Ron Bearden takes aim with the muzzleloading air rifle that he created. Photo by Anthony Campbell.

Ronald Gene Bearden of Grant has been a tinkerer and a hunter all his life. He combined his two pastimes last fall to do the almost-unbelievable: He invented a .50-caliber air rifle -- and then used it to harvest a pair of white-tailed deer!

“I think I’m the first man in Alabama -- perhaps the U.S.; maybe even in the world -- to harvest a whitetail buck with a homemade .50-caliber big-game air rifle,” he pointed out.

Mention the term “air rifle,” and most folks think of a Daisy BB gun -- something that a kid might use to shoot at birds or tin cans. Bearden’s air rifle is more like a pellet gun on steroids. “I’ve always enjoyed inventing things,” he said.

Bearden’s job in a prototype shop in Huntsville involves solving equipment problems, so he’s very accustomed to modifying existing machinery. His self-professed hobby is working on guns, so his hobby and his occupation go hand-in-hand.

“I got that job because of what I did as a hobby,” Bearden noted. “It wasn’t the other way around.”

The gun he ended up developing has three interchangeable barrels -- .22, .32 and .50 caliber. What he was doing was so new that he even had to invent the ammunition for the gun, molding special soft lead pellets himself.

He was using the .50 caliber barrel and one of his 200-grain pellets when he killed the bucks; both dropped in their tracks. One of those deer was a trophy-sized 9-pointer.

“I told my wife after hunting season the year before that I was going to build myself an air rifle,” Bearden explained. “She said, ‘You’ve got one.’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand: I’m going to build a large-caliber air rifle and kill a deer with it.’”

That work consumed him throughout the off-season. “There were lots of nights when I would go to bed and he was still out there working on the gun,” recalled his wife Donna.

“I was just so excited,” Bearden admitted. “I would think up an idea and I couldn’t wait to work on the gun and try to get it to where I could shoot it.”

The very first victim of the inventor’s gun was a favorite peach tree in his back yard. He was so excited when he got the rifle into shootable shape that he’d often just fire off a round at the base of the peach tree, rather than wait to set up a target; remnants of lead still stick out of the tree today. It eventually took so many shots that it was killed.

Bearden’s previous tinkering prepared him well for building the big-game air rifle. His specialty is building heavy rifles in “wildcat” calibers that aren’t available commercially. He even invented one cartridge he named the .50 “Benjamin,” after his grandson.

Another big surprise regarding this project was its overall cost. Bearden estimated that he’s only got $4 or $5 in his high-tech air rifle! He had enough parts around his shop -- like a Monte Carlo shotgun stock -- just about to build the gun.

To accommodate the stainless-steel air bottle that attaches from the bottom of the gun, the receiver required a lot of machining. Bearden has a special English three-stage pump that he uses to charge a spare bottle. He calls that his “pony bottle,” from which he charges the main bottle on the gun. In the woods, it’s a lot more convenient to keep the pony bottle in a pocket than to carry the rather lengthy three-stage pump.