but only make 8-9ft/lb), the same with an Airsporter spring (which I think will make the required power but break the guide fairly swiftly) or shorten the standard spring, and drill out the forward weight as much as possible, which might be the best compromise.

The trigger, by comparison should be fairly easy to sort, as there is too much overlap between the sear faces at rest and the return spring is too strong.

A selection of manufacturer imposed design compromises…!

A lot of the recoil comes from here-100g

Trigger group isn’t terrible..