Hatsan At44-10 Multi Shot PCP Rifle

The original AT44-10 was Turkish Gun manufacturing giants Hatsan’s first ever PCP to come to the UK. I mention this as I’d noticed a few ‘obvious’ external modifications to examples in local gunshops and was told it has become quite popular. Having tested an original I was keen to see how the ‘improved’ gun worked. I picked a synthetic stock version as I had also been told that plastic now sells just as well as wood, sometimes even better for the more serious hunter! As we shall see, what it offers is good!

Angle Of the Dangle

The first and obvious change are the double yet separate barrel bands at the front of the forend, replacing the single band of the original. The ambidextrous stock still retains its quirky charm of angles, blocky sections and a lengthy slab sided forend. The enlarged thumbhole is scalloped out at the rear to offer a less stressed wrist position. The build is finished off with a vertically sliding rubber plate so you can fine tune your position.

The steep drop down pistol grip is slightly contoured and has cast-in panels of chequering. The forend is flat on the underside and tapers towards the tip. Unusually there is no chequering, instead Hatsan have moulded in finger boards along its top edge.

Action Stations

The action use an articulated side-lever for cocking and indexing the 10-shot, removable steel magazine. To remove the magazine for loading -  pull back the lever all the way until the mech is cocked, then push the brass ball that controls the magazine locking plunger forward and up where it locks to free the mag. Originally it only needed be pushed forward where it was held in place once it engaged an internal ‘catch.’ This wasn’t the best for safety while loading, so it’s good to see this has been addressed. You can now remove or replace a magazine out of the right of the action.

While loading I remembered on my original test of the AT44-10, I struggled a bit to seat the pellets properly as they had a habit to thumb in but not fully align in the chamber unless you used a seating tool. No problems this time around and the test rifle was in what can be the fiddly .177 calibre.

The small calibre pellets thumbed easily into the robust, rotary magazine and all the manually-operated features of the gun felt much more precisely engineered than they did on the original version. At this stage, the AT44-10 is now cocked and loaded and a familiar design trigger safety automatically engages on pulling back the side-lever. This manifests itself as a T-bar that pops out of the rear of the action. It’s the spit of the pop-out style as seen on the Webley Blackhawk and quite a few other models of air rifle too.

I’m glad they stayed with this system as it’s well positioned and easy to operate no matter if you are left or right handed! When pushed in to FIRE a red dot is visible at the rear. It can also be re-set manually if you don’t take a shot by simply pulling it back. I did find it a little noisy in operation, which could spook close range quarry!

The action is still quite blocky and lengthy, on top are twin scope mounting dovetails of 11 and 22mm. Apparently this is to accommodate standard airgun and larger Weaver-type mounts. So no problems scoping this rifle with optics with a lengthy scope body or getting a spot on eye-relief and thanks to that sliding adjustable butt pad a precise head position for optimum gun control.

Easy Fitting

Noticing the slots cut across the rails I tried a Weaver to rail adaptor mount, handy if you want to raise the mounts to fit a big objective scope. Vice-versa if you use the Sportsmatch rail to Weaver Adaptors, the fitting of a night vision (NV) Riflescope is made all the easier. I say this because you could use an arrestor block on the top rail of the action block and have the Weaver to rail mounts left fitted to your NV scope. Likewise, leave a day scope set in dovetail mounts and it will act as a backstop for that and will allow you to change over to an NV scope without loss of zero.

As Edgar Brothers have both the Hatsan and the Bushnell brand I fitted my own 4 – 12 X 40AO Bushnell Legend scope. The muzzle comes with a stylish small vented muzzle brake protecting the ½ UNF threaded screw cut barrel. I did most testing using the compact Deben Whisper ‘Ultra Quiet’ 130 moddy. This complimented the rifle in handling and proved highly effective at taming muzzle report. Using quality ammo ½” groups were soon achieved at my set 30-yd zero and proved the rifle isn’t pellet fussy but is highly accurate.  All in all this was a very enjoyable experience and ‘Hats off to Hatsan’ as they’re continually impressing with their air rifles and pistols. GM