An important one for me. This next project is the first full size air rifle I owned. This is not one like it, but the actual rifle, and has been in my possession since 1982. It is an early Relum Tornado in .22 and was bought secondhand by my father from a gun shop in Wembley in the late 1970s. He gifted it to me when he replaced it with a brand new Weihrauch HW35 in the early 1980s.

This rifle was a pretty constant childhood companion for me, and as I started to teach myself the basics of airgun maintenance/tuning etc, this poor rifle was on the receiving end of all my experimentation, and suffered appallingly as a result. All the “imrovements” of the time were heaped upon it (intentional dieseling, OX mainsprings, weighted pistons, floating spring guides, etc) and put in place with poor quality, ill fitting tools (all I had available at the time). By the time I stopped using it, it was battered, bruised and comprehensively worn out.

I bought it back to life around a decade and a half ago, and replaced many of the chewed up fasteners, rusty parts etc and completed a synthetic piston seal conversion. It worked really nicely, but the extra length of the conversion robbed it of swept volume and reduced power to pistol levels. I returned to a leather seal, and it worked really well, but unfortunately once returned to regular use the rivet fitment for the piston head fractured, leaving the piston head stuck at the end of the compression tube. This setback resulted in me stripping it down and coating with oil for storage. From which I have just retrieved it… watch this space for updates!

Relum resto