Ian_Gere

2nd hand Z-Tactical replica Sordin headset - £30 posted 2nd hand Surplus East German Vz61 Skorpion Leather Holster - £10 posted WELTS 0.43g BB Airsoft Sniper Ammo - White - £22.54 posted ~ Patrol Base CM folding retractable butt stock - $54.39 posted ~ WGC Shop

Hmmm... The reason I bought the advanced hop unit (from airsoftpro.cz who designed/implemented production of it because it was cheaper when bundled with the extended cocking handle & postage than buying from ASPUK) is because getting the top cover off and more importantly back on without removing a side mount scope is quite a pain in the hole and, while you can set your hop at home and leave it, in my experience the temperature and humidity affect hop performance, so i often adjust my settings during a day. When firing at ppl 60m away it doesn't matter so much: it is just a case of adjusting elevation and the way i have my scope zeroed, i am not aiming at a cross hair point anyway*. But out at 80m and beyond (which is where the expense of a PDI 6.01x590mm barrel shows), setting the hop right for the conditions is the difference between a precisely aimed shot which will only miss if it is deflected by air movement** and a lob shot which may land anywhere within a meter of the target. *it's a PSO-1 mind so it has a differentiated T reticule, not cross hairs anyway **which is always the most significant factor in long range shots, no matter how heavy the BB's are

For most sites, PMR446 is just about adequate - you are rarely in need of more than 250m through medium density woodland, or 75m through 3 storey buildings. There are sites where 500mW is never going to cut it however, like Ground Zero nr. Ringwood, but the main problems there are hills and valleys, plus during the yearly mega National Airsoft Event, hundreds of people using the same channel (regardless of CTCSS, there are 3 factions which get 2 channels each, and the marshals keep a channel for themselves - it's a boot off offence to piss around on the marshals' channel or transmit on an enemy channel, if caught). In my experience the Z-Tactical Bowman Evo II is sufficiently rugged, and just like the real thing gives you a sweaty squashed ear, but that's nothing to cry about. There is an Evo III however, with a removable boom mic, and this is naturally fraught with problems. The Comtac and Sordin replicas were always going to be problematic, because we're expecting high end audio performance from budget components and, to a degree, this is true of PTT's also... part of the reason i haven't bothered tinkering myself is that they're using Nexus jacks/sockets which are bloody expensive, even though they're bog standard chrome surface (i mean whoa... it's used in helicopters, the market must be able to bear 3 x the cost of a Neumann TRS jack eh?) and the real steel uses mini din, so there's an immediate outrageous expense when considering some kind of civilian/busted surplus repair/bodge. If you can get hold of Nexus TRRS jacks/sockets at a sensible wholesale price, you could probably help us out with a more rugged PTT and surplus headset combo. I mean, the real deal Sordin costs £340 and that's without a PTT - I am a bit of a gear whore, but shit, there are limits! But the £80 replica is, according to many, a waste of money because it is ineffective - I am in the process of buying a 2nd hand Sordin replica so i'll soon see for meself how bad they are, but I am a sound engineer so improving what i get isn't beyond possibility - the trouble is that i expect the guts to be an undifferentiated PCB, so probably beyond my knowledge to do more than redo dodgy joints and/or improve RF shielding / mechanical attenuation (although tbh 95% of the time we are dealing with sub 130dB bangs and those fairly few and far between, not artillery, or even live fire, so that's probably not necessary). BTW, do any military headset/handset combos use balanced audio? I'd also be very interested in what you can tell us about antennas and how we can get better performance out of our 446's. For me the ultimate dream would be to also play music through a talkthrough system, with mixer control over the 3 sources, and if the tunes could be shared across a team, that'd be sooo cool

You may end up wanting a high 25mm ring mount also - with the one which comes with it the bezel of the torch will have to fit pretty far forward to clear the end of your RIS, which may make your gun uncomfortably front heavy. A high mount will allow you to set the torch further back, because there will be more space between the body of the torch and the RIS. If you search ebay.com you will find them slightly cheaper than on ebay.co.uk but either way, they are pretty cheap.

Have a look here, rimbo, for a site close to you. As for loadouts - make your own thread: it's the easiest way for people to advise you.

No, like this:

^^Ooooooh luuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrvly! But $1000 and that's before we start jumping through UK Customs' hoops, concerning ourselves with the, no doubt outrageous, FPS, and trying to discover what, if any, original AK parts are actually banned from import into the UK... it's a cruel world :'(

I suspect JCheese nailed it with CO2 gun might need a bit of oil through it to prevent rubber perishing.

Actually I think that springs are oil quenched because oil has a higher boiling point than water so that when the metal goes in, it takes longer for vapour to form, which does not transmit heat well, between the metal and oil - so more of the heat is extracted from the hot metal in the initial milliseconds of quenching, which is important for hardening. Edit to add: although yeah, oil does get into the interstices between metal crystals on the surface, which definitely does prevent corrosion, but i'm not sure it has any mechanical effect.

Actually, surprisingly enough for SRC, that is the standard design for AK-47S under folding stocks (used by Tokyo Marui, CYMA, JG, Inokatsu and LCT). It's difficult to tell from your pic, but it looks like the bolt which holds the spring loaded locking bit and stock to the interior plate has failed. If not however, you should be able to break the gun down, remove the plate, reattach it, and reassemble. This is what it looks like inside: ...the plate is attached to the receiver by 2 bolts separate from that holding the mechanism together. TBH, the movement of the stock is something which is integral to that model, so unless it's over a year old, I'd be tempted to get in touch with the retailer. Trouble is, by the orange body and that it's an SRC AK, i'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you bought it from somewhere with BBguns in the name, right? In which case you will be very unlikely to get any customer service worthy of the name... If all else fails, you should be able to replace the whole unit, either with an alloy one or a steel one - bear in mind that both of these have the somewhat dodgy alloy locking mechanism, like all of them using this design.

I have a bag of oily BB's* which I use to fill new mags, along with a single drop of silicone oil onto the follower. This is not enough oil to make subsequent BB's oily, but i have found it makes the spring work better and allows midcaps to be filled to close to their advertised maximum. I don't fire the BB's which went in with the oil and, no doubt, when i release them they take some of the oil added back out with them. So far I have not noticed this causing any hop related problems. Plus 1 for silicone oil in a dropper bottle not an aerosol... *They're just BB's which have been in mags with a drop of oil, as opposed to fresh ones, not actually dripping with oil.

I use Thunder B CO2 grenades so I often carry a spare bulb with me - I suspect that unless a BB hit the seal end they would be fine, but nonetheless I wrap it in a little pouch made from packing foam and LX tape before dropping into a pouch - that also stops anything else in the pouch from puncturing the seal.

If you are a tinkerer, as i am, fiddling with guns to get more accuracy and range is all part of the hobby. It is true that cheap guns often have very inconsistent air seal through the whole chain, from Piston Head to Inner Barrel, however it is not the case that all expensive guns have better internals, and even those that do do not always produce as much consistency as you would hope for, for the money. On the other hand, if you set up the internals well, even the cheapest original gun can proper pwn one which cost 3-5 times more. I would suggest that your best bet then is to buy a cheap gun, disassemble it, and learn how the parts work together. Then you will see the flaws in design and/or the compromises which have been made in order to accommodate other features and start to see how you could improve on what you see in front of you. You will probably discover that someone has thought exactly that before and produced an aftermarket upgrade which deals with that problem, or that somewhere online is a tech forum in which people have/are developed/ing a bodge fix, but hey, you never know, you may come up with a better idea... Accuracy itself is a function of two things: consistency of air seal makes the power of each shot predictable, which is important for elevation; stability of back spin is necessary so that the Magnus effect is generated vertically - if the hop up is applied to one side of the BB more than the other, the BB's trajectory will curve to that side - aha, adjust for windage you say...? Well yeah, but for accuracy that curve must be predictable, and unfortunately there are a number of ways for inconsistency to creep in, either during the contact between BB and rubber, or as the BB transits the barrel... Some of the best ways to improve accuracy are also the cheapest and, since hardly any guns come with them as stock, should always be your first modifications:- CT-2 Teflon Grease - slap it liberally all over the Piston Head O-Ring and make sure it evenly coats the interior of the Cylinder; Air Seal Nozzle w/ O-Ring - smear CT-2 around the rear 1/2 of the Cylinder Head spout so that the Nozzle O-Ring gets greased but the grease does not get blasted into the hop up chamber; PTFE Tape exterior of the Hop Up Bucking (Hop Rubber) - a few turns which then improve the seal between the Inner Barrel and Rubber - grease the outside of the Rubber/PTFE Tape so that it slides into the Hop Chamber without sticking (which can tear the Rubber) H-Nub (also called Fishbone Spacer or Improved Cushion) - this forces the BB into the centre of the Inner Barrel and improves the left-right balance of how much hop up is applied, but is not compatible with all Hop Up Chamber designs (G36 for eg) W-Hold Bucking - in the absence of an H-Nub a rubber with a split bump for contacting the BB goes some way towards L<>R balance of applied hop and BB centring (there is also the Falcon Dual Point Rubber, but IME it does not lift BB's heavier than 0.2g that well / CYMA stock Rubbers have this type of split as standard, but they also suffer from poor quality control, so some of them are not moulded all that well - IME a good 1 is actually better than a PDI W-Hold Bucking) - these are the way forward in A&K SVD's, G36's, and any hop unit in which there is no standard Nub. People, as much as we may be trying to help, to be inclusive, I'm not sure that we are being as sensitive to our new mate's situation as we would no doubt wish to be - I mean yeah, mounting a heavier gun on to his chair certainly is a possibility and other people have turned chairs into armoured vehicles, but I worry that some of the suggestions above are not only very expensive builds, but also have the potential to be seen as making tclancey a figure of fun. There is no reason why he could not take part in ordinary skirmishes, with an AEG like anyone else, so long as the site was chosen for being accessible to his all terrain chair, and with the cooperation of the organisers to bring some common sense to any problems which they foresee. Clearly, tclancey, you are never going to be front line assault material, because you will not be in a position to dive for cover when the opposition spot you, but then again, many of us, through age, lack of cardiovascular fitness, and/or infirmity, cannot keep up with the yoot. Nevertheless we still manage to have a good day in supporting fire roles, suppressing the opposition so that nippier kids can get forward and get kills over the top/round the sides of cover, being still there when a rush attack has failed allowing our side to regroup and have another crack, and of course, where we tinkering old/fat/knackered players excel, defence (when our uber guns can pick the opposition off at ranges at which their suppressing fire is ineffective). Edit to add: guns - for an M4 get a G&G, either a bog standard Combat Machine, or one of their Intermediate range / for a G36 the JG has parts compatibility with TM which is a bonus worth having if upgrading yourself is your plan, because although the SRC is a better gun, it isn't parts compatible with any other brand - the Umarex is apparently quite good also and has electric blowback.

^^That - I can confirm that the Xcoretech X3200 automatically gives you a ROF figure if you fire full-auto through it. In terms of skirmishing, IMO ROF's between 18-25rps are, as Loz says, just pointless byproducts of seeking better trigger response and as such are more of a pain in the arse than something to be sought after since, even with good trigger discipline, you're not going to get as much spread of fire from a 3-4rnd burst as with 11-17rps (which is useful for firing at running targets). But above 25rps I believe there is an intimidation factor which, used deliberately, could be turned into a tactical advantage.

No, no... that there are two of them is what gives the game away - they are for squeezing BB's out of your face, zit stylee.

There are 2 main design types and the difference between them is the length of the cylindrical bit with that little slot to fit into the selector gear/lever thingy on the inside of the receiver. I'm afraid I don't know whether the Hephaestus has a long cylinder or short, but CYMA AK's take the short type.

I am soooo depressed :'(

That is the exact same machine as the iMax B6, just in a different colour case and more expensive. Edit to add: i edited your title to comply with out 'what it says on the tin' policy.

The one that Madonna wore one her "Erotic" tour...? The story goes that one of her dancers had to leave the stage, not just because he had a boner but because he was genuinely worried that she was about to jump him right then and there on stage. That's pretty sordid It's the Z-Tactical or a real one, mate. The Z-Tac has a spotty reputation - I'm going to pay for one 2nd hand on Wednesday so, hopefully next Sunday i'll get chance to skirmish it - my opinion will have to wait until then.

Suppressor diagram linky.

With an accessories socket, the T5 is the cheapest brand new.

I told you what it is - electrical problem. You must figure out whether it is a disconnect, or a short circuit. It is true that the motor could be burned out, but that is unlikely. You can test the motor, by applying a battery directly to the motor contacts, bypassing the gun's wiring loom.

^^Only finest buffalo grass vodka in my AK's, tovarish!

Not if the tap water tastes so horrible that you regularly find yourself dehydrated because subconscious disgust prevents you from drinking enough...

OK, it is an electrical problem. It could be very simple: a blown fuse, or one of the wires may have become disconnected from the motor. If not either of those, check the connections to the trigger switch. Because you have not noticed any heat, or burning smell, it probably is not a catastrophic short circuit. However, if you replace the fuse and it blows immediately again, then you do have a short circuit - check that the insulation of the wires is intact, over the whole length of each wire. If you cannot find damaged insulation, it must be one of the contacts on the motor, or the switch, which has been bent to touch the gearbox shell.