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Yes (source, was the first gun I bought, 23 years ago). There's a couple of ways of doing it, and there used to be a good guide here but it seems to be down at the moment. I have saved some pictures though. Or you can do it the lazy way below

Explain on the PayPal dispute what they have offered. And say it's not enough. You will at least get back what they have offered if not more.

Pretty good day at Area-66, with some well thought out games. Helpful, friendly marshalling, but too friendly, with far too much tolerance for non-hit-takers, over-shooters, and my new bête noire, dry firing in the (not so) safe zone. Bloody airsofters, we need to ban them all to make airsoft great for airsofters. 😠

Welcome, Great first post, can we expect much of the same in the future ?🤣

A couple of years ago I decided to put together an airsoft squad, with a group of people I enjoyed playing with. Our goal was never to be the best, or the winners. Our goal was to have a laugh playing toy soldiers in the woods. And we're succeeding at that! It's all about silly fun, and never taking ourselves seriously. Over time our little group has grown from 5 to 17 members, all with the same "Fun first" attitude. We don't often get all of us together at the same time, but today we had a good strong group out on the field, and a lot of fun was had. Missing a few faces, including our Scottish contingent, but it was great to see so many Outcasts playing together again. Unfortunately, with over 100 players on the field, and a shortage of volunteer marshals this week, I had to work. But the Outcasts did me proud. One of our squad did, unfortunately, manage to step in front of a friendly sniper hidden in a bush, at pretty much point blank range. If it wasn't for his goggle strap it could have been really nasty. We call him Iron Skull now. @GAMBLE @Smiling-Dutchman @Honey Badger 63 What the actual fuck?

First game back in about two years! Had so much fun 🤩 tried a NGRS from a guy and now I’m contemplating getting one. Maybe I need a gbbr now

Just got home from Worthing where I didn't play. Well, I did, but not as a player and I had a lot of fun. First game of the day was a marshall and two of us playing blind hillbillies defending barrels of moonshine. We had juggernaut rules, but we also had to pretend to be blind (drunk too much moonshine!), so we were patrolling around yelling things in overly exaggerated American accents and only shooting in peoples direction of they made noise. It was hilarious seeing the players trying to be as quiet as possible when there was a lot of crunchy dry leaves on the ground and sticks that go snap and then shooting purposefully just past them or over their heads. It was a proper laugh yelling about commies and the government and rich city folks and the damn squirrels stealin' my goddamn moonshine! As for the gameplay, I think it worked well but the teams weren't well balanced. We had a single blue player make it to where the objectives were and, to his credit, he held up the yellow team all by himself for a really long time. He eventually got shot in the back because yellows wrapped around, because what had happened is the yellows had captured the blue team's base and weren't allowing them to get to the bottom of the site where we were protecting the barrels. All I saw were yellow players and they eventually managed to get all 13 barrels thanks to a very sneaky kid who crept all the way up multiple times very slowly and very quietly; we were all quite impressed with how quiet he was, as obviously we could all see him, but he made no noise so we didn't shoot him. He managed to ferry most of the cans out to pass them to his team and combined with the yellows taking the blue team base, this meant that the yellows absolutely stomped. After this game they did some team balancing, moving some of the more experienced players over from yellow to blue, but I can't comment on how the rest of the games went as I headed back to the safe zone afterwards; I had a lot of guns to test and make sure were working for the Vietnam filmsim weekend next weekend at Gunman Eversley, so I wanted to make sure the m700 was set, the AKM was set and the MWS was set. Also, the local tech was bringing two of my guns he was working on, so I wanted to have a fiddle with those as he tends to leave fine tuning the hop to me (at my request though, as I'm more than happy to dial in my hop and scopes myself). But the main reason I stopped was because the new gun I was using stopped working very well. Predictably, to be fair, but I think the hop rubber just turned to dust as it stopped hopping. I bought a PPS kar98 as the guy who runs a kit shop and sells at Worthing bought a bunch of Dadio's guns (a fairly well known WW2 airsofter from a few years ago) as I think he's getting out of the hobby and this was one of them. Got the kar98 and 4 magazines for £250; 1 was leaking so I'll get that sealed up, but I reckon it's been sitting for 4 years and needs a clean and a new hop rubber, but it's set for 1J (with an adjustable bolt, so I can tweak it if needed) and I'll get it set up for .32s. That's coming to next weekend's Vietnam filmsim weekend! The other new gun I was using was the hicapa I bought last weekend at Shift Your RIFTs and with a few upgrades it was shooting phenomenally (parts I had lying about mostly, as I'll do a proper build next month) Then I collected my m14 DMR (ironically not set up as a DMR) and SR-25. First I tested the m14 and... it went back to the tech. As I went to set the hop, the motor completely died so it needs a new one. Not entirely surprised as it's a stock G&P motor and is probably about 12 years old or something, but that went back to him. The SR-25 however... that was brutal and I'm probably going to be using it a bunch in the future. He's left it to me to do a lot of testing (as I said there's no point me paying him to spend hours testing out springs and hop rubbers when I can do that myself), so I'll be finding a spring for 1.1J on .32s and a spring for 1.88J on .43s, as well as a hop setup that will lift them (might already be able to!). Didn't have my long screwdriver with me so couldn't experiment there, but with the spring currently in it it was 0.9J and hitting the 60m target accurately with every shot so I'm bloody happy about that. Really snappy too! It's been properly locked to semi-auto with a perun mosfet that has been programmed to be semi-only but then also had the full-auto sensor covered with electric tape so it's definitely locked to semi!

Looks like you need this that I have spare

Thats certainly what they claim to have done. However I have yet to see a single piece of evidence. I could claim to have sold my left testicle for funds to fight the VCRB before it became the VCRA but the fact is a very few individuals from the community did all the heavy lifting.

This is going back to the discussion of having an association/federation/facebook group Who should be keeping track of and able to pull out numbers about the airsoft economy

My personal view is that it doesn’t matter what clowns/party are in charge. They would all ban anything in order to get votes so political affiliation doesn’t matter. All these people want is to line their pockets at the expense of us. Apologies but I’m so disenfranchised with politics in this country. I can’t see it being better under labour or greens or anyone else for that matter.

There was me thinking all the pimped hi-capas on here were crazy money but it seems Patrol Base want a piece of the action - WTF?

The other issue you have even if you did want to send it back. No courier will take it as Joe public customer out of the UK afaik, so you pretty much can't send it back.

Fire Support nominally run it. UKARA was essentially created by Frank at Fire Support, Wolf Armouries in Camden and Zero One.

Yeah, sorry about that... my bad.

The only people (person? speaking dog? sentient rock monster?) I can think of who might have a rough number of active players would be UKARA. Except far as I'm aware we still have zero real clue who holds this mystical database with (presumably) 10s of thousands of people's information on it. I'd honestly love to be wrong on this one though. Actually just had a quick dig, not sure if it's been mentioned before but the random-af address linked to UKARA's GDPR reg is just a totally bland wood block on the Cornish coast right next to a GCHQ site. Said site has a stronger fence line that any MoD establishment I've ever visited and is bristling with radar/radio dishes.. tinfoil fully deployed 😂 The first google review for the site is just stunning lol.

You're right that there's many self proclaimed official airsoft groups, but the sum total of what they've contributed to the hobby is ⅘s of fuck all. If I had a pound for every time a new organisation popped up claiming to be the saviours of airsoft, only to never be heard from again I could probably afford a TM NGRS upgraded by DCA. As for other shooting groups, they'll often try to distance themselves from airsoft and in the past have seemed to deliberately throw us under the bus in an attempt to save themselves. To me this is very short sighted as many airsofters are interested in other shooting disciplines.

Paypals intervention is issuing a full refund, post a safe return of the gun to SWIT. Something which I’m not going to do, so I’ll probably just accept SWITs 60 dollar partial refund, and cut my losses on this. Could be allot worse, and lesson learned never to use them again, or order from outside the UK again.

With airsoft being far more popular and mainstream than it was 15-20 years ago I think any attempt to restrict or ban rifs is going to get more push back than when the vcra was being discussed

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So they claim, despite being formed a few years after the vcra became law

I saw it done about 18 years ago, so yes it can be done, plus the guy I knew who did it wasn't very technically minded, so hopefully that means it's a simple swap ?🤞

Thats a REALLY good question..... and one I've also not seen an answer to

But... then what do UKAPU do..?🤔 But... then what do UKAPU do..?🤔

But airsofters aren't unionised...... which would have helped with Thatcher (and Starmer)

Let's face it, all politicians are self serving cunts, the mere desire to do the job should automatically disqualify someone from doing so. Whoever gets in will do whatever they think will get them more votes so they can spend longer on the gravy train. Fortunatly the UK airsoft scene provides lots of jobs and some decent tax revenue , which are good arguments for not fucking about with it.

I've mulled over one of these many a time over the years, ultimately went for an ACOG for my M16 carry handle upper because that's what the Bad Company 2 M16 in BF2042 has and I love it tbh (early 2000s aesthetic). But I've never not been able to find airsoft clones of the retro Colt scope clones in stock somewhere any time I've looked, I have to say. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006287579209.html?spm=a2g0o.store_pc_allItems_or_groupList.0.0.197c1c55QbPYS5&pdp_npi=4%40dis!GBP!￡41.64!￡41.64!!!51.45!51.45!%402103846917172473533577324ea631!12000036620160530!sh!UK!0! https://www.amazon.co.uk/SPINA-OPTICS-Hunting-Handle-Reticle/dp/B0C5CXQRP4 (Same product at these 2 links I'd guess) https://www.octagonairsoft.com/product-page/fcw-4x20-scope-with-colt-marking

Well that's me sold then... I've got a few Fjallraven shirts and they are unbelievably comfortable for camping etc... Cheers gents!

My neighbour said that my dog was chasing people on motorcycles. 'Bloody rubbish,' I said, 'he doesn't even have one motorcycle!'

Well, we're geared up and off to apocalypse 249 tomorrow, the boy seems happier about it and even the younger one is coming too. I best buy a lottery ticket 🤣🤣

I wasn't camping so I can't speak to how the campsite is late at night or early in the morning, but there are marshalls patrolling around it during the day time on a motorised scooter thing. I didn't hear any horror stories from the guys who were camping on site, so I reckon it's okay. Also didn't hear of any thefts, though we were all warned that it's an open event and anyone could be in attendance and so were advised to keep things locked in cars, which is a sensible thing to do at any event anyway. They had plenty of staff to make sure the weekend played well, including a paramedic in case of any accidents. It was my first time going and honestly I was pretty impressed with the whole thing. I probably won't be going to the NAF again unless there are changes. Shift Your RIFTs fills that social weekender-shaped hole with quality airsoft for £85 and I'll still head to AI500 for £75 (returning players get £10 off the £85 price there) for the interesting sites they tend to get a hold of, though the airsoft there isn't as good as Shift Your RIFTs which was just really enjoyable. Combine those with Vietnam filmsim weekenders and that's at least 4 per year for me which is a nice number

Sounds like a quality weekend event. As someone who looks at NAF and sees negative feedback surrounding it relating to the quality of airsoft, thefts, dick-heads firing blanks in the camp, driving quads at night around the site at early hours, 2nd hand area being shrunk to nearly zero and prices being hiked for almost zero benefit, i'd much rather go to this event by the sounds of it.

No worries …. FilmSim has it covered, just ensure that scenario has an actual scenario complete with some embedded NPC role play marshals and market your ‘immersive theatrical experience’ I’ve even just come up with a bare bones overview that could be marketed for anyone from the experienced to the one off amateur taster, with a low(er) budget homage to Bill Murray, I’m provisionally calling it “The man who knew even less” This will work best in those non standard urban environments, and even better we don’t need to wait for disused shopping centres. Make it a full immersive experience so that customers never really know who is an NPC, a player or just random public what could go wrong?

I’m a Green Party member, we’re embroiled in leadership power struggles, internal politics and various other operational issues. I wouldn’t worry, and if we did get a sniff at an election win, which we won’t, but if we did I assure you I’d personally take a significantly more active role as a party member to ensure the right people are put in front of the right decision makers to ensure the longevity of airsoft. As much as I or others don’t want to believe it, party donors have a lot of sway in the Green Party, a fat donation could wipe that policy right off the manifesto.

I was also at Redcon-2 for Shift Your RIFTs, but was there for the whole weekend; a very warm Saturday followed by a very warm, then very wet Sunday! I packed my m700, AAP-01 and p226 as a backup pistol in case I had issues with the AAP. We booked in on the Friday and it was incredibly smooth. Plenty of staff were around to direct people who were camping and those of us who were just there to sign in. Got my wristband and goodie bag and then hung out with my friends for a while as there were quite a few of us there. Gates closed at 8pm, so we left at about 7pm to go get dinner at the pub a few of us were staying at and got a good night's sleep for the next day... or at least it would've if my heart didn't decide to act up that night. Anxiety around it made it worse too, but it wasn't so bad I had to take myself off to a hospital, so I popped one of my pills and powered through it. Anyway, next day was glorious. Weather on Saturday was incredibly warm at around 20 celcius pretty much all day! I had a similar experience to @Galvatron; chrono was really efficient with 4 marshalls on them and then another 3 or 4 marshalls after them with cable ties to tag guns that had passed. There was a long queue when I got there, but it moved very quickly and I got through very easily. I did have an issue crop up here though, as I noticed two of my AAP magazines had lost the o-rings in the fill valves, so I decided to use my p226 that I brought as a backup pistol. Everything passed chrono nice and easy and so that was that. We then hung about until the legendary brief and it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. It was long, probably clocking in at about 1 hour in length, but it covered everything that the players needed to know. Also, I heard last year that people on the weekend had to listen to the brief on both Saturday and Sunday, but this weekend we only had to attend the Saturday and could just chill on the Sunday in the safe / camping zone during the briefing, so that was nice. I decided to try and play as much as possible while the weather was good, as the forecast was bad for Sunday. The site itself was a breath of fresh air for me; where Worthing Airsoft is fairly small and quite close-up, basically woodland CQB during the summer, Redcon-2 was huge with a lot of very open areas, though there were also plenty of close-up areas and dedicated CQB areas so when the marshalls said "any gun you have will find a use out there", they weren't lying. I went out with my new under £100 ghillie setup and my m700, p226 and my belt kit; no chest rig as I packed light. We were on blue in the morning and for the first hour I was a bit useless. I had no idea where anything was and bumbled about the site as I tried to work out how I wanted to play it. Fortunately I quickly got into my groove after we took a respawn on the far side of the map and started pushing along the boundary. I managed to tuck into a bush to cover the advance and had a great time plinking at the reds, though some of them were really well dug in! I eventually got taken out, so I went back to the respawn we captured, but as I was returning I saw the other blues who were with me also walking back, so I opted to set up in a position to intercept the reds if they pushed up after us. I took a few out that did, but then I saw some reds coming from the other direction as they must've captured the respawn from the other side, so I laid low and waited for them to pass, before shooting them both in the back. I love moments like that It was then lunch that I was about 10 mins late to, because none of the marshalls called that it was lunch over where I was and I had recently taken out a red from my position; I only went back because I heard one of the vehicles and poked out to ask if it was lunch yet. They had said that they couldn't have tap water to drink due to MoD regulations (as it's an MoD site), so I was expecting some extortionate food and drink prices, but I was pleasantly surprised. I spent £7 on a massive double jumbo chilli dog that was very welcome after the morning games, as well as two bottles of water. After lunch our entire group got balanced onto red team as apparently the morning was pretty one-sided in blue team's favour. This time, I decided to just stick to the massive runway area that the teams spawned at (one at each end, it was really quite long!). There were a number of bushes and some lovely tall grass that worked wonders for concealment, though due to how airsoft guns worked I had to poke my rifle barrel through the grass, which made it a little bit visible, but oh well. I managed to rack up an impressive number of kills from here and completely denied a fairly strong position at a corner as I had it totally dialed in with my bolt action. During quiet moments I found myself hand-loading my magazines as otherwise I would've run out of ammo pretty fast and I was very pleased to discover that my magazines will easily shoot three full magazines on a single fill of gas if it's a warm day. Photographers got some great shots of me too, so that was a nice bonus as I rarely get caught on camera! Towards the end, most people had given up it seemed as I ended up getting hit from behind and having to respawn in to hold the flank pretty much by myself, however due to the tall grass I was able to easily get into a concealed position to do so. The Sunday I wanted to play in the morning as while the forecast said it would pour with rain all day the sun was out and it was nice and warm (a bit windy though!), but most of my kit was locked in the car and the guy with the key was out in the gameplay area. Most of my kit included my hat, so I have a bit of sunburn on my head, and also my armband so I couldn't go and play. I instead opted to have a good wander around to see what people were selling and I picked up the exact TM hi-capa 5.1 that I wanted for £80 and I had a long chat with the guys at Empire Airsoft, so it was nice to put a face to a name there as I order from them quite a lot and have asked Kenny to get me some niche m700 parts from Europe a few times! I also had a long chat with Big Steve Builds about my AAP build and picked up a bunch of parts for that too; only bit I'm missing now is the hammer set as that sold out on the Saturday, but I have a really good idea what I want to do with mine now. Also going to experiment with the flamingo buckings as I hadn't used them yet and he seemed to be very impressed with them in his builds. Went out in the afternoon after lunch and the heavens opened up. It absolutely chucked it down and I got really wet. Didn't play for as long here, playing around the runway again. I managed to crawl into a very forward position and started sniping blues in the tank graveyard from the side; the m700 is so quiet I managed to basically burn through all of my ammo doing this before I was finally taken out by a stray shot just as I was going to shoot someone colour checking me. I was soaking wet and out of ammo and I didn't want to open my ammo bags in this weather as water + bio BBs is not the best combination. Emptied the rest of my pistol mags as I wasn't putting those BBs back in the bag either for the same reason and headed in. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and will be going back next year. I will, however, bring a DMR next time. I was planning on doing so this year, but my MWS was not happy at all lifting heavy BBs, so more tinkering is needed there. The site itself with all the long distance areas combined with the 2.32J DMR limit makes the site very, very good for DMRs. Usually I use my pistol a lot when using a bolt action rifle or a DMR, but I think this weekend I only got 2 - 3 pistol kills and burned though about a single magazine in total, whereas I got dozens and dozens across the weekend with my bolt action and went though many mags. Being able to engage at long distance is a definite advantage at Redcon-2 (as long as you avoid the CQB areas!). If someone is locking down an area with a DMR, it's very strong, but it's also possible to counter because the site itself is so damn big; you can simply go around them. I think the marshalling was top notch and I didn't come up against any issues all weekend with the singular exception of one guy who was blatantly not taking his hits as I took out the people around him, but then every time I hit him he'd look in my general direction and step back behind the bushes and every time he peeked out the same would happen. Everyone else without fail took their hits from what I saw and I didn't hear any complaints about it. Going to be bold and say that Shift Your RIFTs is the best weekend event in the UK at the moment. The airsoft quality is better than AI500 and definitely better than the NAF, and for £85 you get a really solid weekend of airsoft at a great site with great marshalls. Food and drink isn't extortionately priced and there were lots of different retailers about who were more than happy to chat and cut deals you wouldn't get when you buy online. The whole atmosphere was really great across the entire weekend and I'll definitely be going back next year as I loved it!

9 months later got around to finishing up the BRT CAR15 SD, however been so long I forgot my plan to short stroke this one so need to pull the box out again😂

So....Saturday at Apocolypse 249. Geared up, all the kids in the car and off we went. Used the wifes motor as it has more room for stuff. All set up in the safe zone and safety brief done, we head out for the first game. Noticed there was lots of rentals but they were enthusiastic and ready to go. 10 shots in, i realise the AUG is not being as awesome as normal and is double feeding, resulting in "brewers droop". walk back and swap out to the M14- its first time on the field. Damn they're heavy things, aren't they? almost need a wheel barrow to push it around on!! Blue team got destroyed on the first game, we needed coffee and bacon to regroup and get into the swing of it. Coffee and bacon consumed and we were off again, some over complicated dead, fall back, this bit is yours, this bit is theirs, blah blah KILL REDS etc. So we did. few non hit takers were introduced to the "I'm going to keep shooting until you actually call it" section of my brain, but otherwise a really good mix of maniacs and strategy users. One guy had to be escorted off site due to being a complete bell end and i genuinely hope he had a car crash on his way home after non hit taking, losing his rag and turning the M4 around to use it like a cricket bat 🤯 I dunno. i don't understand it. Went through more rounds than normal, but had a really great day, especially after the day at dogtag we had, the boys needed a good day to get their heads back into it. We did. Loved it. So other than a poorly AUG and "angry man" we had a great day. Im back at work today and i ache like a bastard but hey. it was fun.