Rogerborg

Hi Sebastian, and welcome to AFUK. I'm guessing this or similar? https://www.amazon.co.uk/BESTSCOPE-Hunting-Optical-Fiber-Reticle/dp/B08FB4WY9D I can't speak to that particular model, but I will note that quality control on Chinese scopes is very hit and miss. However, Amazon at least gives an easy return if you get a lemon (as I did from Ali Express), and most owners seem happy. However, several reviewers flag up that the eye relief is short, which might be an issue depending on what eye and face protection you're using. It's also quite common for airsofters to put optics on risers to get a more comfortable view through them. Pic for attention, and you'll notice that I've set the scope as far back as I can because of the eye relief issue. And finally I do feel compelled to note that there's really no need for a magnified scope at airsoft 1.1J AEG ranges. I run a cheap 1x40 red dot outdoors, and a cheaper holographic site indoors (where there are fewer reflections). That lemon-scope there is on a DMR. Oh, and it's got no sight protector because it's a £21 optic with a plastic objective lens that might improve it if it gets shot out. If you're running anything nicer, I'd highly recommend popping a sight protector in front of it, for example: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tactical-QMFIVE-Shooting-Protector-Foldable/dp/B06XZR34YH

Hah, sorry, that was getting way off topic. I wasn't suggesting it for a pistol, just mentioning it in the context of fancy hops. "S-hopping" generally refers to filling the hop window in the barrel with silicone, then putting a flat hop bucking over it (i.e. a hop rubber with all the bumps dremelled off of it). Folk use Sugru, or just plumber's silicone. I've just done it with a tube of RTV silicone. As Adolf says, that gives you a nice soft contact patch, but with a harder bucking with stiffer feed lips. It's more for DMRs than pistols though, and in any case Maple Leaf hop rubbers do a great job without any faffing around.

Huh, the Mandarin Empire must have given me a decent social credit score, I've been getting stuff from AliExpress within 2 weeks, and under a week on one case. Given the absolute mare that folk seem to be having importing stuff from the continent or the colonies, I'd still rather gamble on our Chinese overlords, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of tat flooding in from there probably swamps the fun police in Border Farce.

Thanks, that's very decent of you. It's quite reassuring that I have a different piston head, that suggests that something has changed. I couldn't find any problems with the casting, and somebody (or some robot) did make a half decent attempt at greasing and shimming it. In more good news, the M130 spring that I popped in is producing 1.8J on 0.32g with the hop off (up to 1.9J on 0.2g), which is spot on what I wanted in order to to come in comfortably under the 1.88J site limit, so no need for an M140. Given that these things come with an M120 (although mine had the M90 in) I'm going to pin my hopes that the shell is slightly over-engineered.

Given all the costs of running an airsoft site, only banding one arm has always struck me as a curious thing to economise on.

Evening. Barrel length isn't that important in airsoft. I've got an MP5K with an M100 spring shooting at 1.04J through a 110mm barrel, and an M4 which hit 1.3J (oops) from M100 and 229mm (I dropped to an M90). The secret is air seal. Your G&G looks like it's got decent parts, like a double o-ring nozzle and cylinder head. But the rubber can dry out and deteriorate, and airsoft quality control is pretty random. Ideally I'd suggest opening your gearbox, lubing all the o-rings, and stretching the piston o-ring. That's easy enough to do, you just get it off the piston head, stretch it over the cylinder, and heat it up with a lighter or other heat source. If you're wary about doing that, the quick bodge is to split the receiver and get some silicone lube (oil or spray) into the nozzle so that it ends up inside the cylinder. Swish it around, give it some time to work into the o-rings, then give it blast on auto before you put it back together so that it blows the excess out the nozzle rather than into your hop rubber. The other easy thing to check is your hop rubber, which might have dried out and be giving a bad air seal. They're cheap enough to replace (Maple Leaf rubbers are great) or you could lube it with silicone oil or spray and see if that perks it up. It's actually fine to get silicone inside the rubber, just clean it out afterwards. You might get a few wild rounds but it'll soon settle down.

Agreed. I'd rather be taken out by someone sneaky than pepper a dead player being a bit lazy. I'd even laugh about it and congratulate them. Once. After that though, it's game on and if you're hand's not up, you're getting lit up. When, not if, that leads to grumpiness, then it's on the person who initiated the "It's not against the rules" dick-spiral.

Veering a bit OT, but that was my thinking. I'm going with an RTV silicone S-hop under a 70 flat bucking for a ~1.8J DMR. The RTV can be done in a couple of minutes: bit of teflon tape round a 6mm drill bit, pop it in, spooge the window, scrape off the excess with a straight edge, done. If it's a basket case, I can just clean it out and pop a Maple Leaf rubber on there instead, so it seems worthwhile giving it a go.

That was what swung it for me. Compared to a more basic plastic toy plus upgrades, I think it's a fair deal for an all metal outer and reasonable internals. I've been in there now and it all seems good. The shimming wasn't quite spot on, and it needed quite a lot of it - there were some 0.7mm shims in there. Although I guess they get credit for actually putting 8 shims into the thing. Indeed, and I'm viewing it as a freebie until it dies. I'll only be using it on semi auto and I've got a diode across the motor as well. The grease was interesting. It's that nasty waxy snot, but it was carefully applied to the gears, and the piston rails rather than just randomly spooged in there or missing. Oh, one correction, the piston head is single o-ring, not double, and isn't on a bearing. That's a shame, I'd seen a review to the contrary. The air seal also isn't as good as I'd hoped either, even after stretching and greasing, on either the stock 3/4 cylinder or a ZCI full cylinder. Not bad, just not quite complete, my plastic fantastic CYMA does better with less. Only one way to find out. It's well radiused, at least, I didn't touch that. It's got an M130 now, as there seem to be no M140s to be had West of China. The s-hop is still curing so I don't know yet what it's going to produce. Thanks, I'll bear that in mind if it grenades.

Edge 2.0s start at £200 and upwards, and that's if they were in stock which they don't seem to be. That's my total budget, and I've come in under it with the DMR barrels, cylinder and spring. I know that Specna's QC and OEM have been patchy, but the EDGE 1 has all the parts that I want, and I'm prepared to take a gamble on the bearings and gears holding out for a bit. I'll be sure to flag up if I've guessed wrong.

Specna Arms EDGE SA-E02 M933 carbine, my swankiest purchase to date. Mostly decent, one really disappointing part though, full review here:

Freshly purchased in a rather nice grey to use as the basis for a DMR. The stock, grip and handguard are plastic, but everything else is alloy or steel. Buffer tube, receiver, outer barrel, delta ring, sights, sling mounts, trigger, fire selector, charging handle, forward assist, rear sight and its adjusters are all metal. The receiver is a really good tight closure with no wobble there or in the barrel or grip, and there's not much in the stock. I've not had the gearbox apart yet, but there's blue goo lube in there, it's not too loud, and with a little squirt of silicone lube down the nozzle it's shooting at a respectable and consistent 1.07J / 340fps @ 0.2g on the M90 spring, so the air seal seems fine, as it should be with double-o-ring piston and cylinder heads and an o-ring nozzle. It's got the advertised rotary hop which seems very similar to the ZCI plastic rotary which works well, although the adjustment wheel isn't as secure. The hop rubber is generic, but it's got a style of hop nub that I've never seen before, semi-circular on top, but flat on the bottom and extended front-and-back to fill more of the length of the hop window. That seems to make sense and was a pleasant little surprise - it should work well with the s-hop that I'm going to inflict on it. The "enter and convert" QC gearbox is as described, the spring can be changed without taking the gearbox out, just get the buffer tube off. That's a bit of a chore to get off and back on, mind, and I'm just off to buy a properly long screwdriver. The wiring cable is stiff and doesn't want to coil up inside the buffer tube either, making shortening the stock rather difficult. Being wired to Deans via a basic Gate X-ASR mosfet is a great idea, and it's practically begging to have a Gate Warfet or MERF dropped in for 3 round bursts. The 275mm barrel is heavy brass and has no obvious internal blemishes, although it's not the neatest on the outside. It was well oiled internally and needed a thorough clean out using the supplied and usefully long cleaning rod. It's not all great though. The handguard is very disappointing, being a hard, cheap feeling plastic that's wobblier than a politician's promise. It's slightly bananad and the halves don't want to close up tightly - you can see that even on PatrolBase's advertising pictures. The wobble is down to the halves not gripping the delta star ring securely. I've bodged it all tight with electrical tape around the barrel, between the guard and the star ring, and whipped around to hold the guard tightly together. It's fixable, but shouldn't need to be. The tight interface at the rear of the receiver halves also made it a sod to get apart, I was looking for a pin that I thought I must have missed, but it's just the standard front pin. When it eventually did part company, I was using so much force that I managed to stretch the charging handle spring to an unusable length and snap the plastic part of the mechanism in half. My bad, fixable, and not a big deal. The secret is to lift the front of the upper receiver a faction, both during disassembly and reassembly. I can't really blame them for having achieved a secure fit. The no-screws latch mechanism on the bottom of the pistol grip is nice in principle but in practice the pinned latch just gets in the way, and it's not an area that really needs quick access anyway - I might replace the grip with something less clever. The Specna Arms "advanced" motor isn't that strong and the wiring is disappointingly thin. The motor height adjuster doesn't have a separate E-Z-Looze disk, which is a nice change. It's a good fit for the Specna Arms motor, but I had to do quite a bit of filing to get a slightly longer Big Dragon M140 to fit instead, and the bottom plate mechanism is unforgiving there, it either closes, or it doesn't. On balance, it seems decent enough out of the box, just clean the barrel and hop, plug in a Deans battery and go. I do have to flag up the poor handguard though, it's fixable, but that's no excuse. Would I recommend it? Provisionally, yes, pending playing with it. I don't expect it to be either poor or magical. Puff is consistent, the hop mechanism looks decent, the barrel is probably OK, although I'll be replacing both of those anyway. At £140 for a metal body and a set of decent air seal parts that sharply reduced the size and cost of my followup AK2M4 order, the value proposition is what sold it to me.

I reckon what will finally do it for us will be an urban yoot with a RIF getting himself taken out by a twitchy armed response. Then the usual suspects will descend like vultures and grift off of a tragedy.

I bet they called each other "brothers" right up to the point where they started rolling on each other.

Unfortunate, and I expect that this "airsoft team" is as imaginary as the rest of his "the dog must have undeleted those pictures" excuses. And now back to the scheduled controversy: why didn't he just join an existing historical reenactment group or team, dress up in SS regalia, and then say "bUt I'm OnLy InTeReStEd In ThE HiStOrY, i'M nOt A nAzI" ? Personally I've got little time for that, particularly in airsoft. Wehrmacht, knock your socks off, but I've seen a couple of folks on Failbook who who go full lightning bolts, and then play the "muh history" card. Sure, that will be true for some, but it's also useful cover for those who harbour views like Licking Mustard's. I'd rather scorch that earth and leave them out in the open.

Oof, has that picked up again yet? I've been studiously avoiding keeping track of the latest lockdown diktats, but I understand that Glasgow Toon is still a level-tier-3-deathzone to the anguish of the remaining hospitality venues.

I generally carry one but don't use it because I've never been caught up in a dick-spiral where it's necessary. Section 8 mandate them, which is both sensible, and also a bad sign that dickery has raised its swollen purple head there.

As have I, but the hypothesis isn't that all airsoft toys are overpriced junk, just that some of them are. VFC seem to be in the business of sending business to Negative Airsoft. Also, Nuprol exists.

Here's the thing, f you're not milsimming, it doesn't matter, and if you are milsimming, then there are undeniably M4/M16 based rifles that are "DMRs".

I think it's fine, as long as you never, ever complain about being lit up like a Christmas tree the nanosecond that your hand wavers one tenth of a degree away from fully vertical. Ever.

Their site, their rules, but I'd feel compelled to point out that they're then talking about semi automatic sniper rifles, not designated marksman rifles, one point of which is that they can use the same mags and ammo as the carbines in the squad. If it becomes an issue at my local (I very much doubt it) then I'll throw on a solid stock on and die on this hill.

That, exactly. I'm sorry to hear you got sucked into that and it's great that you've finally climbed out of the hole. Lenders who aren't charging interest are reliant on preying on people who can't afford to pay it back. Low interest rates are the twigs and leaves covering the elephant trap of usurious debt collection, and it's long past time that this practice was looked into to see what actually keeps these companies going. Rant aside, until that happens, it's a real consideration for 2nd hand sales. And inflation makes interest free credit even cheaper by the time you've paid it back - even if you do have the lump sum up front, you might as well use interest free credit to benefit from that. In fact, the only time I'd use credit now is to exploit it when I don't need it.

"Then you'll have no problem shining it in your eye, then the eye of its owner, for 3 unblinking seconds, right?"