El Gamo Falcon 20R ball repeater

El Gamo Falcon 20R ball repeater

With thanks to John G for these pics. He says: "

One... 'find' which deserves to be brought out into the light of day is an example of the rarely seen Gamo Falcon 20R repeater...

"The Gamo repeater is one of those guns which I can never understand [why it] didn’t become more commercial. The design involves a very simple modification of the Gamo single shot Falcon that converts it to a very effective 20-shot repeater for ball ammo. The magazine is just a tube along the left side of the barrel which holds the ball shot under spring pressure.

"These pictures show how it compares with the standard Falcon.

"When the loading gate is swung open manually in the usual way for the single shot Falcon, a ball is automatically fed into the gate. The gate then is then returned manually. Not a true automatic repeater of course, but pleasant to use and the feed mechanism is extremely reliable as there is virtually nothing that can go wrong. As the feeder mechanism is restricted to round shot only, the pistol could never aspire to being a serious target pistol which is probably why El Gamo only made the Falcon version rather than a more upmarket Center version."