Improving T4-18 accuracy

[Lozart]

I have spoken to landwarrior about warranty claims, the errant charging handle button and the accuracy issues are not something they are willing to cover with the warrranty. One is damage I did on a site and the other is part of the natural variance between guns. It fundamentally works. I also informed them about the issues I had with the magazines and that equally wasn't a warranty issue for them as the magazines fed. People seem to still be under the impression this can be fixed under warranty, I tested this theory a month ago and it definitely isn't.

 

Sorry but as far as warranty goes I don't think you'll have any comeback at this point. You've opened the gun and changed bits for a kickoff. Had you taken it back straight away then maybe you could have had a claim under the Sale of Goods act as it wasn't fit for purpose but I'm afraid you're well past that point now.

 

Which raises a very interesting point (to me at least) about the whole "buying a gun and changing stuff straight away" question. If you buy something and it's crap out of the box, why try and fix it yourself when you should be able to just return it as unfit for purpose and get a replacement? (not having a pop at you by the way BrightCandle as I know you've been through this loop already) Too many people seem to just accept the shortcomings of a BRAND NEW GUN and go straight to "what do I need to do to make this work properly?". Why would manufacturers ever bother to improve their products if we all just blindly accept that Brand "X" needs a different hop up/barrel/whatever as soon as you open the box?

[Ian_Gere]

That's a damn good point, Loz. I think that some guns are made to what seems to have been standard a few years ago - accurate enough to hit a man sized target at 30m and if you get better than that, it's because you had a lucky alignment of the planets and/or confluence of wide engineering tolerances. But in the 2 1/2 years I've been into airsoft, I've seen attitudes change - people want man sized target accuracy at 50m as a minimum, but there are still plenty of guns using old designs out there, so upgrades are necessary from the get go.

 

At the risk of being thought of as more obsessively compulsive than i actually am, I'm going to bring your attention again to the most overlooked part when air seal is under discussion - grease. A lightly lubed gb may be nicer to work on and so long as the grease is good quality, a light smear probably isn't much less efficient than a good slobber of good grease, but when it comes to air seal, more grease is definitely better, so long as it isn't getting inside the hop. For sure certain hardware parts make for a better air seal, but a good slap of CT-2 Teflon grease will dramatically improve consistency as well as improve power output from the spring and it is gloopy enough to stay where it is smeared, not get blasted down the barrel.

 

The next thing to consider is the air seal nozzle. Those which have an O-ring at their base are good for at least a 5FPS boost (with 0.2's) but they also lend consistency - putting a smear of CT-2 around just the base of the cylinder head pipe/spigot (what do we call that nozzle which we cannot refer to as a nozzle without causing confusion?) so that the air seal nozzle o-ring makes a very good seal, but the grease does not get forward and into the barrel, is the way forward.

 

I'm not convinced that double o-ring cylinder heads are that much more efficient than single o-ring ones, because both the head and cylinder are locked in place by the closed gb shell. So, again, a good smear of grease between the two should be all that's necessary. That said I have bought one recently so i can test them out in more controlled circumstances than any old gb with a random mix of upgrade parts.

 

I suspect that the worst place for air leakage is the interface between the nozzle and the hop rubber, which is why it's crucial to make sure that when you fit a rubber onto a barrel and push it into a hop unit the lip of the rubber is sticking far forward enough for the nozzle to engage with tightly. There is only about a mm of potential variance there, but I think there is a knack to it.

 

Then there is how much air can squeeze between the rubber and barrel, inside the hop unit. I never really put much stock in the PTFE tape mod, but i have done it anyway because undoubtedly there is potential there for leakage. But when you read reviews of Modify Hybrid barrels, you have to take notice - the barrel grooves and corresponding internal ridges on the rubber can give up to a 30FPS boost - so that is the potential range of inconsistency, and it will not be the same from shot to shot, because leaks like that will vary depending on how much pressure they're under, so if a variation earlier in the chain changes the shot power by a little, this may be exacerbated...

 

Finally I am in love with double o-ring piston heads - that's +20FPS right there and the closer you make the entire system to the theoretical maximum, ie no leaks at all, the less potential there is for variance between shots, hence greater snap shooting accuracy - i mean like the first shot you take with nothing to go on but your sights and your best guess about wind conditions and target movement.

 

But let's also bear in mind that whatever BB weight we choose and whatever stock or upgrade internal parts we are running, the wind is still the most significant factor in determining where any particular shot will end up.

[BrightCandle]

Ultimately the GR16 magazines I am using cause two issues. One is they can't be filled to 120 rounds, 100 maximum. Secondly they don't reliably feed on full auto, they will drop about 1 round in 20 or so. But otherwise the rounds shoot the same as they do coming out of the high cap that came out of the box. I do intend to get some different mid caps, but so far I have been living with the minor issues and they feed better than the hicap (not uncommon for the G&G hicap to be rubbish, was with my combat machine as well).

 

The warranty sticker is still in place on the gun, its covering the magic point on the gearbox and I haven't gone in there at all. I might have broken warranty but its because I know that my problem isn't really covered. I am wanting to shoot and hit targets beyond 30m, and right now I can just about hit a man size target at that range with a burst but its pretty bad accuracy even at 20m where my expectation would have been semi single shots should hit reliably, but its not that good at all. I spoke to LWA about it and they say its pretty normal accuracy, so yeah not going to get a warranty replacement on that one. Distance selling rules were already long gone by the time I got the gun out to skirmish so another bit of defensive law that isn't much use when skirmishs are every 2 weeks! Its not really faulty or not fit for purpose its just exceptionally rubbish quality.

 

But since the gun wont even reach out to 40m at all I can literally see how poorly the hop is performing, I am getting almost no lift after the BB slows down. Instead I either get arch downs with too little hop or immediate lift out of the barrel putting the flight path well above the point of aim and zeroing capabilities of the scope. There doesn't seem to be anything in between, which suggests to me the hop spin isn't being applied and kept on the BB's very well. The range isn't even that good with the hop up that high and the accuracy is kind of awful with the hop being applied, and the range too short to care with it off.

 

As I said before my accuracy is somewhere in the region of 1-1.5m of spread at 30m. So its possible to hit a human target with about 5-10 rounds, but its a long way away from what reviewers show this gun should be able to do, and indeed what other guns actually do achieve. I got a good look at some well running AEGs on the skirmish this weekend and I am outranged by 20m's and they have almost laser beams compared to mine. We messed with the hop and I went through a lot of different ammo that some fellow skirmishers gave me to try and in the end it was a little better with 0.30g BB's but not significantly. Something in the gun isn't too the quality level it ought to be, and accuracy and range are mostly in the hop and the barrel. The hop bucking I have fixed, that helped a little. The next thing I am going to do is either lap or replace the barrel. I think that is honestly the next step to trying to make it work better. Seal on the hop bucking definitely improved with the prometheus purple, but its not brought back all of the original FPS so something else in the airseal is still dodgy.

[team flex]

perhaps you sell it on and buy a G&P. I think you have been seriously unlucky, guess thats a bit annoying that there is no warranty. Did you push them on it (guessing you did)? I hope LWA don't be naughty with warranties but I guess it's more to do with who you are talking to at the time. Best of luck to getting it fixed though

[Ian_Gere]

Well, by all means buy a new barrel. You will get more power from a TBB without changing the spring: about 25FPS by changing a 363x6.08mm stock barrel to 6.03mm TBB, depending on the air seal. You mentioned an M110 spring: one of those should give you 360FPS from an average stock barrel length and good air seal. An M100 should get you 330FPS, from a 363x6.08mm barrel and good air seal. An M90 spring should produce 300FPS, although they often get as low as 290 - it depends on the air seal.

 

 

 

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