The eyes had it!
Unfortunately, while the new steel BB solved some problems it also created some new ones. For starters, the swaged shot seat that tightly held a lead BB in the breech before firing no longer worked. A lead BB can be forced through a slight constriction, but a steel one cannot. A new hairspring BB holder had to be designed for the steel shot tube.
A greater problem was that steel rebounds from hard surfaces, where pure lead does not. Kids were getting hit hard enough in the face with BBs to pierce eyeballs! In addition to the new rebound accidents, the "BB gun wars" kids fought in those days before airsoft did not help the situation. Eye injuries from BB guns skyrocketed and the often-heard phrase, "You'll shoot your eye out!" was born.

Daisy's Avanti Champion 499 BB gun is "The World's Most Accurate BB Gun." No other BB gun comes close! It got its start when Daisy sponsored a national BB gun competition for youngsters

Through these turbulent times, Daisy soldiered on, even staying solvent through the Great Depression. But when the country entered World War II, the production of BB guns and BBs halted. Daisy retooled for the war, and Cass Hough became a military pilot of some distinction. On September 27, 1942, over Bovington, England, while performing a power dive in a P38 Lightning from 43,000 feet, Hough became the first pilot in history to break the sound barrier!

After World War II
The end of the war did not immediately restart America's peacetime economy. Wartime industry had to be phased out and plants and tools returned to their rightful owners. Certain materials remained in critical shortage for several years. Companies like Daisy had to virtually remake themselves from the ground up. So steel BBs were off the market for quite a while.
Aluminum BBs were tried briefly as a substitute, but without the weight of steel, they exhibited the worst sort of instability, even at relatively slow velocities. Old stocks of lead air rifle shot were called upon for a time until the late 1940s, when factories got the steel flowing again.
Through the 1970s, the major production problem with BBs was the way in which they were made. There were always one or two flat spots on the circumference of the sphere to disrupt flight. Because the guns of the time were also largely inaccurate, this was not a major factor, but that was about to change.

Ten shots from a 499 are incredibly tight. The 10-ring is the tiny circle at the center, and possibles have been recorded in competition! It's hard to believe a lever-action BB gun can shoot so well.

Competition improved the breed
Daisy and the U.S. Jaycees started the International BB Gun Championships in 1965 to encourage shooting education for American youth. No BB guns at that time were capable of fine accuracy, so they took the best model they had and turned it into a match gun. The Daisy model 99 Champion eventually morphed into the model 299, Daisy's first example of a target BB gun.

Cont to pg4>>>>