Adolf Hamster

once you get some experience under your belt it's not a risk, quite the opposite it gives you the power as you say to skip paying techs to do the work for you and means you can do things like buy secondhand with a lot more confidence knowing you have the capacity to deal with any hidden demons that the current owner might not even know are there. which is why i strongly advocate people learn their own tech work. what i'm referring to when i talk about risk is the learning curve, research only takes you so far and starting off without experience means you're gonna almost certainly make mistakes, and lots of them, hell i still make mistakes to this day. and jumping into trying your own tech work with no backup gun means any mistakes that show up on gameday (conveniently never at chrono and always when there's a target to be shooting at, it's just one of those universal laws) mean you're gonna have to pack up, go home and try to figure out what went wrong. which speaking from experience starts getting real tiresome the tenth time it's happened. best way to mitigate that risk is to have a backup of some sort, doesn't have to be a gun you own, could be a mate who has a spare you can borrow, or taking extra cash to rent a site gun etc. hell just a few months ago (during the glorious two weeks shooting we actually had this year) i had my primary go down because of a motor brush issue (brand new motor from a reputable company) and ended up having to run around all day with a mosin nagant i borrowed off a mate that had no front post. which was much more fun than trudging off home to try and sort things out. if practical range (ie shooting further than the other guy) is your goal then i'd have a look at these 2 threads: first one is basically a massive nerdfest that boils down to heavy bb's are better if you can hop them, second is some more generic info on gearbox work, for range/accuracy it's particularly worth looking at the stuff about airseal because there's no such thing as excessively good air seal. ^this, absolutely this, it's one of those tools that's so useful you forget other people might not have one.

In a technical sense yes the green is better, and i do preferr it for the super heavies, but it should also wear out faster (although hop rubbers are a wear component) Either colour should be just fine for launching .32's. The higher ratings are likely for hotter countries with higher limits, eg americans pushing all the joules in the desert

The barrel length alone isnt going to be an issue. For the .32 range either of my 2 standard reccommendations work (pdi w-hop 50deg or ml macaron tan+omega nub) The maple leaf would also be able to go heavier (ive used them for up to .48's at 1j) Slidey hop setting you can solve with a wee oring or such to give it a bit of friction.

Having seen inside one of their m4's i cant say i'd buy a kwa gun myself Because they managed to employ the only person outside of tm who saw an airsoft gun and thought "cool toy bruh, needs more proprietary parts and springs and shit"

See you answered your own statement there- that bloke already has the market cornered.

The moral of this story is: If you're gonna fuck up, fuck up when nobody important is looking

I only tell people to leave their first gat alone until they get a spare so i dont have to feel guilty when something inevitably goes wrong. I sure didnt follow rule 1 when i started so i'm well aware what comes next (hint: it's taking the walk of shame with a broken gat on a weekly basis) However, the op's research seems to be on the right lines. I cant say anything against any of those products on their own (because its all stuff i would be happy to run in my own guns) However as i often mention there's more than specific individual parts to getting a nice build, for example a snappy build with a baller ass barrel isnt going to do much if for example the air seal is terrible, or your using bad/lightweight ammo etc. @Alimcd has done a great job pointing out some of the common issues with the orion that typify this. With all that said, yes its a steep learning curve but only so much can be learned from the internet before you just gotta learn by doing it.

I kinda wish i didnt need to arc-weld a 3-phase rated switch together with about 6kv worth of back emf to have learned that lesson (or at least remembered back emf was a thing) And thats how hamster got banned from the electrical lab.......

have you read rule 1 of airsoft upgrading? because it's an important one.....

depends on your definition of "safe" assuming the gun hasn't had a shoddy downgrade meaning it's trying to spin a really underpowered spring then rof wise it should be fine without exploding. however, as @EDcase points out that's not the only element of longevity, and arcing out trigger contacts is gonna be a concern, granted the contacts will carbon up/arc out on any battery even nimh running 11.1 is gonna really cut down how long before you're gonna have to go in there and replace them.

afaik there is a "manufacture" clause in the vrca. it's a tricky one when it comes to the likes of secondhand sales if you're trying to figure out what you should be asking a defence for. the easy test is "will joe bloggs look at it and think gun" (or the man on the clapham omnibus argument as rogerborg puts it), which is why it still applies to guns that aren't technically based on a real gun (for example the aps uar) internal parts should be fine, gearboxes etc.

small strip of microfibre and one of them plastic cleaning rods most guns come with works very well. some folk use silicon, some use isopropyl, and i sit right in the middle and use nothing

Is that just white powder on the surface? If it is then thats bb residue, in part down the choice of ammo. Getting into the habit of cleaning the barrel before every game is worthwhile, one of the best "upgrades" you can do in terms of cost/difficulty to performance ratio

Watts his name

You get used to it, especially in daylight.

Sound like it's pinging off the tracer, pretty common if they aren't lined up right/work their way loose.

So what's up with it?

I'm sensing a correlation here......

If its a short unit should be fine, but i wouldnt be confident a long suppressor would work. But for a pistol tracer its worth a shot.

I guess it's just different ways of looking at things. From my perspective i dont get why folk would spend loads of money paying someone else to fix their gats for them. Granted i'm sure the amount of shit i've broken over the years learning to tech properly means cost wise it probably evens out, but lets face it no matter what path you choose if you're playing airsoft financial sensibility has already gone out the window

Not really, think of it more like buying a gun in mint condition on the secondhand market. For example when i'm buying i tend to be looking for external condition/quality and dont give a stuff about internals because even if they're good i know im going to end up changing them because i refuse to shoot a gun twice without doing some kind of tinkering. If a warranty is important to you, and you're in the habit of leaving guns totally stock then fair enough, but tbh i've seen the kind of shit that gets pulled as warranty repairs/fps downgrades and i'd rather do the work myself.

Its just the price you pay for importing cheap stuff from poland rather than paying a premium to get a uk shop with logistically easier returns. For folks who do a lot of tinkering it's pretty standard to accept the warranty aint gonna be worth jack the moment you do something as simple as put a set of proper connections on it.

Problem i'd have with the likes of tape or jb weld etc is how square and true the threads are, for a unit of any real length or narrow internal diameter you may end up chopping rounds.

Tbh the omega nub hardness never really bothered me much, the bucking has plenty of material to squish up and even with the aluminium nub in the maxx chambers i've had good results.

click sounds like the motors at least trying to spin. if it's not a weak battery like @BigStew suspects then i'd be looking at motor height being too tight or possibly as simple as they've plugged in the polarity wrong.