Canadian Airgun Forum

When I first started thinking about a “springer” air rifle I had decided that I wanted a .177 that had a good reputation, open sights even though I planned on adding a scope, power in the 750 to 850 fps range as I understood that was the optimum power level for .177 accuracy, weight under 9 pounds, and available after sale service without having to ship my gun. On one of my trips to AGS, Travis showed me a TX200 which I found to be a very impressive air gun, but the weight really bothered me, and it did not have open sights. The other gun on my short list was a HW77 available from D&L which had open sights, but its weight also bothered me, and D&L advised they were the sole dealer in Canada and after sales service was limited to them.

This led me to the Diana 430L which met my above requirements, and I can drive to AGS when necessary. I ordered the gun from Travis and he called me back shortly thereafter advising that when he opened the box he discovered the gun was no longer coming with open sights. Despite my disappointment, I still went ahead with the purchase as it still met my other foregoing requirements, and so I also had Travis mount the scope for me.

I have a good selection of lighter weight pellets so this is what I started using for the break in after giving the barrel a good cleaning. At first, I found cocking the gun to require lot more effort than I anticipated, and had difficulty adjusting to the double recoil and the loud thunk noise on firing. However, after a couple of hundred pellets the cocking became much easier, and the noise quieted down quite a bit. I think my personal learning curve also improved.

I then decided it was time to get the Chrony out to see what the gun was actually shooting. I decided to run 2 tests with the heaviest pellets I had on hand – JSB 8.44 domes & JSB 8.02 wadcutters. Results follow.


JSB 8.44 – high 798.0, low 784.7, average 793.2, E/S 13.29, & S/D 4.69
JSB 8.02 – high 808.6, low 795.8, average 804.1, E/S 12.96, S/D 4.12

While I’m not an expert on Chrony interpretations the consistency of the above numbers left me very happy. I have since purchased some JSB 10.34g pellets, but have not yet had time to Chrony them.

One of my disappointments was that the gun did NOT come with an owner’s manual, and I could not find one anywhere. I was able to find a generic manual on the Umarex website, but it did not list the 430L, but did the 460 which is a similar, but more powerful version of the gun. This at least showed me the trigger assembly which appears to be the same as mine and relative adjustment screws. With this guide I have made a couple of minor adjustments and am now finding the trigger much more to my liking and my accuracy is starting to improve.

I started shooting air guns a couple of years ago by shooting air pistols at a local German Club that has an indoor 10 metre air gun range and have adopted their official targets for both my pistol shooting and now my rifle shooting. Their rifle targets consist of 5 small bulls’ eyes on one target and they shoot 2 pellets at each bulls’ eye, but only with open sights. I have decided to use these targets for my new rifle and scope but have set the distance to 20 yards at present. The black portion of each bulls eye is 1 ¼ “and I’m finding that trying to keep all pellets in the black area at that distance is currently challenging enough for me.

I do know that this gun/scope combo is capable of much more accuracy than I can currently shoot, but we will keep on practicing and hopefully improve.