After the meeting in New York, a schedule was developed and a project team was assigned to all the tasks that go into designing and fielding a new air rifle. Those who build them one at a time in the basement might not appreciate everything that goes into a new product like this, but there is literature, packaging, education and promotion to consider, not to mention a hundred small but important details on the gun, itself. Just because a couple hand-built prototypes work doesn't mean you're ready to produce them.

But PCPs are something new. And this is not only a new model rifle in two calibers, it is a revolutionary new TYPE of PCP - one never before seen from any production manufacturer. On top of that, it comes to market in a revolutionary new way - a complete shooting system in a box - nothing more to buy.

With one powerful stroke, the Crosman Corporation has shattered all the fences and obstacles to PCP ownership - right down to the affordable price. Wouldn't it be nice if the new guns also shot well?

When I originally pitched my idea, I said I believed the guns would have decent accuracy on air. After all, they were already shooting decently on CO₂! But imagine my surprise when I began testing the early prototypes of the Benjamin PCP 2000 and discovered they are just as accurate as the thousand-dollar European PCPs!

Remarkable accuracy
I couldn't believe it. Starting at 25 yards, I was getting some five-shot groups smaller than a half-inch, but that's no big deal for a PCP. A PCP can do that well out to 50 yards. And, so could both calibers of the Benjamin PCP 2000, as it turned out! As incredible as it sounds, their groups didn't seem to open up between 25 and 50 yards.

I didn't do it once, I did it time after time after time. Not every 50-yard group was a half-inch, just as not all of my groups from a thousand-dollar PCP will be a half-inch, but enough were that I know these two rifle can shoot that well! And the rest were only one-inch or less.

So what DON'T they have?
So that begs the question, what are you giving up when you buy one of these? Well, you do loose the fancy adjustable trigger, though I must say the trigger on these rifles is very usable. It is reasonably light and very crisp. It lacks an overtravel screw, but that's a feature almost anyone can install for themselves. They also haven't got the fancy adjustable stocks, though the one they selected is pretty slick-looking. And the Benjamin is lighter than most of the European PCPs - but wait a minute - that's better!

In short, there is not a lot that you do give up with this very affordable PCP rifle. If you have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the day when an affordable PCP comes to the market, now is the time to act. There won't be a better package than this one.

It comes to you with a steel breech that has a long 11mm dovetail for airgun scope mounts. It's longer than half the expensive PCP scope rails on the market. It has a built-in pressure gauge called a manometer - something some of the expensive guns don't even have. It has a protective cover to keep the fill nipple clean, which is an absolute must. And the fill nipple is a simple Foster quick-disconnest that shooters find the most desirable fill nipple of all. The accuracy will astound you, but you'll have to determine that for yourself. Fortunately, the low price for the rifle, hand pump and a tin of pellets that puts you in business from the moment you open the box means that PCPs have never been more affordable.

The 2000 psi fill level means almost anyone old enough to shoot this rifle will also be able to fill it from the hand pump that comes in the package. If you do use a scuba tank instead of the hand pump, you will get a huge number of additional fills before that tank has to go back to the dive shop for a refill. You will get around 30-35 full-power accurate shots on each fill of air. The exact number depends on the distance at which you are shooting.

When you want to just fill the gun and shoot a lot, an inexpensive CO₂ adapter converts this rifle from air to CO₂ operation. Then it is easy to fill the gun from a standard paintball tank. For indoor use or for outdoor casual plinking, CO₂ is the way to go. It even has enough power for close-range hunting of small game.

As for which caliber to get, choose .177 if you want to shoot informally, punch paper targets or try your hand at the sport of field target. The Benjamin PCP 2000 is certainly accurate enough to put you in the winner's circle.

If you want to hunt small and medium-sized game, dispatch pests and shoot informally at larger targets, choose the .22. It packs a real wallop downrange.

But here's the best idea of all. Get the caliber you want most right now and later you can buy the other one. You won't need a second pump, so the price of just the rifle will be even lower than the first one! You will still have less money invested in these two air rifles that if you bought just one budget-priced PCP from another manufacturer!

As I thought about how to present my idea to the management at Crosman, the idea itself began taking on substance. I knew I would be talking to men and women who understand the airgun market quite well, but who do not know the PCP sector of that market as thoroughly as the sectors in which they currently make airguns. They are not without some experience, having marketed Logun PCPs for a brief period several years back, but they have never developed the technology in-house.

Another benefit to using air is you get about a 25 percent boost in velocity. The thinner atoms in air flow through firing valves much faster than the larger molecules of carbon dioxide. With such a boost, I knew the gun they developed would be in the same ballpark as the rest of the PCPs, in terms of velocity and power.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the perfect time to do more than just invent a new type of PCP. With a little more effort, we could also solve the entire shooting solution, by selling a complete shooting system instead of just an airgun. Don't just sell the gun and make the customer wonder how to get it filled like all the other airgun manufacturers do. Sell the entire system - airgun, hand pump, pellets and technical instructions - all in the same package! That way there could be no confusion for the customer. They couldn't forget to buy something if it all came in the same package! And, because I was dealing with the Crosman Corporation, I figured the price could be kept on the unbelievable side of affordable!

I put my presentation together and used the Benjamin AS 392T as the gun to be converted. It was easy for me to PhotoShop that rifle into a good-looking sporting PCP, though I hoped the engineers would stock it with a longer forearm. To overcome any objections to using the hand pump to fill the rifle, I recommended that we show a video of a teenaged girl filling it. I have demonstrated hand pumps at numerous public events over the years and I know that most healthy 18-year-old women can fill a gun to 2,000 psi without problems.

Crosman and I entered into discussions of the gun project, which is when I learned that they were actively seeking to enter into the precharged market, and had been discussing various options at the time I made my approach. They liked my idea of the complete package and we began development of what would become the Benjamin PCP 2000. It should be easy to see where the model designation came from.

Our preliminary discussions were conducted on the phone and through the internet, but then they brought me to Rochester to discuss some concrete details. Their production manager had put together a working prototype that he surprised me with at that meeting, and it turned out that everyone was astounded by the performance potential of 2,000 psi air. Instead of the AS392T, he based his work on the popular Crosman 2260 rifle, which in retrospect made more sense, since it was already built with a very PCP-like profile. And, because this rifle exists in both .177 and .22 calibers, he built two prototypes.

At that meeting we discussed details of the new gun. Making a .177 made a lot of sense, since there are more .177 shooters out there. I felt that a longer steel breech was necessary to hold the large scope that shooters would undoubtedly want to put on the rifle. But they surprised me by including a manometer (pressure gauge) built into the rifle. Expensive European PCPs have such gauges, but a lot of the lower-cost PCPs do not. This was a real step towards quality.

When I hefted the prototypes and looked over the velocity figures they got, I knew this was the gun we wanted. There were still many details to work out, but the basic gun was there. However, they had one more surprise for me. There was a second spreadsheet of velocities for each caliber that represented the output of the rifles on CO₂! The engineer who designed the gun had even labeled the spreadsheet Dual Fuel - thus coming up with what will perhaps become a household name in airgunning.

Something incredible had happened when he ran the guns on CO₂. They were actually more powerful than they had been when they were standard CO₂ models. The new valve that was created for air was also more efficient with carbon dioxide gas, and it gave over a hundred shots before needing a refill!

It started with an idea
Everyone has had a "great idea" at one time or another. You know what I mean, a What They Ought To Do kind of idea. Most of those ideas die as daydreams, but once in a rare while one comes along at the right time and also happens to be the idea everyone is looking for.

Something new
My idea was to take a current CO₂ rifle from the Benjamin line and convert it to use high-pressure air, only not such high pressure that filling it from a hand pump would be difficult. Because filling a precharged airgun has been the biggest roadblock to the popularization of this type of powerplant thus far. Filling, and, of course, the high cost of the gun.

Precharged airguns have so much going for them
Precharged airguns act like most shooters imagine all guns should act. They are trouble-free, highly accurate and they require no special techniques to get them to shoot well. They can operate in very cold weather without suffering a great power loss and all you need is the gun and pellets. Once they are filled, there is no pumping the gun, no worry about the outdoor temperature, and you certainly don't have to learn any special gun-holding techniques. Just shoot and shoot, until the gun needs to be refilled, which these days won't be for many shots.

Filling is the problem
Precharged guns are so desirable that once shooters hear about all their benefits they want them. Until they learn about the filling! Until now you either had to fill a PCP gun from a scuba tank or from a special high-pressure hand pump, either of which was a significant additional expense. The standard fill pressure of PCP guns has hovered around 3,000 pounds per square inch (psi), which is difficult to achieve with a hand pump. Up to about 2,000 psi the pumping is relatively easy, but above that point it gets progressively more difficult, and over 2,500 psi, there are adult men and women who lack the strength and body weight to operate the pump. So filling PCPs has been a major drawback.

And so is cost
PCPs have traditionally made by companies catering to a few thousand shooters in each country, shooters with the financial resources to afford the best guns. Because the guns are so inherently accurate, the makers have naturally used the finest barrels, finishes, wood stocks and expensive internal components like regulators - all of which has driven the price of the guns very high. Most European PCP rifles today sell for $800 and higher. The few models that cost less than $500 are Chinese airguns of questionable reliability. So cost has been another major roadblock to the popularization of the PCP.

Crosman could change that!
My flash of insight was that the Crosman Corporation could change the face of PCP airguns if they put their resources to the problem, and if they didn't go about it in what many would consider the conventional way. If Crosman could convert a CO₂ rifle to operate on air, and if the pressure at which the firing valve operated was 2,000 psi instead of 3,000 psi, the world would have the first affordable PCP that could also be easily filled from a hand pump! And Crosman could keep the cost down on such a rifle like no other airgun company in the world. That was the foundation of my idea.

I didn't design the parts of a gun, nor did I build a prototype of anything. I simply defined what the airgun world wanted and had never known who to ask. And now the Crosman Corporation fell into my plans because, frankly, they are the only company in the world that was poised to do what I thought needed to be done. So I prepared a presentation for them.