Rogerborg

Ahoy and welcome. You get a huge adrenaline hit from your first day, just stick to basic stuff until you're sure that you're going to enjoy the hobby long term. Pretty much anything that PatrolBase sell will do you OK. I'm not saying buy from there, just check out the range. CYMA, Jing Gong, Specna Arms, Double Eagle, Lancer Tactical should be fine. I'd avoid Nuprol. https://www.patrolbase.co.uk/airsoft-assault-rifles-all SMGs also work, as long as they have full sized gearboxes. That means the MP5s and upwards here, not the R-4, V-61 or MAC-10. https://www.patrolbase.co.uk/airsoft-electric-submachine-gun Pistols are mostly just for pose value in woodland, you'll rarely use them. I run a cheap Army Armament R17 mock-Glock green gas blowback pistol which is fun in CQB. I've tried a CYMA electric pistol: they do work all year round, but are very low powered. As above, you're limited to what you can get your hands on at the moment. Some sellers care about a defence more than others. Buying a "two tone" isn't the end of the world though.

I've seen them too, and use 50 or 60 degrees with a lot of success. I'm minded to keep an open mind though.

Wiring through the hop unit: horrifying meme or horrifying reality?

@Skara seems wedded to 70 degree. To be honest, I've not tried a 70, so I have no reason to refute it.

With 0.25g? That would be 1.07J which is pretty decent. You could eke a little more out of it. If you mean with 0.2g then that's just 0.85J and I'd try and get more out of it, first by optimising the air seal, then thinking about the spring. Er, if you know about it, why is the site continuing to let it happen, or why still play there?

That. Airsoft magical beliefs aside, maximum range is entirely dependent on muzzle energy + sufficient hop for the BB. That's not the same as effective accurate range, but that's less of an issue for you. You just need to be banging on the site energy limit, with your BBs fully hopped. I like a little lift at the end of my trajectory so that I can be sure that I'm erring on slightly over than slightly under. Also consider the possibility that you're being outranged by DMRs, or hot guns. Shouldn't happen, does happen, one local site caught a marshal hot in game.

Oh hai, I'm from the Tabletop Gamers thread, I'm appropriating this meme for the Imperium of Man.

So you said, but you didn't say whether you'd cleaned the barrel, silicone greased the air-seal components and/or adjusted what appears to be an adjustable hop unit. This isn't Facebook.

But... but how do strangers tell you what to think, do, and buy? 😕

Hello and welcome. And yes, if you're enjoying airsoft replicas responsibly (wow, an indoor range!) then you'll be very welcome here. It's curious how we view these things so differently. I find the mechanical internals of electric guns very comprehensible, but how the gas gets from a magazine to the barrel of a gas/CO2 gun is a complete mystery to me.

Yup, an o-ring nozzle and replacing the stock [clarification] piston o-ring resulted in a rock solid air seal on my CM.516. A bit of silicone grease and I was seeing a had-to-check-it-twice 1.3J out of an M100 spring and a ZCI 229mm barrel. Air seal is king, I had to drop to an M90 and even then it's nudging 1.14J.

I honestly can't recommend Specna Arms at the moment. I got lucky with my Edge SA-E02 but the quality control isn't great, the gearboxes are suspect, and they have magazine compatibility issues. If you do go for one, I'd suggest stretching to one of the Edge 2.0 models as they come with a Gate Aster mosfet with a fair amount of options. The Double Eagle M9XX models are getting a lot of love right now and also come with burst mode options. Stocking is the problem right now, you're lucky to find anything. The M916G is in stock at the time of writing though https://www.patrolbase.co.uk/double-eagle-m916g-utr556?pv=17877 and offers something a little visually different from the typical loads-o-rails.

I only had one pop (before I deleted them) and that was a 20A mini, after a V3 lockup where I did what everyone will do the first time it happens: held the trigger and hoped. I'd reckon 20A is sufficient to protect against user error in a reasonable AEG, and once you've learned to not just keep fingerblasting long after it's clear that you're not going to get a happy ending, it's only there to protect against a full short. My plan for that is to hurl it away then strip the corpse for parts.

It's a tricky one, and all the suggestions above are perfectly valid (plus G36 with a magwell adaptor). On upgrading the G&G, it does make sense, but then so does having an unmeddled-with backup or loaner, and that's also where they shine. Since airsoft is more heart-over-head, I think this is the key question: What's your honest, knee jerk, first response to "airsoft erection"?

Bodge? That's standard servicing procedure on anything made in Longbridge. Also, now I'm miffed that I resisted the strong temptation to suggest that.

I went for practicality over posability and binned off the charging handle. No more HK slap, but a fair bit more room in the tube. Also, I rear wired mine, as I couldn't be doing with all that fiddling around at the front. There's room to run wires behind the gearbox up to the tube. Deans connector, of course. With all of that done, I can actually get a 116mm x 17mm x 13mm 7.4V lipo in there with a small mosfet as well.

Well, that's jumping in at the deep end. Yes, this is a pretty constructive place, absent the occasional internets spat. You're quite right to strip and clean everything down, it can sometimes feel like internals have been "pre-weathered", and the application of what passes for lubrication in particular is about as accurate as post-pub lights-off toilet bowl aim. There's no hard and fast rule, and a lot of it comes down to air seal (or piston to barrel volume), but if you're aiming for around 1.1J then you might need to clip that spring down a bit, or go to a lighter one, given that you'd be looking at close to a notional 1.7J with a full rack. A lot of airsoft is suck it and see, and a chrono is pretty much essential to avoid unpleasant surprises - I've had a couple of guns come in way over what I wanted (or the legal definition of airsoft guns) by up-springing or just getting the air seal spot on.

Those are 30-32mm. Rostok is after 30A in 20mm which are much harder to find, to the point where I gave up and settled on 20A. Mind you, I've binned off all my fuses now anyway, it's just another point of failure.

Once you start measuring this stuff up, the really surprising part is that any of it ever works at all. Half a mm doesn't sound like much, but side-by-side it's very obvious.

Oh, neat. What sort of ballpark amperages are you seeing? I'm guessing over 10A? Thanks, I figured it was down to the great silicon drought. Hmm, that's a great price on that 150A unit for UK stock, I can only chisel a few pennies off of it on AliExpress.

This one? https://www.umarex.com/products/airsoft/co2/2.6466.html Have you cleaned the barrel? On BB weight, it depends on the hop, if any. It's not mentioned in the manual, but... is that a hop unit? Is it adjustable with that screw marked 1-37? The Umarex page implies so: "the shoot-up is also adjustable." If so, have you adjusted it to your BB weight? I'd also apply silicone lube to any rubber parts to try and keep the seal consistent. Aside, given that it claims up to 2 Joules (!) I'd hope that you're using it for target shooting rather than close-quarters airsoft skirmishing. My DMR only puts out 1.8J, with a 20-30m minimum engagement distance.

That's the ticket. I'm not sure that I want to know that much, it's more of a passing curiosity. I'll put it on my watchlist and maybe drunk-buy it later, always in motion is the future. It's been mechanical fixinz today, I haven't got to the wiring tasks yet. Actually, I might hold out until and unless the cheap Peruns are back in stock at ak2m4, I've got a couple of others that want swapping out for being too big or too weedy.

Specnas are getting notorious for being fussy about mags, and my SA-E02 is no different. With the stock hop unit (a decent rotary) It feeds fine off of its own mid caps, and is OK with hi-caps, but didn't want anything to do with other mid caps. Reddit sez "lol just change the magazine catch lol", but nobody seems able to explain why, or for what, or how this helps. So I decided to science it out by measuring mags, and testing the feed tube interface. Specna mid cap vs M16VN short mag, total length front to rear, and from the front of the mag to inside the feed. The overall length can be measured precisely, but it's harder to get an exact measurement on the front of mag to inside the magwell tube, so I've been a bit approximate there. It might not be a full 1mm difference, but when the fronts are aligned, it's apparent that the Specna feed is further back. With the rears of the mags aligned, they're a closer match. The Specna mags also have a conical section at the top of the feed. With the hop unit removed from the gun and tested with both mags (to isolate just that issue), this provides a noticeable smoother insert: it's a smart bit of design. I'd seen speculation that the Specna hop tube was "pencil dicking" mags and not big enough to key in solidly without free play. I didn't find this. If anything, the hop tube was slightly sticky when going into the VN mags, and there was no free movement at all once it was in. The last significant point was the the BB stopper on the VN mags has a flat section that protrudes slightly into the tube, whereas the Specna doesn't. This lip provides a significant obstacle to the hop feed tube, and it needs a harder push-and-wiggle to move the stopper back and get the feed tube right in. Either because of this, or a stronger stopper spring, or something else in the magazine geometry, it also needs more effort to keep the hop unit pressed all the way into the VN magazines. Some slight exaggeration for effect: So: what did I do? 1. Carefully filed and sanded a slight conical shape on the bottom edge of the feed tube to assist keying it into the mag. There's a fair amount of material there to play with. Just give it some help to find the magazine, and to let it get and stay all the way in. 2. Do some more aggressive filing on the back of the feed tube, to produce a flat ramp where it meets the BB stopper. This looks aggressive, but bear in mind that most of the height of the tube is left intact, so there's still no free play. The BBs are going up the middle, and as long as there's any material at the rear, the BB stopper will be pushed far enough back. With this done, the feed tube isn't fighting as hard against staying all the way in the magazine. 3. Magazine fettling. Since I want to keep the Specna mags usable, rather than modifying the magwell I've added half a mm of tape at the front of the VN mags to give them the same size as the Specna mags, and to move the feed backwards to more closely match the Specna. I've put some silicone grease on top to help it slide in without tearing, and might replace it with velcro depending how it stands up. If I wanted to only use these mags, and not have the Specna mags fit any more, I'd put a velcro strip inside the front of the magwell instead. Result: a smoother insertion and perfect feeding of the VN mags. In fact, I got reliable feeding from one even before adding the tape at the front, so it seems like just a small mod to the end of the feed tube does help. The mags need a good hard push to get the magwell catch locked in place, which is perhaps where the Reddit wisdom is coming from, but once in place they're solid. That's not the problem, at least on my example, with my magazines. Best of luck.

I quite fancy one of tho- [Looks up VED, insurance and running costs]

You don't need two kidneys. Really though, selling expensive summer toys just after Christmas is unlikely to net you the highest returns from the biggest market.