The big news from Day One of the 2017 IWA Show was the announcement of the new FX Crown air rifle!
That’s Fredrik Axelsson above, in our heading photograph, showing us his latest creation.
In fact, there’s so much to say about the FX Crown, it’s difficult to know where to start! At a first, distant, glance, the Crown looks a little like the existing FX Royale range. But that would be a big mistake. The Crown is a completely different design from the ground up. It’s taken a year and a half to develop, as Fredrik’s son Johan (photo below) told me…
The FX Crown is specifically designed to be the ultimate configurable air rifle. There’s a huge number of features and options available. Let’s start with the barrel, or actually barrels.
The Crown introduces a complete new barrel concept from FX Airguns. This is the Smooth Twist X barrel. Fredrik’s goal with this is the ultimate in accuracy. Smooth Twist X barrels are actually liners that can be easily fitted to, or removed from, the Crown in a matter of a minute or so.
Smooth Twist X barrels will be available in multiple twist rates and multiple different calibers. And FX is promising to test each twist rate to find the best-performing pellet – and then make that information available to the public. This means that you will be assured of the perfect barrel/pellet combination from the outset, as Fredrik is shown below explaining to interested airgunners.
And the amazing thing is that these Smooth Twist X barrels are made with the rifling formed completely from the outside of the barrel. The inside of the tube is completely untouched by machining. This might sound like the process used to manufacture existing Smooth Twist barrels, but that’s not so, says Fredrik.
Smooth Twist X barrels have rifling along their entire length. They’re also manufactured by a different process.
And then there are multiple caliber Smooth Twist X barrels for the FX Crown also. It’s really easy to change caliber as the bolt probe is held in place by one easily-accessible setscrew. This means that changing caliber on the FX Crown takes very little more time than just changing the barrel liner itself.
As the Crown is to be available in multiple calibers – including .177 .22 .25 and .30 cal – that’s huge versatility. And Fredrik says that the Smooth Twist X barrels will be low cost – he said $99 each!
The FX Crown uses high capacity magazines – the same 18-shot clip for .22 caliber – as are used in the FX Impact. It also has a regulator, with different settings for each caliber to ensure consistent muzzle velocity. There are also two power adjusters. The front one adjusts the valve output, the rear one alters hammer spring tension.
There’s also two pressure gauges and a fill adapter between them below the stock ahead of the trigger. The trigger itself is a new target version that felt extremely good to me when tried at the show.
The shroud/silencer is extendable, so you can control the sound output to “quiet” or “really, really quiet”.
The stock of the FX Impact is manufactured by Minelli in Italy. It incorporate a buttpad that’s adjustable for both elevation and “windage”. Also the cheekpiece of the stock is adjustable vertically. There’s laminate versions available, as well as the solid walnut version shown above.
The company says that production of the FX Crown will start in April/May 2017. HAM suggests you place your order as soon as possible. There’s clearly going to be a rush!
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