Ian_Gere

Only me, DX. But thanks for the vote of confidence

You tell them your UKARA# in the comments dialogue box when you place your order and they write it on the package for Customs to see. I've started putting it in place of "Company" before my name also: just "UKARA# SKI01234" - 2 out of 2 guns through without a hitch.

They're great, yeah. If you need it under 350FPS they'll fit a Guarder SP100 spring for just the price of the spring. Free shipping for a spend of over about £60 too. Only thing you will need on top is a good battery - the 1100mAh one that comes with it is only useful as an emergency backup - ie a backup to your backup. But 1 1600mAh Vapex / VP stick battery will get you skirmishing - componentshop.co.uk £12.40 + P&P. Can't comment on the 8Fields batteries twg sell as i've never used them, but buying 1 would save you the P&P and if it's shit I reckon twg would refund you. They seem pretty keen to establish themselves as good for customer service - a bit on my CM.048 broke (the handguard takedown lever) and it isn't covered by their warranty apparently, but their tech is sending me a replacement anyway. TBH if you're happy to buy an AK and can afford the extra, the CM.048M is a much better gun and still on offer from twg for £148-odd - still needs a replacement battery though. The chargers that CYMA guns come with can be used perfectly well so long as you use the App (link at the top of forum pages) to calculate how long to charge for and either use a timer plug or set an alarm to stop you overcharging the battery.

Get an AEG for your first gun. Unless you're minted of course, in which case, pistols wise I agree it sounds like £80 well spent (inc shipping and gas). But £80 would buy you most of this and you'd get a lot more use out of it.

You got something against my smile?

No way would you CQB in those Honeywell's, James, and you know it!

TBF on her they seem to fit closer to the face than some, but I'm not convinced in the down direction. You know, the part between eyebrow and frame which will be facing forward, exposing your gaigin round-eyes to whatever can fit through, every time you look down at your chest or what's immediately in front of your feet (which you will more often than in ordinary life). The main question remains however, how much like hers is your face shaped? Here's the biscuit taker however: By all means put a lanyard thingumabob on there to stop them falling off your face when you run, but even if it's tight, unless you have a pronounced dent in the back of your skull into which the string can slot so that it cannot move, then running is going to make it slip introducing slack and those arms, no doubt designed for the convenience of workers who regularly take them off and on again, offer very little resistance to slipping forward when your head is bowed... What you need is goggles which have frames with rubber/foam edges that seal against your face. If you get polycarbonate lensed ones like this, they may well fog easily - that's a different discussion. The important thing to grasp is that just because you see pictures of plenty of people wearing what I have here defined as inappropriate eyepro while airsofting and don't hear of hundreds of accidents, that doesn't mean that the eyepro is in fact safe. It's not that common to be hit in the eyepro at all, although it seems to go in rashes, and those hits will primarily result from leading with your face, which is an unfortunate but necessary aspect of skirmishing since blind firing is universally banned, so the BB's will be coming straight at you, fired from the direction you are attempting to get a look at from behind cover. Of those not all would have hit you in the eye anyway, they hit some wider bit of the eyepro... but the thing with hits which come from the edges, and would have hit you in the nose maybe or the temple, is that the eyepro may actually funnel the BB towards your eye if it's that 1 in a million shot that just happens to get you in exactly the wrong place as happened to this bloke. Don't be the next unluckiest bastard in UK airsoft.

Just spotted this - may be worth dinging uk.redwolf to see what price they have it for.

Yeah, but while we're on the subject of shooting glasses and/or workwear with kite marks coming out of their arses, let's just remember that someone got hit in the eye not long ago wearing this type of eyepro. Fortunately it seems he will be ok: fucking fortunately. It happened because these are not designed for airsoft. If they were there would be no/next to no gap between the frame and the wearer's face no matter from which direction a projectile approaches, because, as happened in this case, a ricochet can come at you from a direction which a direct shot cannot, such as directly below the frame if the BB bounces off a mask or, depending on the shape and angle of your head, off your gun or rig. £900... well, I'm another one who thinks the better part of valour lies in not adding up how much I actually spend on airsoft, since that way I cannot be asked to justify a figure which I do not have by any significant other/s. Although last week or so I attempted to buy a 3" piece of 1.6-ish mm stamped mild steel with literally no other redeeming features than its shape for over £30 posted and was not relieved but gutted when it turned out to be out of stock after all. I did have the good grace to know and fully admit that it was the kind of extravagance at which whatever passes for my snook is habitually cocked however and i'm here to echo other's advice regarding trying the sport before you spank your wallet and to tell you that if you plan to spend that much money in/around the time it takes to get UKARA registered and not long thereafter, you had best budget for a lot more as your annual spend because a good deal of what you get will turn out to have been stuff which is good, but not so much for airsoft, good for airsoft but not good for you, or entirely inappropriate and/or just shit. We've all done it, some more egregiously than others, and no doubt you will too*... thought something looks brilliant and how could it possibly not be good, only to discover that actually what works in films, or on real gunfighters in Afghan or wherever, is either not much use for airsoft or actively a pain in the arse... I'll take gloves as a glaring example. In ordinary airsoft they have 3 functions: keeping your hands warm; protecting your fingers from hits, which sting there a lot more than you'd imagine and girly screams go a long way towards ruining function 3 of looking cool. A lot of us wear hard knuckle gloves, because we want to look like the kind of operator who may decide that, rules of engagement with weapons being what they are, punching someone is on the agenda. I have a pair myself, although mine are clones and, since 1 thumb got shredded by being between me and an exploding BFG which I incautiously leant on, are also heavily modified to cushion my fingers when cocking my spring sniper rifle and take some of the following experience into account: Most of them are made for the kind of places soldiers are currently likely to go - hot and/or dry environments and so breathability is far more important than waterproof... not so on a cold wet Sunday in some muddy hole in Yorkshire. If a soldier gets shot in the hand, a piece of flexible moulded plastic held by its shape a few mm's away from his fingers will not save them, but this design is far and away the most effective protection from BB hits, beating even Pyrohide & Kevlar despite costing only a fiver, however even worse, for most of us, than looking a bit namby pamby, they look a bit paintball-ish! Military kit tends to be made with tough situations in mind, made to be operable just as well when roughly grabbed by desperate hands caked in shite as when being demonstrated calmly on a range, so anything a soldier may need to get hold of in a hurry will not have its operation hampered by the wearing of gloves through which the wearer can feel 3/5ths of fuck all... not so in airsoft: things that spring to mind are the flap/slide which keeps the BB's inside a hicap mag, speedloaders for mid/lo caps, blanks and loading tools for BFG's, the striker tabs/caps of pyros, and everyone who has ever paid £6+P&P to replace a lost one's favourite... AEG body pins of which some designs require the removal in order to change batteries. Now imagine if you had just spanked £65 on a pair of Southcombe Bros'? No matter how unsuitable they turned out to be, how much would your unconscious need to justify the expense to yourself, and others if we know about it, goad you to take issue with what I have just written? Ah but these ones are special... yeah whatever; tell it to yer missus when you next see her eyeing up shoes. I wrote this guide mainly for people who want to get into the sport/hobby but do not have your resources with which to proceed, but I reckon there's a lot to be said for starting out with forum and fleabay fifth hand specials while you rent guns, then buying a wombat machine and doing your best to make them work for you - you will know what features of expensive kit you want most ie the solutions to actual problems that you personally have had, what are not so important, and what don't matter at all, despite hiking the price up. Like many of us who bought cheap but good guns to start off, you will probably find that you will want to keep it even when you have plenty of more expensive options to pull out of your arsenal. *However we can but hope that, whatever your particular style of Nobheadery© and/or flavour of Emperor's New Clothes™, it doesn't cost you more than a month's enjoyment of the sport due to lack of funds for something which would have done the trick cheaper/better/with less anxiety over whether you will lose or break some part of it/etc. and in the absence of that, that someone lurking may read this thread and take note.

Try chilling the whole thing in a freezer then use a lighter (preferably a turbo flame for soot-free operation) to heat just the bushing - that should get them apart.

And gives blufor the unfair advantage they need to be in with a chance.

Gives you chance to meet a few people and have a hold of their guns too - see what fits your body and hand size before you buy.

Couple o'years and they'll be in local print shops. Can't come fast enough for my liking.

Yeah, he's got that all off to a fine art - I'm generally not that good. For eg I still haven't managed a knock, rock'n'lock mag change in game. I feel sure i'd balls it up and somebody would be bound to be filming so I've never tried. With an enhanced mag catch it's a waste of time anyway - the mag doesn't drop out without a slight forward/up jerk, but it is possible to do it with the butt trapped against the bicep without having to think about it more than what the left hand is up to at the same time, ie feel for buckle/button, undo, fingers and thumb parallel, vertical, either side of mag base plate, push grip down mag ready to withdraw... at that point the empty is gone and now i think about it the gun is rotated about it's lengthwise axis, but not as much as Sonny's, maybe 25, not more than 30 degrees: even though i have it well practiced, being able to see where the mag lip is going helps in making sure it rocks and locks first time (as not all mags are the same ) - and saves mag damage / the lip snapped clean off a D-Boys quad stack mag I had during a fucked up mag change (lying on my back behind 2' high cover with the gun flat against my chest). Seeing the lip engage is what allows the single grip position, I reckon, because unless it works first time its a bit of a bastard to manipulate the mag effectively with its base plate flat against the ball of the hand. Still, the more I think about it, using my "dodgy grip'n'flip" method also leaves the left hand with the correct wrist rotation and finger/thumb position to 'catch' the gun by the hand guards as i bring the barrel back down to aim and i'll bet that being able to fire'n'forget that motor neurone command allows my attention to go down range faster than during a transition from a trad 'pistol grip' type hold of the mag. I think you make some good points there, PT. You're totally right that I hardly ever think "this next attack will be better/more of a laugh with my pistol," unless we're murdering the opposition so I'm not bothered that mucking about will compromise a victory (I mean yeah, it's not all about the winning and I don't have to win to enjoy playing immensely, but it bloody helps ). All the same, I think that choosing to play a game or 3 with just pistol/s every now and then is the antidote to ignoring their possibilities. At the beginning I think it is best to concentrate on the basics - snap shooting moving targets is not something many of us can do outside of a skirmish day and this is the skill which will translate into hits more than any other.

At a guess I'd say it takes me just over 1/2 a second to draw from a drop-leg and aim my USP. If I'm under pressure so i don't bother with putting the empty in a dump pouch, I can reload Phatima my AKS-74U in just over a second, because she has an enhanced mag catch so I don't have to alter my grip to operate it with my trigger finger easily and at the same time my left hand has hold of the replacement, which I carry upside down so I don't have to change my grip on the mag to insert, rock and lock, just turn it right way up, which has brought it closer to the gun by its length with just a flick of my wrist, which is a foot when I'm using her long mags, considerable when counting in milliseconds and then there's the muscle memory... Different story with my G36, especially when using a dump pouch - more like 15 seconds that feel like a few minutes! That's why I use her lo-cap mags locked together in pairs by the lugs and one of one pair out of the 4 or 5 I'm carrying will be a pre-wound hi-cap. My point is that when I reload Phatima it's usually very slick (Val Kilmer has got nothing on me); it takes me longer if my spare mags are anywhere other than my left hip; it takes me longer still with any of my other AK's and absolutely yonks in some of my loadouts when I'm worried that simply dropping a mag will be the last I'll see of it... As an average I could have drawn my pistol and taken 4-5 aimed shots before I could reload an AEG and get it back on target. But I still say spend your money on your AEG and mags rather than a pistol, because in over 2 years of airsofting there have only ever been 2 incidents where those milliseconds counted (although in the 1st one I didn't actually have a pistol on me so I did get hit lying on the floor where I dived for cover to reload {in 'the fort' at Tac House: Spartan if anyone cares, single handedly holding off about 6 opponents - it had all gone a bit Pete Tong well before I ran out of ammo!}): compared to fuck alone only knows how many slick or bumbling mag changes that allowed me to carry on well enough - you can get a box of 10 MAG mid-caps for about £50 and a massive (and thus easier to use) Viper drop-leg dump pouch for about £15.

He's sooooo MoneySupermarket.

Bollocks. I hope you realise, GK, that I am not casting aspersions on your character or commenting on you at all, but simply concisely expressing my opinion of the view you have put forward. Naturally I wish to avoid any handbags at dawn or any appearance of mod-bias, so by all means say whatever you like about my opinions (not me)... but really, this totally frustrates me. Clearly there is a lot more to airsoft than range and there is more to range than FPS but to say that when using a good hop unit 22FPS produces pointlessly minimal difference in range not only flies in the face of my, and many others', experience, but also physics. If we were somehow restricted to having to choose more muzzle energy or better hop then these arguments might hold water, but we're not and they don't. If a good hop will get a 328FPS BB the same distance as a mediocre hop gets a BB at 350FPS, then 350FPS through the 1st will go even further Where this falls down is not when comparing good hop units but shit ones, where the BB is so unstable in flight that the lift generated by backspin acts less in the vertical plane as it yaws to one side and the other (as the effect is to a large degree self-correcting in terms of absolute deviation from a birds eye view of a line between muzzle and target - off-centre negative pressure will obviously cause that side of the BB to lift more than the other, but it is a spheroid so it just rotates about the trajectory as a 2nd axis: it achieves equilibrium but now has angular momentum so goes too far the opposite way, whereupon uneven lift brings it back, then too far, etc.) - basically the more the force generated by backspin is not acting directly opposite to gravity, the less far the BB will go and, if this is bad enough, more muzzle energy will just make the BB hit the ground with more forward velocity - I believe this is how a dirty barrel reduces range. The plain fact is that even 1m of extra range is an advantage and if that is the only advantage you have, careful play can convert it into hitting your opponent before they hit you. However higher FPS creates 2 other advantages: 1) the BB takes less time to travel to the target... target@35m so 35m / 100m/s = 0.35s you don't have to be Usain Bolt to run very quickly over short distances... 100m in 10s would be damn good going for an average airsofter carrying gear & kit over mixed terrain, but 10m in 1s...? I'm unwell and in most circumstances i could beat that, but whatever, it makes the maths easier 10m/s 0.35s x 10m/s = 3.5m as the distance which your aim point has to lead in front of a running target 35m / 106.68m/s = 0.328s x 10m/s = 3.28m 22cm... pointlessly minimal, right? Wrong. A standard man sized target is 60cm wide and at 35m a practiced shooter firing an averagely decent AEG, like an OOTB Top Tech, snap shooting, is going to have a grouping on that target of about 40-45cm. 22cm puts some of those shots up to 12-14.5cm off a fat bastard in PLCE webbing... but of course that is not what having to lead a running target by 22cm less actually means, it's just a convenient thought experiment to demonstrate what that distance actually translates into in terms of pure static target shooting. In reality what leading a target by less in order to hit them actually means is that the target has not just less time to react but fewer choices for effective changes of direction. The truth however is that, with a good hop set up, 22FPS (in this muzzle energy band) will give about 6-8m more effective range, which isn't that much, but in many skirmish situations it's the difference between in cover and not, ie i can keep your head down with my 267x6.02mm TBB, Element M105 spring, Double O-ring piston head, gucci grease, O-ringed air nozzle and G&G green rubber, putting out high 340's on 0.2s, whereas with your G&G green rubber and hey have an H-nub at 325-30FPS you'll have to flank me and/or get a team mate with a hotter gun to pin me while you get closer, unless you can herd cats well enough to get enough players with mags in fresh/wound, and ready to rock on command (and get where the target is and what suppressing fire actually entails ) to overcome me with sheer volume of inaccurate lob shots... but of course I can just retreat a couple of meters and you have to start again, and all the while I, 1 shooter with a well set up AEG in decent cover, hold up half of your team, the rest of my team have a numerical advantage wherever they attack. But going back a paragraph and making point 2) I find what I miss most when some modification results in less FPS, for eg when I swapped the above TBB out for a shorter Systema MP5 BS 6.04mm barrel (it's all in the name lol - no actually it was a hair more accurate) only dropping about 5FPS, is the degree of flatness of trajectory. I find this most important when I'm shooting at people in cover, they may only be visible for a fraction of a second and pop up somewhere other than where I last saw them - anything which makes the BB fly more true to where your sighted viewpoint suggests it ought to will always make snap shooting more effective, but also when you're aiming at someone behind a small opening, if you can only get a BB that far on a parabola that ends with the BB coming down at 25-30° to the horizontal, or more, the width of the barrier has the effect of closing off the window and even if you get the shot through, the more it slows the steeper it falls and you know yourself, people often don't notice light hits low down.

I've got a set of 58 Pattern webbing doing an impersonation of stuff that will get used in the bottom of 1 of my wardrobes... strikes me as a little odd cos I can clearly remember meeting a number of squaddies in the 70's who must have been fair pie-snafflers. Still, in them days men were men... and sheep were scared

yeah Baz, i mean for sure fb is a good way to make sure a lot of softers hear about it through friends like invites, but i just don't see anything in a 'secret fb group' staying secret for long - i mean fb isn't known for security... but hey perhaps having to adopt a cointelpro role could be part of the immersion for some ppl (would have been for me a few yrs ago but with the meds i'm on these days i'm lucky to remember the passwords to get into my own fucking stuff let alone complicated apps etc)

Long skinny fingers... ahhhhhhhhhh, at last! The new Pyrohide Kevlar ones i got for crimbo aren't working out too well for finger length :'( Talking of soldering earlier reminded me I needed some more heatshrink and i've discovered TDB of the stuff in transparent. Picture paints 1000 words: That's the same 3mm diameter stuff on 16AWG and some approx 30 and 36 signal wire - it shrinks more than the 2:1 advertised - basically it's the neatest stuff I've ever used and that includes when I soldered up the Neutriks onto Canford for LIPA Studios 3 & 4 (which, for the uninitiated, is a big deal). Get it here for £1.70 / 2m posted.

Not hard to work out - the 'bobbin' shape of the nub has to fit an arc of a 5.95+/-0.01mm + (2x0.65mm ~ hop rubber thickness) Ø circle* into its curve. so if we stick with tradition and call butt-to-muzzle the Z axis, side to side Y, and up/down X then in the Z/Y plane the 'tab' which will contact the nub will be a simple rectangle in the X/Y plane a convex arc of the same *Ø circle and the clever bit - in the X/Z plane it will be a concave arc of that circle... that way the nub will not have anywhere to move whatsoever and so the pressure exerted by the hop arm will be completely even across both Y and Z axes, only flexing in the X axis by an amount determined by the stiffness of nub and arm vs hop setting (ie a new chapter in approaching the holy grail of backspin rotating around an axis exactly perpendicular to the BB's trajectory) yw just remember you all read it here first

You know what would be TDB? An arm with a socket made to fit exactly onto a RA Tech / ASPUK style gucci H-nub.

Actually I was in a nail salon with my g/f last year and i was so bored i asked if they would do me a manicure while i waited for she-whom-must-be-indulged's fancy pants falsies to be applied and painted... "NO WAY," came the stern admonition, "We don't do men." No explanation, in fact a complete refusal to elaborate... fuck 'em, eh? Will do. Those gloves look almost as good as Southcombe Bros'. Got a linky?

Yeah, that'll be doable. Thanks mate Only thing is I'm not allowed to drive due to meds, so as long as by "share" you mean go halves, thirds, or whatever, on petrol and hand you drinks/munchies/smokes/etc then yeah i'm your man. re: intel I don't think an FB group convo is likely to stay secret... If this is going to be the start of a long running plot/theme then maybe a forum is the way to go?

Flash mags still rattle.