UK Double Eagle Stock Springs
I bought my son a DE M906C for Christmas, so far he's only fired it in the garden briefly, so before we play a game on 9/1/2022 I thought I'd swap in both a Maple Leaf 60 degree Macaron and Omega nub today (once my M908A arrives that'll be three DE M900's we have in the house).
The hop up units "arm" is the variant that has a hole for a "captive" nub...
https://imgur.com/m9rWHXB ... which my M904E's arm does not, with this nub removed and the Omega nub installed this appeared (a visual check) to be adding quite a bit of hop to the Macaron without any hop actually being applied on the hop unit. A chrono gave me around 280 FPS on 0.20g, horribly under powered, so I thought it best to put all the original parts back in a chrono again (I forgot to do one beforehand). This still gave around 280 FPS, and started to get me worried.
I'm building up a nice supply of spare parts now, and have a few different springs to hand, so I thought I'd swap in a Gearparts M105 to see what the result would be. This lead to two negative discoveries, one the QC spring guide had its flat head screwdriver cut out mangled at some point...
https://imgur.com/breI5D0 ... and secondly the spring was a hideously cheap and nasty one. So in goes the Gearparts M105, with DE M900's by default having both a piston head and spring guide bearing, and with no hop it shot hot at around 360 FPS and with a little hop it was consistently around 348 FPS so I was happy then and popped back in the ML Macaron (but the Omega nub will have to wait until I can buy a better hop unit).
That's two incidents I've had now with iffy springs in UK spec DE M900's, both of which were purchased from Patrol Base, who get them from Taiwan Gun as the European distributor. I personally don't think it's a coincidence, but who's installing these crap springs, is it DE themselves, the distributor or the reseller? (I'm going with either the distributor or reseller so they're country specific legal). This is a shot of three springs...
https://imgur.com/PvoZtwF ... a Gearparts M120 at the top (170mm in length, with tighter coils at one end), my original DE M904E in the middle (160mm, no tighter coils) and at the bottom the M906C (200mm, no tighter coils). Both DE springs feel so cheap and flimsy compared to Gearparts and Guarder springs, especially the 200mm one. I'm very much looking forward to getting the spring out of my M90A when it arrives, as it's not from Patrol Base but I'm assuming the Taiwan Gun is the distributor (let's see if it has the usual green "Krakman" Polish label).
Luckily I've my own chrono, spare parts and tools, however the M906C could have gone to someone who'd not have known until a site chrono / a back garden plinker who'd never have known!