Ian_Gere

Airsoft retailers and fleabay, or outdoor sports retailers for Bolle.

TBH finding the right eyepro is very personal. You will probably have to try several types before you find what works best for you and, like me, you may find that certain types work better for certain sites or game styles. For eg, I have a pair of ESS Advancer V12s for which I have made custom mesh inserts to replace the polycarbonate lenses - they are fucking excellent, the size of the mesh at that distance from my eye just disappears from my view very quickly and never forces my eyes to refocus close up, which is something that some mesh eyepro does to me... but I wouldn't wear them for CQB because the raw mesh is not strong enough to withstand more than 14 rounds fired full auto at 1J point blank range - the curvature I have added and the way the ends of the wires are locked around the perimeter will add to that strength, but by an unknown amount, so even though the chance of an accident is actually miniscule, since it would take my head to be jammed in place, I don't feel it's appropriate to take that risk when it's not just my eyes but the reputation of the site and the sport as a whole. I also have a pair of Revision Bullet Ants, which although they have polycarbonate lenses and therefore will always fog, by preparing them the night before with Fog Tech and giving them a quick polish with an ESS cloth before use, the fogging can be put off for about 3-4 hours assuming breaks every 40mins or so - after that further Fog Tech polishes last for about 30-40mins. These are my CQB eyepro. I also have some Hero Shark Daggernose - I feel fully confident that the mesh in these would withstand 00 buckshot, but the perforated sheet never quite disappears from my view - it creates rows of tiny triangular shadows. This is not really a problem, however it does mean that when i involuntarily glance close by, because I've heard something unexpected for eg, like a BB hitting my cover, my eyes momentarily attempt to refocus on the interior of the mesh, which makes seeing stuff close up a ball ache (and i need reading specs anyway). These are my spares. On days when I'm using my ESS's, for when I know I will be getting forward during a game and might get a faceful, and for CQB when fogging in my Bullet Ants has become more of a pain than I'm prepared to accept. I tried Bolle Cobras - these are fog free, but the liquid still builds up on the lenses distorting my view, so I may use these as additional spares on days when taking fuck loads of kit isn't a problem. Plus I have a fencing style facemask, but this needs a door mod over the mouth before i can seriously use it, because I need to sip water and eat sweets continually to keep my mouth moist. Oh yeah, and an S10 respirator with replacement ballistic lenses - this is actually a lot better than you might imagine, but i need to modify a filter so i can breath through it easier... My only advice to you is that you should always use eyepro which seals against your skin. Shooting glasses which have gaps around the edges are not intended for airsoft and it is a proven fact that BB's can get behind the lenses from underneath and hit you in the eye.

^^Good choice. I was going to get one of those too, but i already had 2 AK-47's so I couldn't really justify it got the 74 instead and i'm very happy with the quality of it.

Yeah, I've had a couple of pairs of Magnum Panther 8's - they are comfy and the ankle support is ok, but they don't last.

I'm not a fan of Viper kneepads - nothing wrong with the quality of them but they are quite flat which is not so good for my spindly knees. IIRC the Blackhawk ones have more of a curve to them, right? My favs are Hatch Centurion...

I've just skimmed this thread, but i straight away noticed a few people saying that heavier BB's have more energy than lighter ones - in simple terms this is not true in use (although there is debate about a phenomenon known as 'joule creep' however it's effects, if any, are quite small). Momentum is a function of mass x velocity so when a 0.2g BB leaves the muzzle at 328FPS it has 1 Joule of energy - the same gun shoots a 0.25g BB @293.4FPS = also 1 Joule

Surplus German Paras with lace in zips - tbh they're more strength and support than i actually need for most skirmishes, but wearing them gives me confidence - i know that whatever i stand on/in my feet will be fine.

I wish you'd left it how it was, Chris. My own views are somewhat different as to why dressing in military gear on remembrance day is not something to do, unless you're at a skirmish of course, but we are adults and we can debate subjects. We can even hold quite passionate views on particular subjects and nonetheless remain perfectly civil while expounding our pet theories and/or peeves. It's also the case that if someone else cannot behave as an adult, we ourselves are not duty/honour/magically bound to return to the playground. In fact, if someone cannot defend a statement without being offensive, it's usually because the statement cannot be defended logically and we can just leave it there as the evidence that whatever pride we feel has been vindicated, until a mod comes along and removes just the ad hom portion of a post. You know what? Pride. That's what it comes down to, eh? And yet, how proud can we be of ourselves when our community has so often seen even just mildly contentious opinions spark some proper mongery, so much so in fact that Chris, one of our longstanding, well respected, members chooses to censor himself. Gordon Bennet, I don't know what the answer is my friends, but i know we need one!

Yeah, i don't know what is different about the AW .338 replicas, because even the cheapest Well Warrior L96's have a... well... established upgrade path and, as we have discussed, although some of it is expensive bollocks which doesn't actually translate into much bang for your buck, things like steel trigger mechs which allow you to use powerful springs without short term failure and CNC hop units/hop arm, which produce better consistency between shots, so that if you miss (and 'kin trust me, you will) your attempts to correct for a/some subsequent shot/s have some chance of working, are worth it. We have touched on some of the other things surrounding sniping other than the gun and IMO the role of a sniper is about a different mindset to typical airsofting: it is true to say that success as a sniper is gained more through mastering fieldcraft than the particular gun you use; not just the obvious skills like estimating range, windage, predicting target movement, camouflage and concealment, hidden movement, etc. but things like when to shoot so that you don't give your position away whether you hit or miss and selecting a kill zone which you can hit effectively from as unassailable a position as poss and thereby deny access through it to the enemy, giving your team an advantage out of all proportion to how many people it takes to gain it (force multiplication, ie you and perhaps 1 or 2 assault rifles, to prevent a rush attack knocking you out, can dominate an entire flank/zone, meaning your team can use sheer force of numbers to dominate elsewhere on the field - and they do not really even need to be in on it*, to be tactically aware, they can just find themselves owning because even totally uncoordinated fire has a suppressing effect in sufficient volume and sooner or later someone will grab the opportunity created to get forward and shoot around cover, then the momentum takes over). However it's also like learning the guitar: if it sounds shit it takes a particular type of stubbornness to persevere, bordering on pig headedness and/or OCD - if your gun is shit then you can go through the motions of fieldcraft and, no doubt, learn plenty... but just like you can't take a guitar that wont stay in tune and an amp that sounds like a brass band in a biscuit tin to perform on stage, pig headedness alone wont dominate shit in the field. So while it's perhaps no longer true that you need to spend several hundred pounds in upgrades on top of a minimum hundred and fifty quid for the base gun, it is true that unless you have at least a 10m accurate effective range advantage over just about any AEG you will be up against, your low rate of fire and having to reacquire the target after every missed shot, to some degree even when you've got recocking down to a fine art, is such a disadvantage that you will get pwned so often that it will more than likely soon loose the novelty factor and become bloody depressing. Svetlana my SVD does have a lot of upgrades and some of them have proved fairly pointless, or at least premature in as much as I replaced bits which i knew would wear out with more robust parts before the originals were even close to heading for the great plastic box in the sky, but I began skirmishing her with just an upgraded hop unit and rubber, a cocking handle extension, and a Madbull 6.01x590mm barrel - oh and CT-2 grease, the bang-for-buck-ness of which cannot be propounded enough. I still don't have a full ghillie suit (i sometimes use a veil) and initially i just wrapped some scrim around her front end to break up the hideous two tone covering tan paint job i inherited from her previous disappointed owner. I wouldn't call myself an expert sniper by any means, but i have managed some spectacular shots**, the memory of which is all that sustains me on days when the wind is against me, the light is all wrong for seeing where my misses went, my team mates have so little tactical awareness that i have to be my own security detail, and a marshal decides to take more of an interest in watching me for the rubbernecking than any game management reason, since i was, until they stood there staring at "a bush", completely unnoticed by the opposition... but I do love it... However, despite what seems to be a degree of natural aptitude and my love of sniping, with a gun which could do the business from the get go, I nevertheless do get pissed off. I always take an AEG to the skirmish as well, even though I may only use it once, because there's only so much exercising fieldcraft skills but failing to get hits or prove tactically effective and living on remembered glories that I can take before I start to feel like the laughs/quid has proved to be a poor investment of funds. I can't imagine that I would have learned even half of what little i know now if my gun had not been good enough to get some successes early on and, if that were true, I would not have the pleasure of exercising that knowledge in the field now either... I'd have given up for sure - like most people who buy a sniper rifle and either don't bother to upgrade it or don't go far enough. *it's a thankless task usually - people don't often realise that their bull-by-the-balls-grabbing assault and subsequent run of 15 kills was made possible by perhaps one or two hits you got or even misses which nevertheless shat the opposition up - you have to enjoy knowing what you did and having a secret smile about it, because nobody other than other snipers wants to hear the... **minutiae of difficult shots with which i could bore the arse off almost anyone if i didnt have a modicum of self control But hey, when it goes well, when the angle of sunlight is working for your direction of attack/defence against the particular background colours of the terrain, when the wind conditions are relatively stable, or even when it's blustery if the direction of blow is at least consistent within say 60°, when the marshals are watching the game not gawping at your uberness, when your team mates do take advantage of your force multiplication and muller the opposition, when you're aiming, for the sake of easy conversation, a metre high and a metre wide, to compensate for range and wind, and leading the moving target by say another 5m and you get the hit, when your target looks around confused and cant see you so doesn't take the hit and you pop him/her again... when even then he doesn't take the hit but swerves off behind cover and never comes back... when you are basically owning half a field and nobody else really understands it... you are fucking |33†.

Ahhhh, the penny drops! No, it's too soon - I'm not yet recovered enough from my recent worsening of illness to go to an event which requires me to travel so far.

^^There isn't a single brand of AW .338 with a good reputation and some are well known to be utter pigs. ASG do not actually build their own guns, they licence designs and have them manufactured under their badge. What this means is that, whichever design they have licenced, it is either a pig or unspectacular at best. It's sad because it's a great looking gun, but we can't help that...

Welcome to the forums, mate. Search "airbana" for a map of where to find sites.

The name rings a bell, but i'm not signed up, no. Do you have a link?

Well, score 1 for gunfire.pl customer service then! I was expecting some argument from them at least... As for which gun to get now... I do not know exactly what you want - what do you think of the gun you have? If it had not been broken, would you be happy with it? Do you want a gun which is good enough to skirmish and looks great, straight out of the box? Or do you want a gun which shoots very well? If the latter, no matter which AK you buy, be it E&L, LCT, VFC, NPO «AEG», CYMA, or D-Boys/Boyi, you will need to either upgrade the internals yourself, or have a gun tech do it for you. That may affect your decision on how much to spend on the base gun, because you could buy an LCT body kit and fit it with the internals of your choice, or buy a steel bodied D-Boys and replace all the internals and refinish any woodwork - that would be my choice, but i) I already know which parts to fit for maximum effectiveness per pound/dollar/euro spent and ii) I would build it myself, so the cost would not be so high...

Yeah, they do. On some of their guns they also give the gb's a basic rebuild as standard.

The final piece of my Soviet Motorised Rifle Brigade loadout: ...we will be fighting the cold war again soon, capitalist pigs!

Are you going to shoot it?

Show me someone who thinks they have it sussed and i'll show you someone who has ceased to learn. Plus: don't ask, don't get.

You could also add a large steel bolt wrapped in black LX tape (or any lump of metal), or what I have used for this - the dreaded black gaffer, as a balancing weight to your stock. Even though it will make the gun heavier, it doesn't make your left arm ache so much when the weight is distributed evenly either side of your hands.

You could attempt to use google translate to speak to them in Polish (assuming you do not speak Polish) - as far as i know gunfire.pl do not have any good English speakers on staff, unlike taiwangun, so they may well not have anyone who can speak your native language either. There is a knack to getting the best out of google translate - use punctuation to divide ideas up into small chunks; try not to use idioms; use two tabs so you can run whatever it spits out back through to check that it says roughly what you mean. We have a couple of Polish members so you could ask one/both of them to translate for you, or perhaps phone gunfire - Namaco is one of them but i have forgotten the other.

No, don't mince words, Loz, tell us how you really feel

Actually i can't swear to the accuracy or consistency of the stock one because i replaced it as soon as i realised that it would be annoying to use in the field, so i never even skirmished it once. I do have a means of testing accuracy at range without taking a gun to a site, but it's a bit dodgy so i try to keep it to a minimum. Thus i never bothered figuring out if the stock one held its setting well or not, but you have to imagine that a grub screw adjuster would lend itself to consistency. Still, the twist collar design of the advanced unit also has little room for movement - in fact the only point where inconsistency can creep in is the width of the plunger which presses the rubber, ie to the degree which it must remain loose enough in its hole to move back up freely when the collar is twisted to reduce hop up, it can move side to side. This is true of the original design also however, because the grub screw itself is not in contact with the rubber - it depresses a plunger also. This is also true of a nub in an armature hop design mind, just in a different way. I keep meaning to get the Dremmel and Vernier out to shape a new plunger for mine, so that it ends with something like an H-Nub, because I want to sack the W-Hold bucking i'm using - it doesn't want to lift 0.4g BB's without being 'on' more than i want* and I want to shift up from 0.3g Blaster Devils i'm using, but a flat bump in the rubber and flat nub is a recipe for instability in applied hop, which is fine at AEG ranges and ROF's, but is more than the difference between a hit and miss when aiming at a head at even 60m, let alone 80m. *I could always shift up spring power to overcome the FPS drop from applying so much hop, but cocking the thing is a ball ache for me anyway (because i have an illness which causes me constant pain in my hands), which is the main reason why I decided upon a 6.01mm diameter barrel - to get max power from an Element M135 spring. Ideally what I want is a version of the advanced hop unit with a milled rectangular space for an H-Nub or one of those RA-Tech uber hop cushions, with a plunger milled concave at one end to contact the nub, but this would introduce the possibility of torsion during adjustment, so the whole plunger/hole combo would need to be replaced with a square cross section design... not that i'm picky or anything as a simpler improvement, PDI could always get with the programme and make W-Hold buckings as sticky as Prometheus Purple soft ones... i mean ffs, for those of us prepared to pay over £20 for a bag of sniper BB's, replacing the hop rubber because it wears out faster is hardly an imposition! BTW I am generally of the same opinion that there is an awful lot of bollocks talked about upgrades and I think that for many, if they produce any benefit at all, the returns become vanishingly smaller beyond a certain point so, considering that this is also when the expense becomes a bit gasp-worthy, a lot of them are not worth it - they do not get you anything in a skirmish which better fieldcraft wouldn't. In the case of PDI barrels however, you can tell where your money went during the first group of shots you fire through 'em... 10m extra effective range is a big deal when complete concealment is not an option on the particular field you're on, especially when you're attacking other snipers.

Ooooh, that is a bummer - still £15 may be a kick in the nuts on small items that can be stacked into a sensible shape of box, but it's not bad on an AEG shaped package - it's cheaper than ordering heavy stuff from HK too and no chance of Customs wanting their pound of flesh. So far i've found twg customer service to be faultless too, whereas gf may be well meaning but their English language skills aren't much good. Let us also not forget that some* UK retailers not only charge an arm and a leg for items, but also can't resist gouging a few extra quid out of us when it comes to P&P... you just have to maintain a mahoosive bookmarks list, keep a currency converter tab open, and see who can do what you want cheapest all in... *i'm having a fad on using asterisks at the moment - it's easier than constructing better sentences / anyway, i feel that my position as a mod precludes me from naming and shaming any particular retailers, but as an example, i've just bought something for £17 which would fit into a package Royal Mail define as 'small' and would charge £3.80 signed for - i had to pay £5.50 / ok it's only £1.70 but it's my cup of decent hot choc while i'm waiting for a train which i may now be forced to forego...

If you have a proper balancing charger, which you need for LiPo's, it will stop automatically when the battery is charged.