The main tube and barrel are brass, and won’t rust you can clean it up in the bathtub if the rest of the household doesn’t mind, and it won’t hurt anything. Just make sure the inside of the tube is clean, and that the seating surfaces for the check valve and exhaust valve are polished smooth and flat. I haven’t shown re-assembly, but it’s pretty much the reverse of dis-assembly. Even a few early 392/397’s had a soldered valve, and are similar in dis-assembly. The same basic process also applies to the 310 and 317, and the later 340/342/347 series (although the safety is different). But this video deals with the tear-down of a repairable Benjamin 312. We have other video’s showing a ‘cut out’ of a Benjamin 312, and how the internals work. Either option is preferred to the scrap heap. Maybe others, after seeing the detail involved, will decide that it is better to send the old Benji off to a professional airgunsmith for repair. So, maybe these videos will be of interest to someone who has come to posses a ‘soldered valve’ Benjamin that doesn’t hold air anymore or shoots weakly, and who wants to get it back in trim. Heir ‘Awwww, just throw it out with the rest of his junk’.

Grandchild to heir ‘This old thing doesn’t even work’. Even worse is a trip to the dump after grandpa or Uncle Bob dies and the heirs are clearing (throwing) out his stuff. Lightweight, easy to cock, reasonably accurate, I associate these Benjamins with independence and freedom, especially during my summers off from school.įast forward to 2014 as an airgun accumulator (always got my eye open for one, but am not a collector), I hate to see these classic air rifles fatally damaged during a ham-fisted repair.

Roaming the hills around the (then) undeveloped east side of the Napa Valley, shooting at whatever seemed a suitable target. It may be a childhood thing, bringing back memories of riding my bicycle with my air rifle across the handlebars, searching for pop bottles along the roads (yes, people used to just throw the empties out the car window!!), then redeeming them at a little country store to buy more pellets. I can’t help it, I love the old tootsie-roll forearm Benjamin pumpers. If it seems like I’m putting up a lot of video about this particular airgun, well, I am.

Benjamin franklin air rifle parts