Leo Greer

I'm not an ICS expert, so someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't ICS use a nonstandard spec hop rubber in terms of length of the feed lips, and also a nonstandard nozzle? You should check out the PDI W-hold--it's a true Marui-Spec rubber, so it's a lot thinner than most of these modern rubbers, like ML. The Prommy purple is a legacy rubber as well, but it's thicker than Marui if I'm not wrong. Maple Leaf is way off Marci-Spec, by the way--they work the best in units like the Maxx, Krytac, and the G&G Rotary that are designed to take larger rubbers.

Personally, I tend to run around with about $350 worth of rif, all internal work included, but sometimes I pull something different out and it goes to 1K+. Either way, even $350 is a lot of money... but that money is all spent to enhance the experience when I run, sprint, jump over a barrier, trip on that stick, throw my rif three meters and it lands in the mud, pick the rif back up, and proceed to slay half a dozen rentals. Figure out what makes the experience for you, and what kind of money it's worth and let that dictate your choices. 🙂

All depends on what you want out of your DMR. Most AEGs with a clean barrel, hop packing, and good quality .25g BBs can hit 50 meters accurately. Not so many can hit 60m, and very few can hit 70. So how far do you want to go? Y'all over there in Britain seem to call 400 FPS w/ a .2g a DMR and I would say for those power levels you don't need a QC spring guide. For an M150, yeah, you're gonna break your wrist without a QC SG, but an M120 is within wrangling strength. Before you decide on changing any of your gearbox parts you need to get inside it and see what you're working with. For example, if the stock motor is Neo, it's probably strong enough for what you need. Stock compression parts can also usually be modified to work perfectly well. For the accurising part of DMR building (what separates you from that idiot with the hot gun over there), it gets a little more complicated. I'm new here to ASFUK (don't try to say that out loud 🤣), but I spent quite a bit of time over on a couple of the American forums putting together an in-depth accuracy guide going through every portion of modern accuracy tuning: https://www.airsoftsociety.com/threads/modern-airsoft-accuracy.167208/#post-1878715 Last I checked the "Holy Grail" guide is actually pretty outdated in some areas. Such as the idea of wrapping teflon tape around AEG packings, which originated from bad hop unit fitment combine with the VSR packing mod and not from an actual need. Maybe the updated version fixed this, but I still see people trying to wrap their AEG packings...

Hang the double-shooting--a 30K Warhead is the equivalent of a 35K brushed. Add that to 13:1 gears on 11.1v and you have yourself a serious case of PME. Heck, you could easily get bad PME even with a regular 30K. I'm also assuming you are located in Britain with a lower powered spring in your gun... which would give you PME even earlier. Honestly, I'd be worried about a Warhead 30K on a stock setup giving you PME. To make that setup work on British power limits you'd need a stronger spring and a fair bit of short stroking. And a lighter than stock piston assembly. Actually, the easiest way to do it would be to go heavy spring and real short barrel to compensate, so you could have a strong spring and acceptable power. For reference 30K on 13:1 11.1v usually comes out to abut 30 RPS. A 30K brushless will do 35 on 13:1, assuming everything is put together well. From experience, I have a 33K brushless that does 30 on 18:1.

The vast majority of gearbox shells on the market won't stand up to a true M150. Much less a V2. Much less the gears. Much less any bearings that may be present. Much less the piston. Etc, etc. The first question I'd have is not legality, but whether you gun will ever fire a *single time* with an M150 installed. And knowing that it's a Cybergun product, I can almost guarantee that it will not. That being said... if you do want an M150... go PDI or Guarder. 😁 PDI are darn tricky to track down nowadays, but Guarder can still be found relatively easily, and having used their M150-M140 variants, I can confirm that they are just as high quality as the rest of the lineup.

Luke is a troller. Some of the stuff in his videos can be downright nonsense... much of it intentionally so.

You can easily make your own flat or concave nub that both works great and is cheap. Any little piece of scrap plastic filed into shape will work fine, as well as being fitted perfectly to your individual setup. Supposedly Omega nubs have been having some tolerance issues and aren't all that effective. I cut them out of my builds a long while ago due to fitment issues (fiddly little suckers), but I thought it was worth mentioning. They're also dang expensive for what they are... and plastic should almost always be better than rubber due to rubber's compressible nature.

I like the build! I did have a couple of notes: The shimming sounds just a teeny, tiny bit scratchy to my ears, so if you were going to be a crazy perfectionist you might be able to make it sound a little smoother. That being said, I wouldn't bother, personally. Not worth the time, in my opinion. Second, you shouldn't ever really experience semi-lockup with the Warhead. Semi-lockup occurs when the piston gets stuck near the end of its cycle and the motor/battery doesn't have enough startup torque to overcome the increased spring strength and complete the cycle. The Warhead has massive torque, so either your battery is criminally underpowered, which seems unlikely, or you have another issue entirely. Depending on the shape of the selector cam on the gears you chose, the cutoff lever may be having difficulty resetting every time. Certain newer gearboxes have this issue where the gun experiences "semi-lockup" with no lockup due to the shape of the cutoff lever... It's possible that the spec differences between the TM stock gears and the replacements are causing the issue.

No real reason for there to be a range increase, unless the FPS is different. This is, of course, assuming both are good examples of the gun and not badly put together/QCed. It would mainly be a difference in accuracy, though Rogerborg pretty much summed it up. Why do you think they do their own production? Almost no one does their own production. Most American and EU brands are based in America and the EU, and as such it's impractically expensive to have a factory in their home country. Instead, Taiwan, HK, Japan, and China do most of the heavy lifting. For example, the Lancer Gen 3s are made by Lonex. Specna used to OEMed by E&C, who also OEMs for the Cyma Platinum line. Cyma doesn't own any tooling for anything but AKs, so they outsource *all* of their M4s/AR15s. Arcturus and E&L are both manufactured by MOS. Or, for example, Maple Armouries, which is a Canadian company who uses E&C as their OEM. The list goes on. In this case, we're talking China. I know they're the same because of identical internal parts. Hop units tend to get reused between models, and weirdly enough motor grips do as well. With a little digging and some research you can visually identify the origins of almost any airsoft rifle. Some parts change, but others don't. Unfortunately never got my hands on a DE, but I know several reputable techs who have done quite a lot with theirs. They seem to offer solid internals with maybe mid-level barrel groups. The kicker is that their version of ETU actually seems to be okay, rather than having serious issues within a few months.

Use enough o-rings that you feel pressure when attempting to put the upper receiver back on. Springs are always worse, since they allow for movement except in rare scenarios. However, chances are that the spring/o-rings are not the cause of your problem. That sounds to me like a hop rubber/hop unit fitment issue, or even a mag issue. What is the rif and the hop unit and rubber?

No way I'm keeping it to just one thing... "Airsoft guns are crap. They were invented by a freaking genius Japanese guy and then badly cloned repeatedly by a bunch of apes. And then the clones were cloned. Like inbreeding." "HPA is cheaper in the long run. The dark side offers the only path to eternal performance." "Those upgrades aren't upgrades." "Evike is run by a little man called the Devil: he does not have your best interest in mind." "There's a reason everyone on YouTube loves that Lancer Tactical so much. It's known as a sponsorship." "Upgrade yourself before you upgrade your weapon." "The faster you run, the better." "Noobs are scared by full auto, big players, and anything that you call a sniper or a DMR, regardless of whether it is or not."

It's nice. I picked up the rear-wired version in the second batch and have been working on it for the past few weeks. I'll confess off the bat that I'm not an HPA expert (AEGs are my thing), and that I haven't had the time yet to tune all the settings in detail and really work on getting the most out of this thing, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. First off, the Titan 2 Bluetooth makes settings an absolute breeze. You can adjust everything within seconds as you test fire, and being able to set the entire range of trigger sensitivity, etc, etc is very nice. Even nicer since you get the T2B included in the package. Second, having bought the Pulsar for a DMR build myself, I think it fits the bill. The range of settings on the engine itself is impressive. Though the settings aren't conventionally labeled, I'm pretty sure the Pulsar allows you to set poppet dwell as normal, but then also to set how long the air valve remains open, so you can control voluming precisely. Though I don't have a longer barrel or heavier BBs, the Pulsar was easily overvoluming .38gs in a 509mm 6.08mm, at 3.5J, with lots of room to spare. In my basic, rough tuning I was able to get ~2 FPS, which is in the realm of acceptable, if not as good as I'd like. I can probably get it better though with some smaller adjustments, though, so I'd holding onto hope. In speaking with some of the HPA techs on various forums, I did hear that HPA can actually be harder to get consistent FPS with than AEGs on these adjustable volume setups, which surprised me. My particular setup seemed to work well with the G&G hop unit and Maple Leaf 85 degree silicone MR.HOP, but of course hop rubber and hop unit compatibility is based on individual setup. As for RPS, for those who are interested... the particular software patch I downloaded allows you to set the Pulsar up to 100 RPS. Whether the engine will actually fire that fast is another question. The Titan telemetry tells me I'm getting 77, but as I've been tuning on .38gs, I haven't tested that with a chronograph for sake of my wallet. Overall, aside from some annoying shenanigans with thin solenoid wires, I'm extremely impressed with the ease, adjustability, and performance for the price.

Overall, in terms of actual noticeable performance, most of those parts will do nothing, as well as being purty dang expensive for the whole list. I'll second Skara and suggest avoiding the purchase of any internal "upgrades" until your son can define what he wants to achieve. (I'm a teenager still myself, so don't worry I know how we can be. 😂) Ultimately, if he can't define what we wants out of upgrades, the upgrades likely won't mean anything to him besides being able to say "It's upgraded!" in the staging area before games. Another great question to ask is who's going to install and tune the upgrades. Good techs are both expensive and rare, and doing any kind of gearbox work yourself without prior experience is difficult at best, much less tuning to actually gain a performance increase. In my opinion, two of the best "upgrades" for any airsofter are a high-quality 11.1v LiPo battery and some high quality, heavier than normal BBs. If your son plays CQB he may not need heavy BBs, but few airsofters would turn those two things down, as well as both providing a noticeable performance increase, if he doesn't have those things already.

Ahhhh, I forgot DE! Nevermind Specna and G&G then. DE is cheap enough for me to toss them out the window. I will still stick with my Arcturus recommendation though. No clue how hard they are to get in the UK though...

Inner barrel length certainly does matter, but not as much as many people think. Very simply, the inner barrel only needs to be long enough for the BB to stabilize in the barrel. Heavier BBs fly slower, and therefore have more time for a certain barrel length, so you can get away with a shorter barrel length. How short exactly? Some debate this, but I find the optimal length for AEGs with a standard cylinder setup to be above 230mm. I and other players have achieved very accurate results using barrels of only 250mm. I'll also comment that optimal length is *individual to your setup* and these numbers I'm throwing out are loose rules and not definitive in any way. Now, shorter barrels can still be accurate, as many pistols prove. I'm not trying to say that if your barrel is shorter than 230mm it will be *inaccurate*, simply that you may experience less than optimal accuracy for your BB weight, level of stabilization, etc. I'll also mention that when a barrel is too long it can also cause issues, but that's another question entirely. Most airsoft forums have a post nowadays explaining cylinder voluming, so go check that out if you're interested. As to the Evolution Airsoft rifles, they look to be from the same OEM as many of the Lancer Tacticals and the Novritch SSR4. In summary, not so hot. They'll probably work, but given the QC and level of crappery I've seen from some of the Lancers, and even some of the SSR4s (usually better QC, but a lot of the early ones had big issues), I wouldn't pay that. To be even more specific, all of Lancer's current M4 lineup and the SSR4 use the same crappy barrel assembly. Meaning, the hop unit, hop packing (rubber), and the barrel are mediocre at best and fit together pretty badly in some cases. In particular, accuracy on the Lancers I've worked on was trash. I would suggest a G&G, Specna, or an Arcturus as a starter, with Arcturus being probably the best value for the money, Specna being the cheapest for their sport line variants, and G&G being the most reliable, having had years and years to work out their issues and kinks, as well as to acquire an army of people who know how to work on them.

By the numbers, your RPS is correct. 24,000 / 60 / 13 (approximate ratio, not actual) = optimal cycle speed. That means the speed the motor should turn the gears if the gears weighed nothing and the spring had no resistance. Optimal speed is about 30 RPS. However, the gears do weigh something and the spring does provide resistance. This means we have to factor in a final variable: efficiency. If you're getting 25 RPS, and assuming your motor is exactly 24K (most motors can be off by up to 1K, and some are far worse), that means that you're at 81% efficiency. This could be better in a gun as low powered as this, but it's fairly respectable, and indicates that you probably don't have any huge issues. That being said, here are some caveats: Motors can perform at "high efficiency" on paper but still be heating up overly fast due to bad shimming or whatnot. The motor can be strained but still put out full RPS. Motors can be badly off-spec in terms of speed. For example, it's well documented that the ASG 30K Boost is actually 35K in practice, similar to the 16TPA 35K Tienly GT. This can lead to issues with inexperienced techs who have a faster-than-it-should-be motor on their hands.

It does sound like you’re overheating, but not because of motor height or bad installment. I suspect the gun is pulling more amps than your batteries can handle. Have you tried on an 11.1v LiPo with very highly rated discharge? Since companies lie about their discharge and milliampere ratings, that’s the easiest way to make sure. Titan Li-ions are really not suitable for airsoft, given the low discharge Li-ions actually produce. There are slight differences between packs, but here’s a comparison of a few: https://www.airsoftsociety.com/threads/objective-battery-test-titan-lion-vs-kypom-lipo-vs-hv-lipo-valken-others.161379/ I have personal experience with *this* pack. It confused me for ages as a new player trying to figure out why my gun wouldn’t cycle (outfitted with 13:1 and 30K), and it took me over a month to realize that the battery didn’t have enough juice. Your 9.9v LiFe obviously doesn’t have enough discharge—does the Titan seem like it runs out of juice faster than it should? When batteries are on the edge of being able to run your gun, but they’re still being overdrawn, it’ll still run your gun, but it takes up a lot more juice. Hence why LiPos puff when they’re bad quality or under spec for what you’re doing with them.

I notice they include full specs for the barrel nut threading, etc, so I think it’s very possible you could find a way to fit it. I’m googling now, since I’d love a 10” rail for my Arcturus.

You could try and figure out who manufactures them. Brands typically manufacture themselves a slightly different thing according to their preferences, but there are still only a few factories/OEMs that make BBs. Aka BLS in Taiwan.

Cali is a sinking ship. Let it die, folks. I’m just hoping they don’t bring too much of their crazy here as a result. (Texas, USA native here) It’s literally a max exodus right now. Interestingly I’ve never had any issue buying airsoft items off eBay, including replicas, fake suppressors, rails, etc, even parts that will fit real rifles.

Cool to hear you sorted it! I ran into the same spiral gearset or brushless motor debate on my most recent M4 build, but ended up going brushless and leaving the spiral set for another build. Do you have videos of either of these guns? They both sound like really cool builds, and I would love to compare the sound vs. my brushless M4!

Maxx adjustable nozzle = your best friend.

Do you know the old o-ring stretch trick? Your airseal would have to be freaking horrendous to lose 200 FPS at the piston head/cylinder junction. For reference, I’ve done some work on certain Lancer Craptical guns that didn’t even have airseal between the head and cylinder, and still got over 300 FPS (supposed to shoot 375). I’m not kidding here. When your nozzle is too long it can lose you FPS consistency, accuracy, feeding… usually not more than 10-12 FPS at max though. My best bet is that you’re getting drag on your tappet plate/nozzle, if your tappet timing is off because of drag, it can easily cause that much FPS loss. Check for any friction between the GB shell and the tappet and the nozzle and the nozzle tube. Make sure you check with the GB screwed together tightly. Oh, and also check and make your nozzle is at the right angle—if it’s angled it can do that. Mag issues are a decent guess, methinks, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen mags do that—I’ve had feeding issues (darn you Lancer midcaps), and sometimes this causes FPS drop as well, but I’ve never seen 200.

Is the gearbox another Ares? If it’s not, chances are you have a misaligned gearbox, as boxes are absolutely not made to spec, especially Ares. Get an adjustable nozzle to check for nozzle length issues. Make sure your cylinder sits tight in the shell. Is this happening on full auto, semi, or both? What’s the ROF?