John, all along, you were right. The Beeman P1 .177 is minutely more powerful than the Weihrauch HW45. Your reason was correct regarding the draconian European laws on airguns.
Beeman confirmed exactly what you guessed in one of the pamphlets that came in my P1's box. I will re-word it to make it more succinct. 'While there exist guns that look exactly identical or have nearly all the same parts,
our airguns differ in the sense that they are built to the parameters of the unrestricted U.S. airgun market. So the Beeman version of guns are more powerful and will have more resale value in the long run than identical brands and versions.'
I own the HW45 in .22 since that caliber is not sold under the Beeman name. I think doing the .22 barrel swap into a P1 is a very unsound idea too because the P1 has a two-stage cocking mechanism. Weihrauch specifically said they omitted this in the .22 caliber version because the lower power setting would not be sufficient for this large of caliber.
Call me eccentric if you must, but I bought both--the HW45 in .22 and the P1 in .177 (more powerful than the same HW45 in .177
). I am very happy with it and have done what you have and added the rubber hogue wrap-arounds. Excellent feel!
Now, John, I must ask, are there any quality lasers that will fit this gun on the trigger shoe (as opposed to on the dove tail rail on top)?
Thanks!
-SIG