RostokMcSpoons

Thanks that's a good checklist for me to work through... It does have a MOSFET. I dry fired the gun with the upper removed, and because the CA guns use to have an EBB system there's a big slot in the top of the gearbox so it's easy to see the position of the piston... It did seem to do a good job of completing the cycle when in semi auto, but I could occasionally catch it out and it'd be pre-cocked in full auto. So there's no active brake or pre-cock features working, as far as I can tell.

I wouldn't have been surprised to hear all that a few years or even months ago, but I seem to have been blessed with all sorts of ammo that actually feeds reliably in a number of different guns. I'd now be rather shocked if handling Bio BBs did anything to them unless you soaked them in water, left them in the sun, dropped them on the soil and then stamped on them a bit. When BBs degrade they actually shrink rather than expand, according to an article I read that had been published by one of the manufacturers. But of course (1) the tolerances in a tight bore barrel are very fine and (2) one piece of sales puffery on the internet does not equal a scientific fact If you had moist balls, I wouldn't be trying to force them up some tight pipework, that's all I'm saying. Keep them out of direct sunlight and keep 'em dry and clean, but there's no need to get OCD about them

Thanks @Jamsandwich - I tried it, and really thought for a moment it had worked. Sadly - nope, not really. Good shout though!

That's very odd. I've had a mosfet complain about a 7.4v being plugged in when it's expecting a 11.1, but not that, especially not in the DE which doesn't normally care. So yeah - worth checking the battery. Have you got a sufficiently fancy charger, or one of those cheapo voltage readers off Amazon? https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DC3LH9C?ref=nb_sb_ss_w_as-reorder-t1_k0_1_8&amp=&crid=1OBO8IRZTYEUT&amp=&sprefix=lipo+vol That might be able to tell you if the battery has gone a bit awry - perhaps one of the cells is out of balance. As the for cheating bastart, I hope you reported him to the marshals too. Full-auto-ing kids at super-short range on purpose is a shitty thing to do, I'd have lost my rag at that point, probably would end up being the one booted off the site

Your experience could still be very useful, as @Rogerborg's question is still open - what's good to remove paint from the plastic parts of a gnu, without melting it?

There is a thread on BBs here Empirically they're on a par with Geoff's, but at a cheaper price. I'm seriously thinking of getting 10kg of the 0.28 Bios

... Unhappy about the wanton destruction of blue paint? Or off to see the Princess?

Thanks chaps, appreciate the input I've already had my eye on a Vortex T1 style sight - given they have lifetime 'any reason' warranties then I don't have to buy a protector (but I probably would, just to save the inconvenience). "Red Dot Engineering" on eBay have provided me with protectors for all my sights - except these two - at £10 a pop, and they're really good. I don't think there's any nitrogen in the Kobra, unless it's behind the lens where the laser is, and as for the cheapo sight - if it fogs... 🤷‍♂️ My soldering skills are ummm "limited" shall we say but maybe I'll be brave and open it up to see if there's something obvious and easy to fix, so I can present it to someone to sort for me. Usually I'd think of going to a watch repairer for 'fine engineering', but who does precision soldering 'in the real world'?

Apologies for taking so long to get back to you. I've tried all my small hex keys, both imperial (1/16" and 0.05") and metric (1.5mm and 1.27mm), and none of them seem to fit! I might just be being very ham-fisted but peering into the holes on the selector levers on each side, there's very little for the things to bite into. Lozart's set of hex drivers would be good - I have one small hex driver and it's always feels easier to use than the Allen keys, so useful regardless of whether it solves this specific problem it's a good purchase

Nope, that was my first thought because I had to swapped from the supplied Big Foot 7.4v 1300mAH 15C across to a Turnigy 11.1v 1200mAH 15-25C. So I swapped back - the same thing. No obvious difference in how often it happens either. Maybe I'll do a more 'scientific' test of that at lunchtime.

I've got two sights that are playing up at the moment. One's dirt-cheap but the other is worth a few quid and definitely worth rescuing... Clone T1: red dot flickers with any movement of the sight. Dodgy connection to the battery. I've ensured the battery cover is screwed down tight, the connections are clean, changed battery etc. Kobra 'real steel': tapping the sight reduces the brightness - it's triggering the button circuitry as it reduces in the same steps as pressing the 'down' button*. Unfortunately it's sensitive enough to have this happen through recoil. Is there anywhere I can send these to have them fixed, or is one going in the bin and the other relegated to wall hanger duties? Edit: * further testing revealed that's not true, it's more like an equivalent of 3 or 4 steps in brightness, a couple of knocks is enough to take it from max to 'barely visible'

I think I need to go down the rabbit hole ... somewhat. Because they're the BBs I can get at my local site, and the Lonex flash mags are the only ones I want to run - so I need to get the gnu running optimally with that combination, or I'm not in as good a place as I could / should be. To be honest, even with the gun as it is now, I would run it like that - the full auto is great. The double shots will be an annoyance where full auto isn't allowed though - a good chance I'll miss a kill or give my position away I suspect the main thing I need to investigate more is the location of the magazine within the mag well. I may have shimmed it too much... I don't know. The next stop will be looking at the hop rubber... but then we're onto stuff like swapping the nozzle, or adjusting the tappet plate. Opening the gearbox is something I'd rather not do, if it can be helped.

Ah yes, good point. I'm sure he's storming oil rigs and battleships and setting Erika Eleniak free instead (to be fair, I would, if we were back in 1992)

My Classic Army Scarab has really impressed me so far, but I have found a couple of issues now, after firing a few hundred BB's through it. They may be related! 1) My Lonex flash mags were a sloppy fit in the mag well, able to rock backwards and forwards (and also a little up-and-down too). The supplied mag (a Nuprol high-cap, not the Classic Army one it should've been) is a better fit 2) Firing on semi-auto, and also occasionally when burst firing full-auto, the gun will shoot two BBs at 50% power, then go back to feeding properly. It doesn't seem to skip firing a BB at any point. 3) The motor is getting pretty warm in the pistol grip. I've wound the height adjuster screw off half a turn, it seems a little better but maybe that's psychology and I'm just not running it as hard! I'll experiment further with that. The gun sounds nice (to my untutored ears) when fired. I found that pushing the mag forwards in the well seemed to improve the feeding greatly, so I've now shimmed the rear of the mag well using one of those little adhesive cupboard "stop 'em slamming" nubs that Ikea always provide. I filed that down to give a good snug fit for the Lonex mags (snug enough that the mag doesn't drop free, and so snug the Nuprol barely fits in). I've tried both 11.1 and 7.4v batteries, same results. Both are rated 25C or below, as per a warning I read not to go to 30C or above. I've not chrono'd the gun but I'm guessing its running at 16-18rps on 7.4 and 20-25 on 11.1. According to the listing it's at 335fps on 0.20's. I'm using decent BBs which don't give me problems in anything else. The Nuprol and Lonex mags are both in good nick, relatively new, and giving plenty of feeding pressure. The gun itself is in as-new condition. The metal hop unit looks great, the barrel is clean, and I can see the rubber impinging nicely as the hop is wound on. I've not dissembled it to examine the rubber closely, but there's no sign of Tatty Lip Syndrome (tm). Any ideas on possible fixes?

We'll have to ask the Black Belt Barrister. That is if he's not storming embassies and freeing hostages with his Bestest Budz

Maybe that random blue sticker on the mag well got it past 49.99% 'bright' blue 😁 I'm very grateful for the way it was done though - if some of the lower, or the plastic stock had been done, then it would have been that much harder to do a nice job on it. I'd probably have just gone for a typical slap-dash rattle-can-camo job instead. Edit: Actually the stock is all-metal.. that could've been blued as well, without making my job any harder

So it went from this to this I still can't get over how easy it was, even compared to the idea of just spraying over the top of the blue. (I don't 'baby' my guns too much when I'm out on a skirmish, so they're going to pick up a few light scratches - every chance I'd have had the blue showing through in short order) So "tea and medals" for @Cr0-Magnon and @Snakeeyes75 for coming up with brake fluid as the very thing

Yup, love mine. £130 for the gun with upgrades plus 2 mags makes it a bit of a bargain in my book. Did the upgrades make an appreciable difference? My DOR was shooting out to ~35m last game day. Temperature was around 10C so I was running Abbey Predator gas. Unsure of the fps, but the hop was pretty much at it's max to lift the 0.28s out that far. I think that means there's some more performance to unlock as I've seen videos of TM Hi-capas reaching out to 50-60m (in USA, so probably much warmer) TBH for a backup pistol 35m is really all that's necessary, but I always like some small excuse to buy more stuff...

I'll take a look at mine later, try to get a size for you

After about 3 months of panicking that I'd be out of work this week, I got a new contract. So 2 days later I bought another gun It's a Classic Army Scarab ABR Just a boneyard special from Action Hobbies but I do have to say it's rather splendid so far... For a paltry £100 I've got a backup gun that might get some prime-time use - it's full metal, solid as a rock, got a high speed motor so really is at the "20's Plenty" 'plus' end of the scale... 13" barrel, programmable ETU with burst fire. So basically it scratches my 'buy another Double Eagle M90x gun' itch, but that's less than half the price. I took the upper receiver off and removed the bright blue paintwork (see my two-tone thread for details), and I've been really impressed by the way the gun was put together. It's very well engineered. Very solid outer barrel is well braced within the monolithic upper receiver. The metal hop unit and stock rubber seem to be lifting the 0.32's I tried in it... I'll confirm that with some more testing tomorrow. The only two issues are 1) The battery goes inside the foregrip, so no room for chunky stuff. And you need Allen keys to undo the two bolts so won't be easy mid-game 2) The gun doesn't like my Lonex flash mags. There's too much forward and backward play in the mag well, so the gun will double-feed or not feed at all sometimes. It's entirely fixable with some shimming inside the mag well, but I'm not quite sure how I'll achieve that yet.

Unexpectedly good news to report! Well firstly, no plastic involved... CNC'd aluminium upper receiver, and so 'monolithic' in its length that there was nothing else on the gun to paint. Secondly. It only bloomin' blinkin' well worked perfectly. The blue just washed off in the soapy water! I 'encouraged' it a bit with the toothbrush in some of the harder to reach bits, but it basically wiped off, leaving the underlying black paintwork in as-new condition. A good blast from the garden hose to really clean it out, and job done! Perhaps this was a special case, as the paintwork seems to be a very nice quality, but I'm definitely going to try the brake fluid again, if I buy another two-tone gun. "Can you tell what it is yet?" I'll post on the What Have You Just Bought thread later, but have to rush off to footy now

A lot of the paint is already off... I'm just waiting for t'wife to go out so I can spend some quality man-time with it (and some soapy water and a toothbrush)

With the disclaimer that I have a UKARA number, and I'm an active skirmisher, I've decided to do a proper paint job, so I'm stripping off the bright blue paint from a gun, and I was intending to prime and spray it black. (Black to start, I might go 'camo' in the near future) The blue paint is on top of the factory black finish I don't mind if the factory finish comes off too, I'll just spray the whole thing The only part I need to attend to is a decent quality aluminium upper, but that does involve a long set of RIS rails... so... lots of corners! I remember seeing that brake fluid does a job on two tone, so I've bought some, did a brief test on a small patch (blue comes off, reveals black beneath... no initial sign that the black was also coming off) So I went 'all in', stuck the receiver in a plastic tray and poured the bottle of brake fluid over the top, to let it have a soak. Now I came back here to look again for hints, and found mention of 'rubbing gently' (yub yub) to remove the paint to reveal the finish beneath. It appears I've gone off a bit half-cocked (wibble) Have I gone a bit OTT with the 'bath' technique? Was brake fluid even the best idea, should I have gone for a 'proper' paint stripper? Any handy hints on my next steps much appreciated! Edit: I guess this will become less of a 'question' thread and more of a 'personal experience / how-to' thread I went to have a look at the soaking receiver, and already the brake fluid is turning blue. A bit of light work with a tooth brush revealed the black paint beneath, and so far the factory paint has remained intact - no sign of breaking through that so far. So this is good progress... I've turned the receiver over to let the other side soak.