Airgun World – Summer 2019

http://www.airgunshooting.co.uk AIRGUN WORLD 61

BSA METEOR REFURB

STRIP, AND STRIP AGAIN
When I began to look at reassembling the gun,
I noticed that the previous owners had
damaged the locking plunger by hammering in
the pin that holds it, without lining up the
cut-out. They must have used some force
because it deformed the hole running through
the body of the plunger so that it did not slip
up and down the hole in the barrel block
easily. I had to file and sand the body back into
a true cylinder to make it work properly, and
then I used a rag with Autosol polishing paste
on the internals of the action, to smooth out the
surfaces the piston ring would run over, to
make them super-smooth.
Putting it back together was next and what I
didn’t know was that the trigger on the Mark I
and Mark II Meteors is a real bugger; the sear
is in two parts, and some restorers change out
the whole trigger assembly for a newer
single-piece sear because they can be so
problematical, and so it proved to me.
I put everything back together, including the
stock, but the trigger sear would not engage, so
I stripped it all down again.
I found and stripped down one of my other
Meteors, put the whole one-piece trigger sear and
blade in the old gun, and lo and behold ... it still
didn’t work. Clearly, it wasn’t the two-piece trigger
that was the issue. I had to strip the whole MK II
again, alter the piston tube alignment and refit

the MK I/MK II trigger. Finally, now it worked. It

had taken an hour and a half to fix.

CHRONO REPORT

I ran it over the chronograph to see what it was

capable of, and it varied by less than 5fps;

500, 502, 499, 500, 498, 503, etc. Wow! That

was outstanding! It was doing a hair under 8

ft.lbs. which is what I expected, to be honest,

for a 50-year-old gun – the most any of my MK

3/4/5 Meteors do is 10 ft.lbs. It was accuracy

time and as much as I wanted to keep the gun

as a period piece, I am a scope man at heart.

However, getting hold of a 1960’s BSA scope

to match the gun is an almost impossible task

... well, almost. 

Bits of a BS MKII Meteor.

A wooden dowel, a rag and Autosol cleaned out the inside. The primed barrel. The painted barrel.

The BSA Meteor logo. Hydrographics taking the barrel down to bare metal.

All back together.

“the trigger sear would not engage,

so I stripped it all down again”