To BB or not to BB, that is the question.

[bigshep]

I even weighed the buggers to make sure that I was not mistaken and the bags were double packed, but nope 2 bags of 4k instead of 4 bags of 4k..will wait to see if they turn up this week before getting a bit more upset.

[Arden]

Hi all

 

The BB's i use are Excel .25's or .23's i personally prefer the .25 because they are so much more accurate and fly alot straighter through my m16. i havent had any problems with BB's shattering in the barrel so far.

 

As far as my sniper goes i use Guarder .40's as my hop had been packed out and easily lifts .40's but over hops.36's. Another reason for using the Guarder BB's is that theey are yellow in colour so you can see them easier when setting up your hop.

[Ian_Gere]

I really should get round to trying .25's seriously. My initial imprssion of using them with Agnes, my L1A1 SLR, was that they didn;t make much difference other than slowing the shot down. Still, they were some bio-BB's of unknown provenance which the previous owner used to use, so fμ<Ж knows if they were any good. or if I could get better results with patience over the hop settings or better BB's...

[bigshep]

got my full order in the end. At that price I'm not complaining, but comms was a bit off. I do prefer to use .25's but not that bothered.

[Airsoft-Ed]

One of my mates had quite a cool idea earlier today.

 

He suggested buying a ton of BBs in various colours and brands and then mixing them all together and reselling them.

 

The result would be a bottle of 3000 BBs, all the same weight, but different colours and tolerences.

 

The effect would offer a cheap bottle of BBs - Probably at least £1.50 less than say, a bottle of 3000 Blasters which would produce a mixture of accurate fire from the high tolerance ammo, a nice spread from the 'lower' tolerance ammo, visible from the light coloured and invisible from the dark coloured, incoming shots.

 

Which I think would be great. Accurate fire is obviously a good thing, but if you just want to hose someone, or if your target is on the move, or if you're not very good at aiming, then the lower tolerance ammo gives you the spread to make up for it.

 

Then there's the dark coloured shots, so it will be harder for people to see your incoming fire, they'll only try and avoid the shots they can see and because they'll be able to see some but not others, they might think you're not firing some of the time, when actually you are.

 

He said he was inspired by the GAU-8 Cannon of the A10 Thunderbolt, which has a "Combat mix" load, which is a mix of armour piercing incendiary and high explosive ammo in something like a 5:1 ratio - Which I thought was a hilarious thing to be inspired by lol.

 

So what do you guys think? Would you buy a combat mix?

 

I think there are a few different ways of looking at it. One is the way I do, which I outlined above.

 

Another, is that you're only saving a couple of quid, when only about a fifth of the shots you're getting are going to be 'accurate' so why not just buy a bottle of high grade ammo for the extra couple of quid?

 

The last one is that you're essentially paying for a cheap bottle of ammo BUT within the cheap ammo, is some very very very good, highest possible grade ammo. Which is a massive bonus, 'cos if you spend about £6 on ammo usually ALL of it would be shit.

 

If he decideds to go ahead with it and it turns out to be quite financially viable, or prosperous, then I think I'll certainly give it a go. I could be his supplier to you guys, take your orders and what not lol.

[TPI]

While i like the Different colour thing by low tolerance i assume you mean paying for BB's with Bur or manufacture imperfection's?

if so i wouldn't as soon as one bb with a bit of extra guff on it mix's it will make the rest a slightly lower grade in my opinion

[Airsoft-Ed]

No I just mean like, some would be identical to within 0.05mm whilst others would be identical to within 0.01 and so on.

 

I wouldn't buy them if they had seams on them, or moulding parts or whatever, that'd just be bad for the gun.

 

They'd all be 'High quality' in that they'd be perfectly round and factory polished, they'd just have different levels of size difference.

 

But you've just made me think of another way people could look at it:

 

Some people might think as you did, Craig, and assume that the "lower tolerance" ammo in the mix is a lower tolerance than they'd usually let near their gun and as a result, never buy the mix, ever.

 

I guess that opinion is multiplied by the fact that they'd be labelled as some ammo being good and some being 'bad' - it would be completely relative to the ammo in the pot, it wouldn't mean in regard to all the ammo possible.

 

He said he'd use things like Blaster Devils as the highest grade, Zero One as like, the middle gound and then some cheaper, more generic ammo (all brand names have escaped my mind at this moment) as the lowest grade.

 

But all the ammo in there would be completely fine to use.

[Richard65]

Ed - Buying a bulk load of BBs and being able to sell them for less than shops/sites could well work.

 

Having a mixed bag of high quality, lower quality and different colours does not look so interesting.

 

When you pull the trigger you will not know which pellet is ready to fire and so will not know if you can take the carefully aimed shot or need to go for a full auto burst. I don't see how you would get the benefit of the really top quality bbs in the bag.

 

From the business side, I would imagine it could be fairly labour intensive with weighing the bbs and filling bottles - especially if trying to ensure an even mix in all bags. Postage costs are a big factor in the final cost - for a single bottle it would probably work out about the same as buying from your local site.

[Airsoft-Ed]

Yeah you're right, postage would be an issue and it's true that you wouldn't have any idea what order they were in, unless you were using an old school speed loader so you could actually put them in the mag in the exact order you wanted. But I don't think anyone would have time to do that with all their mags during a break between games. I struggle as it is to fill 12 mags with real cap.

 

If you're the sort of person who uses hi-caps on full auto all the time, then I think they'd work well though.

 

You'd have to fire on auto to get the benefit of the accurate, high quality shots, but then if your aim was off, causing the good ammo to miss, the less good ammo would make up for it by spreading out at range.

It'd spread out to different degrees too, since it wouldn't all be the same. So you'd potentially be putting down an impenetrable cone of fire that widens the further from you it gets and would be effective out to the maximum reach of your gun.

 

Plus, because you'd have to use auto to make the most out of it, it works out well that it's cheaper.

 

But I do think people will have a tendancy to either not think about it, think about it a bit, or overthink it and more or less all of those perspectives bring up more bad points than good lol.

 

I imagine people would only really ever buy it if postage wasn't an issue and that would mean selling it on site to people, which probably wouldn't go down with the site all that well.

 

So yeah, maybe the idea is just a write off lol.

 

Oh well, it was good whilst it lasted.

[Ian_Gere]

I've been thinking about BB's again, ppl. Has anybody used Exact 0.2g BB's?

 

And after considering your posts above, Ed, I'm thinking about a ton of BB's. 5 million 0.2's / 4 million 0.25's - 1666 / 1333 Bottles of 3000 - how much would that cost to buy? How many people would have to club together to make the amount each would receive a viable deal, ie not far too many?

 

It seems that the longer I airsoft, the fewer BB's I get through in a day, but an average of 2000/day seems like a convenient approximation to work with. Once or twice a month, probably something like 21 days a year, so 42000/yr. I would like to go more often though, and there's always extra events like NAE, so for that and further convenience I'm going with 50K/yr. So a ton of BB's = 100yrs of 0.2's & 80yrs 0f 0.25's

 

TBH, if the price was really low, I could see myself cheerfully going nuts with 'em! I expect it probably would be surprisingly cheap so I think I probably would go in for 5yrs worth - finding 15 other people to do the same doesn't seem like an impossible task (going with 0.25's)...

 

The main issue I see is distribution, because shipping 2-3 pallets to an address is relatively cheap, per bottle/bag, compared to additional costs of shipping/posting smaller amounts on. We'd need to get them shipped to somewhere everyone in the syndicate can get to themselves easily enough, or to the address of someone who is prepared to make themselves available for everyone else's couriers, or some combination. I would volunteer, but I don't have the space for more than 1 pallet in my flat (which is the top floor of a house, so they would also need to be carried up & down stairs). It also works out at 62.5Kg for 250K, which makes carrying them away in one go something of a logistics issue, given that that is like adding an extra teenager to any vehicle per syndicate member wanting to use it to get their BB's home...

 

Courier TNT ~ 50Kg 72cm x 50cm x 30cm (200K 0.25's) - £43.64 inc. VAT

 

Just an idea anyway...

[remus]

mmm, mixed bbs might work with burst fire....

currently i use aimtop .2bbs, im trigger happy so it makes sense, and also my local sells them so if something goes wrong itll likely be them thatll be fixing it... did try a few others but didnt notice much of a difference, and by the time i worked shipping in.... also i believe its better to support a local business that i want to succeed anyway, and i also get them when i need... course bulk buying... yea that bulk shipping would be tempting if you had enough happy to do it...