Adolf Hamster

i wouldn't put it past them at this point.

according to ups a plastic hop unit is a firearm and needs treated as such.

That guy...... i suppose credit where it's due, it's not an m4 mag

is this avenger's new alt?

not always, plenty of guns where pulling the barrel for cleaning just isn't practical. but certainly given it's easy enough to pop the top it wouldn't hurt to be able to look down the barrel and check every now and then. you're going a bit more complex than i do, i just have a scrap of microfibre (literally glasses cleaning cloths) wrapped around the end and shove it down there. lubricating the bucking is a contentious issue, on the one hand folks are alarmed by the idea of oiling something that's supposed to be grippy, on the other hand it's meant to be good for the longevity of the rubber. certainly i used to use silicone and it only took a few shots to get the bucking gripping again. tbh it's a wear component, especially if you're using a softer compound and it ain't gonna last forever. depends on your budget/playstyle, i've run games firing .48's in an assault style role and whilst it was hilarious how it turned airsoft into a point and click adventure it did grate a bit how much money's worth of ammo you could burn through in a day. yes bls are one of the brands i've heard are pretty decent, although not used them myself as geoffs tend to be easier to get here. i'd get the nub now and wait a bit before splashing out on the maxx, for example that money spent on a chrono will be more helpful if you're going to be doing your own teching. not that the maxx is a bad unit, but it can be a bit of a pain to work with/fit/get setup right. and more importantly any benefit it can provide is gonna be lost if say the gun has bad airseal.

yes, indeed i forgot to mention it. i really should have a copy-paste answer for this as it's a common enough question/response. as above, i forgot not everyone has one lying around, with improvements measured by chrono results it's definately worth having one if you're gonna tinker yourself.

the first question is what is your goal? given it's an sr25 i'm going to assume that you're after the usual range/accuracy camp. bearing in mind when it comes to suggestions for specific products you can ask 10 different people and 11 different answers, and while i tend to stick to reccommending stuff i've actually used myself that doesn't mean there aren't other perfectly viable (or even better) options out there. as a general rule i tend to go with a particular order, in a rough order of effort-reward ratio: clean the barrel- and get into the habit of keeping it clean, at least before and sometimes even during every game day. there's debate over silicone versus alchohol and what it does to hop rubbers which i avoid by doing neither. if your gun came with a plastic clearing rod that's the perfect tool for the job (won't scratch up the barrel) with a strip of microfibre wrapped round it. some folk use cigarette filter tips although never tried that one myself. feed it good quality heavy ammo. it's amazing (especially with ak's) the number of times i've "fixed" a gun with jamming/feeding/accuracy problems just by emptying the mag and refilling it with geoffs. weight wise you want to be going as heavy as possible, the limit being what your gun can lift (which can be changed) and how much money you can afford to be sending downrange. for an assault style role i tend to find around the .3g range is a nice balance between cost and performance, but for a lower round count gun like a dmr then splashing out for the heavies is much easier. the best airsoft gun on the planet would still shoot like shit if you fed it crap ammo. hop rubber/nub- this goes hand in hand the ammo choice as this will dictate how heavy you can go. my general go-to combo is the standard maple leaf macaron with omega nub, sometimes the longer feedlips can cause feeding issues and in those cases i tend to switch to the PDI W-hold with a standard nub. the hardness rating is something that needs to be appropriate for the weight/weather/energy considerations. a lower powered setup, colder climate or heavier ammo would preferr going softer (eg to lob .48's at 1j i need to use a green/tan) whereas a higher energy might just push the feed lips out of the way and leak air. air seal- in short, you want every atom that's in the cylinder to be going down the barrel after the bb and nowhere else. a bad air seal will make for terrible shot-shot consistency (vertical dispersion) and a lower average fps. there's no point spring swapping until you're confident that all the energy you're making the motor wind up every time is going to be turned into useful benefit. you can get a rough guide to how good the gun is currently by seeing how much change there is in fps between shots on a chrono, you want this to be as low as possible. do make changes however you will need to crack open the gearbox, which can be a daunting prospect. for the basic air seal checks you can have a look here: energy- once you've got good air seal then you can look at the spring. you shouldn't worry about being 5-10fps under but if you're a big chunk under the site limit then you'll want to think about bumping it up. this will ofc mean a spring change. barrel- we're starting to hit the diminishing returns curve now, and the gun should already be pretty decent. there are debates about tight versus wide bores however the one overriding factor for what makes a good barrel is quality, whatever diameter it's meant to be it shouldn't vary, it should be straight, and the inner surface finish should be smooth. some folks polish their barrels and can get very good performance out of stock brass, however a drop-in is a lot easier. in terms of specific products on a budget the ZCI 6.02's are fantastic value for money, if you wanna go a bit more high end then personally i'm a fan of the PDI stainless stuff, although remember we're hitting the diminishing returns. hop unit- tbh unless there's a specific problem with the stock unit, i'd tend to leave it alone. one of the big problems you can get in airsoft is tolerances, and a good quality hop such as the maxx might still make the gun worse if it's not the right fit for that gun, the stock unit will at least be the proper size and fitment. note that this rule tends to apply generally- simply throwing the most expensive/shiny of any given component into a gun isn't always going to improve it. what you do want to make sure is that the hop unit is being pressed up nice and tight to the gearbox, in many cases there'll be a little spring that does this however a larger spring wrapped around the barrel or a stack of o-rings can work quite nicely. of course this is all improving the guns base ability to lob bb's with consistency, however there are other things that might be worth considering that can help improve practical use when accounting for actually having to use the thing: trigger response (well, lock time)- while you can largely get around this by knowing your gun well it definately feels better to have less time between pulling the trigger and the shot actually happening. the simplest and easiest way to do that these days is a precocking mosfet like the gate warfet/titan or the higher end perun units. bear in mind as a platinum series your gun will already have an internal mosfet and might well be snappy enough for your preferences. handling- doesn't matter if the gun shoots straight if it's so heavy/awkward to use that you can't aim it properly. we're very much in the hedgerows of personal choice and if you want to plaster your gun with grips/flashlights/lasers/bipods etc for no other reason than you want to/think it looks cool then absolutely go for it, just remember that extra weight comes with a penalty.

Allright, i'll let you go this time.....

a grenade launcher with a lower rail and you didn't think to strap an m203 on the bottom?

maybe plays on top of a mountain? less air pressure?

aaaand that's enough internet for one day methinks.......

ahh, i missed your creativity YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!!!!!!11111 i think?

if you modify the gun to comply would that count? ie semi auto only and sub 1j muzzle energy?

does it work both ways, ie if i write in bold do i become a millionaire? edit: sadly it does not appear to work both ways

even though it's unlikely i'll be visiting any of these sites any time soon (what with being the opposite end of the country and all) i have enjoyed your reviews. it's good to have folk who can put out proper information, warts and all. tbh, shifting to being more regular doesn't mean you're going to be lacking material, it might be good to have some context for sites over time, sort out which places can maintain a good average and which ones might have been luck of the draw.

in that case, i suggest hiring an engineer and asking them, unless you already have one on the payroll of a businesss. shock horror as work done by qualified professionals turns out to be expensive when they're not volunteering for a hobby.

for a bespoke one-off there are companies that can do cnc machining bespoke, but it's gonna be expensive, as in hundreds of pounds to make something that for a mass produced part would cost a tenner. the ones i've dealt with you had to at least furnish them with proper drawings/CAD, and to get those you'd need to pay someone with those skills which definately won't be cheap either.

true, although if airsoft is gonna end up on trial then the place it'll lose is the court of public opinion aka facebook and the daily mail. i'll admit that personally it's not something i've put much thought into, almost entirely down to selfish disinterest. i can see the angle you're going for, making it a random encounter rather than a known obstacle would make many techniques for dodging hard. there'd need to be the perception that it couldn't be dodged to deter folk.

depends on what period of history you're going for. there's the raptor Grach, which seems to have mixed reviews, some folk on here have them hopefully they'll swing by to let us know how they're doing. there's the makarov, which afaik there are 4 versions- ics and kwc do non blowback versions which i don't know much about aside from the kwc having a pretty big issue with power. for blowback there's WE and KWC. the kwc is co2, snappy as hell, but only a single action trigger, slightly "off" in many of its dimensions (ie it looks weird), non-standard hop means how it shoots out of the box is how it shoots (although not that bad all things considered), comes at "you have got to be joking" fps (although they can be tweaked to bring this down to sensible levels as mine was before i got it), and of course CO2 and all the long term reliability that entails. the WE imo is the best of the bunch, decently snappy, more comfy than the kwc the proper single/double action with pretty good (by airsoft standards) trigger pulls in both, with a few minor tweaks you can get hilarious range/accuracy on good ammo, and snappy enough. of course as with many WE's they don't like the cold. the tokarev afaik had WE and src versions, don't really know that much about either of them. but tbh outside of a ww2 through early cold war loadout it's gonna be a bit dated. i also beleive there's nagant revolvers floating around as well, although we're getting pretty niche by this point. personally, i'd say the WE makarov is the best bet, not bad performance wise and thematically can fit most loadouts from the cold war right up to the modern day (although granted the grach and/or g17 would be better fits)

by the looks of it then 2A does kind of insinuate the steel thing is a no-no, as if you'd modified the gun to be usable firing steel then it'd break that definition. i'm assuming at least that it'd need modified, particularly the hop, as nearly doubling the weight is gonna be a challenge to lift. only reason i even think it's possible is a janky rhop installation years ago that would space .48's at 1j either way that's a court battle i don't particularly want to see happening. as mentioned earlier it seems that the current crop of weights sit ok with MED's as they stand, the exception possibly being nov's full thrust stuff but that hasn't taken off sufficiently to render it a problem same as marushin's 8mm stuff. i'd guess anyone who's tried steel up to this point has presumably been ignorant of how these things work, most likely assuming they're like air rifles, rather than seriously contemplating it as an option. however given the above definitions i'm not sure it's worth experimenting with, and even without those considerations the perception of using steel is so tainted by this point that wether it works in theory or not is largely irrelevant. kinda like how nuclear energy makes sense on paper, but you mention the n word at all and the droves of nimby's will immediately assemble screaming chernobyl at the top of their lungs. indeed, i'm still yet to be convinced that any material that doesn't swell in storage is also biodegradable. y'know that's not a bad idea, although the biggest prerequisite of the site actually having enough background knowledge to implement this is another hurdle. as i believe you're fond of describing it "safety theatre" it's kind of sad really that these issues simply wouldn't exist if you could trust the players to be honest, but thanks to humanity's fundamental flaws that's never going to happen.

there are some good reasons to not actually use steel (is it actually illegal or is that just an urban legend? i've honestly never looked it up), i can see it playing merry hell with magazines, feeding etc then scratching the hell out of the barrel as a goodbye present. and as already mentioned MED rules would need revamping, for example to maintain a given MED you'd need to drop the power, which might not be the worst given poor range judgement, accidental close range strikes and kicking mustang are a thing. however it might ironically solve one problem- it'll be more biodegradable than "plastic". of course as i'm writing that the idea fairy strikes.... lead- quite possibly softer than some of the bb's on the market currently..... although there is gonna be a point where the velocity drop would be so much it'd be impractical, you'd probably draw the line when you had to wait until after lunchtime before all the shots you'd fired that morning actually landed. needless to say this is all entirely hypothetical with a lot of big citation needed stamps all over it, but it's fun to ponder these things every so often. the issue with joule creep is when not chrono'ing on game weight, if you chrono on game weight (without lying) then it's not a problem (compared to say stuffing .2's in, passing and not realizing the power jumps when they put their game .4's in), of course chrono'ing on game weight opens up for liars. i don't think there's any decent field expedient solution that which doesn't invoke the joule creep issue. at least as long as chrono's are just measuring velocity compared to say a ballistic pendulum that can actually measure energy (and would be immune to bb weight liars) of course anyone who lies about ammo weight to cheat chrono, or indeed exploits any other method to do the same well, you said it best:

indeed, iirc 0.5g was the heaviest marketed ammo i could find at the time. this is an intriguing question. i'm tempted to say an awful lot of it is perception, ie that people just assume steel is going to hurt more because it's steel. certainly my logic is that with the flat 1j limit (ie no mucking around with med's) is that 1j point blank is gonna sting just as much if it's a .2g or .5g, and whilst the heavier ammo will hit harder at range than the lighter ammo, it will never hit harder than what's considered acceptable (ie the 1j point blank hit) although we're straying into territory where there really needs to be more actual information, for example how much the current crop of bb's deform at our impact energies is going to play a very big part of wether or not there's an argument here. if they do deform, then yes harder materials would present a problem, but if they don't then my above suggestion that perception is the issue would be more valid. i'm kind of the inverse, my preference would be for heavier ammo and lower muzzle energy, as it's a flatter curve. with lighter ammo the closer you get the more it's gonna hurt. tell me about it, hell the number of times i've had to explain to sites that my gun is not underpowered after i've already told them i'm running X ammo weight. the .48's are always fun when they see 200fps on the readout expecting 320..... never happened to me, likewise i've never had a site question when you start the day with an m4 and finish with an ak......

could just have been a hot gun. as for the MED thing last time i ran the math on it a 0.5g bb fired at 2.5j worked out to be around 1.3j left after 20m, which isn't too far removed from what's generally considered for sniper/med/rifleman limits. of course if it was even heavier than that it'd hold even more energy and hit harder, so yes if we started seeing dramatically heavier stuff being used it is a question that would need to be raised. currently the heaviest i'm aware of for 6mm is 0.5g, although personally i preferr the 0.48's as a white bb is easier to track. however novritches full thrust goes up to 0.62g albeit with a larger bore diameter and associated drag. although i'm guessing the mass increase for nov's bb's is going to be more of a factor than the diameter, as the drag will be a factor of the cross sectional area (square law) but the mass affected by volume (cubed).