Canadian Airgun Forum

Hello everyone .. back in here again with something a little different, I will be editing this thread allot over time, so things will change a bit here and there. I bought a Black Widow .177 pellet pistol springer at Princess Auto and It was pretty cheap, I wanted to grab another but they sold out quickly and they were limited to how many they had or will get. If you can find one good luck, if you do or have one already, well your in for a treat if you decide to try some or all of these mods, but beware changing it too extremely might get you into some hot water, so just keep this in mind if you keep modding it more and more. I have a licence for firearms but even for me somethings need to kept in proportion such as how long the barrel can be and how hard it can shoot and or both.

I did every possible thing I could think of to improve this cheap Chinese piece and then some and I still have more to come like replacing the main piston seal for an aftermarket one, or even a spring change. The spring in these particular pistols are OD 713 Gauge 100-102, 20 coils. The pistol will need a tophat for in the piston to set in the mainspring and a spacer on the other end. The pistol will need the angled offset air transfer port bored out and replaced with a offset straight through air transfer port. This will create less volume to compress and more compression in the compression chamber. The piston will need to be buttoned and the rear skirt of the piston will have to be ground down to take off the thin piston skirt, cant button it as its too thin, the piston inside will have to be bored out and sleeved with a tuff plastic, after that, a metal sleeve inside the plastic one, this will give tight tolerance to the outside of the main spring and make it less wobbley as the compression spring is released as well as the sound dampened. I will post photos of the detailed work a bit later on.

The chronograph readings below (not the receipt lol) are from earlier stages when it had a short barrel on it, different experimental stages with different mods, up until the present readings. The last mod was the air transfer port as it improved allot after this modification, port size being .122, before it was .166, thats way too large for a pistol, let alone a rifle, because of this, it gave it too much volume because of port size and not just that but also because of the centered to angled transfer port, a very poor design, the angled port adds more volume. Moving along here, to improve this pistol even further, requires a thicker gauge of wire, an OD of 745/740 and coils in 25 range area estimation. 120 Wire Spring 745 OD spring would be the logical next step. This size of OD wire will not be a problem if installed because the piston has been bored out and sleeves can changed to accommodate new springs.

If the barrel that I put on at 16" 2/16 improved it just slightly, it might be better cut down some to lessen the volume of air exiting the barrel thus increasing the velocity in theory. The almost 8" stock barrel was not much different in velocity, although leads did improve with the longer barrel pre port mod.
Perhaps more compression would help but I will play in that area much later on.

This pistol shoots stock at 260-280 FPS with Crossman Hollow Points 7.9 gr

Mods that will improve the velocity most will be:

- Piston Sleeve mod
- Piston Button mod
- Air Transfer Port .122 mod
- Moly Lube mod?
- Rear Spacer behind Spring mod


Here are some photos to get started with below.

Close to the original pistol, put a cheap red dot on it at this point in time. Later on I put a much better one on as this cheapo one cracked from the recoil. So I went with a Tasco red dot that uses a weaver rail. The pistol has two tiny holes in the back for the glow sights. I used those to mount a tiny weaver rail. It works as long as you blue the threads. The box for it says it had rails on it to mount red dots, when I opened the box up to no such aval was there any rails machined into this tube. hah !

Here we go

The numbers, from earlier, weeks ago, to the latest, then later on just recent the port 122 mod numbers, barrel is recent as well. You can see how it has slowly gotten better.

I ran out of the alloy pellets but the last readings you see to the right were before the port mod. With the numbers improving with the latest hollow points and the newly acquired Crossman Destroyers (today). wrote down two readings from them as you can see. I would assume the alloys would be in the 530 FPS range. guess*** And remember this is without a new aftermarket seal and with a weak spring. Eventually I will make a nice little wooden stock for it and sheath the barrel, by no means am I done with this little pistol or carbine lol

I will have fresh numbers up soon with a variety of pellets as what you see in the above post is kinda all over the place with different experimental stages by adding and taking away things such as spacers and barrels. Before I test pellets after opening the pistol up, I have to fire off at least 5-10 rounds to settle the pistol in as the readings are erratic and deviation is semi extreme for the first little bit. I go through pellets like you wouldn't believe when modding rifles and pistols.

Here are the current FPS numbers as of now with all that has been done to it. Sorry no alloy X-Point 5.56 gr pellets left to test, I'll pick some up eventually. This pistol dislikes Crossmen Hollowpoints for some reason, very finicky with them, they are definitely the deviation kings lol, that is with both barrels as well ?


Id like to mention as well if you have one of these pistols, scrap the leather seal and remake your own as it will seal the breech to barrel much much better, it can increase the FPS around 30-40+ higher, doing just this alone. Just get some leather from a belt or a source of some kind and soak the leather in oil for a day or two and use hollow hole punches to fit to size, then re oil it again, hammer it on with a rubber mallet, work it in, then oil it agian, close and open the barrel, work it in good, then let it sit for awhile as it adheres or conforms to the surface face of the breech.

One more thing, the piston head seal in my gun has a little chunk missing on the side of the seal probably from the factory installation, I bet it is losing some FPS because of this, So its definitely something i will replace in the future.

This is the only known source I could find and it's definitely not worth what they want for it, considering what other break barrel pistols you can get for the same amount of money. Nonetheless .. here is a link.


http://neweycorp.ca/products/black-wido ... ingle-shot

It's a decent pistol if you put some work into it like better quality components and that pays for itself in the end if you are willing to put forth the effort, you'll end up with something that is pretty powerful and rare down the road. To me that's what makes air gunning, modding & collecting them fun. This pistol has the potential to reach 600FPS or much more. The top of the main air tube for these says "Black Widow 300 fps or under" This pistol can be converted to Nitro as well with the right gas shock or custom fitted. I might play with a Crossman .22 barrel & a much stronger spring next. Always nice to have the machinery to do this stuff.

Wink wink

Piston inside and out view.

Tophat for spring for inside piston & the spacer for the spring as well as the new breech port.

Some extra photos

Next update will be alloy pellet speeds & or stronger spring, (barrel will be shortened in this case to keep it legal) stay tuned ....

Ok a little update I will continue this thread once I get my order in from Vortec. I also have a Diana ORING-28 Piston Seal coming in for the Ruger Air Hawk thread that I have going.

I will be testing the following:

113 Wire 730OD spring.

120 Wire 745 OD spring.

GAMO / BSA 25mm O-RING Piston Seal.

Hopefully this seal fits, it should, 25mm same as stock, but we'll see !

.

Ok so while I am waiting I did some breech sealing testing with different material and some chronograph tests to see if anything other then leather would make a difference. I kinda knew anything synthetic would be a bit better then a leather seal so I went ahead and made a couple o-ring type breech seals. The results were much better all around for many types of pellets with nearly 4% to 11% better averages for all pellets that I tested. The green seal you see below is what I settled with. A green black type tygon tube for PC water cooling. As for durability, that remains to be seen since its sort of experimental at this point. Other rubber types quickly wore down such as car radiator hose "type" rubber, the Tygon tube material is holding up so far. The O-Ring "well" for these pistols is much bigger then traditional O-ring barreled type guns with the O-ring well being much thinner and shallower, the pistol having a wider and deeper well to it. The stock barrel comes with a leather seal originally.

The face of the breech should be sanded a bit and polished after the port mod, even without the port mod it could still use a polishing to smooth it out a bit as its a bit crude (small scrapes & micro voids "pores") keep this in mind though as without doing this it will ruin leather seals after awhile, especially if you use synthetic seals. You want to create two surfaces with glass like smoothness with enough pressure from breech to barrel to compress the rubber or leather so that no air can leak what so ever ! Breech sealing has been a major problem with this pistol over time, with leather seals wearing out quickly. Now solved !

New Tygon seal testing results: "grain weighed"

Crossmen Destroyers 7.7gr Crossmen Pointed Pellets 7.4gr

439.0 436.9
428.8 429.0
424.5 421.6
441.7 424.6
428.8 440.7
426.2 432.0
424.1 429.8
436.0 434.4
431.8 462.4
439.6 445.9
438.8 434.5
450.3 433.9
430.0 448.0
431.5 426.4
426.6 427.8
433.6 433.2
420.7 459.3
453.4 438.5

New Leather Seal:


Crossmen Destroyers 7.7gr Crossmen Pointed Pellets 7.4gr

431.0 424.2
417.8 427.8
425.4 429.8
409.5 425.1
419.1 423.9
410.4 435.4
415.4 446.1
443.5 441.2
432.5 428.4
439.7 424.7
417.3 428.2
420.9 423.4
445.5 427.8
451.4 432.6
444.7 419.9
396.4 429.2
410.1 436.7
424.2 426.7

And an example of what will happen with velocity using a leather seal when worn or wearing out.

Crossmen Destroyers 7.7gr

400.6
388.1
376.7
415.3
394.6
379.4
382.6
361.6
427.3
377.8
423.2
369.3
411.7
389.8
412.3