Your post really takes me back! When I was a kid, my dad bought me a Diana Model 25 at a Sears store in Edmonton. This would have been around 50 years ago!
We didn't think it would be much of a gun, because it was so cheap! (even by the values of those days). But we took it home and shot at some tin cans at a range of twenty paces or so.
And the darn thing was punching holes right through both sides of the cans. Now, those cans were not the aluminum ones of today, but real tin, and fairly substantial tin at that!
Checking the Sears catalogue, we think that the clerk who sold the gun charged the price of another (much cheaper) gun than the Diana they had listed in the catalogue. I can't recall what the price was supposed to be.
Anyway, the thing was darned accurate, as well, even though it had just open V sights. Dad took it to a gunsmith and asked him to put a peep sight on it. The guy just laughed and told him not to waste his money; that these airguns just weren't accurate enough to warrant a peep sight. But Dad persisted, and so the guy said he'd take it out and shoot it to show him. Well, he did so, whistled at the results, and said he guessed he'd been wrong about this gun, that it could benefit from a peep sight, and mounted one on.
Shot that gun for years, and killed innumerable gophers, magpies, crows, etc. until the barrel became loose and wobbly and it lost it's accuracy.
Still have that gun in my basement, but it doesn't have the peep on it anymore. Can't recall what happened to that.
