New Airsoft player in town looking for some gun advice!

[Tad]

Thanks for the advice guys. Tad great words of wisdom and you sound exactly like my mate who got me into this wonderful sport. I will take what you guys have said. Try a £200/£250 gun like a G&G or Kings Arms. Maybe even a WE or something kit myself out then later towards then end of the year when I've found out if its for me. Buy a monster of a gun.

 

Many thanks guys. Really appreciate the advice.

 

100 times this...

 

G&G are great starting guns and will last you a long time, plus they will treat you well if you learn how to trea them!

 

I know it's not a straight up answer but there is reasoning behind it

 

Plus as others have now said, that cheaper gun will give you more value as you start getting into the sport.

 

Hope you stick around so we can see how it goes!

[Ian_Gere]

Bear this in mind though: the argument that an expensive gun performs better than a cheap gun and so if you buy cheap you will end up buying expensive in the end is a nice, simple, logical sounding idea. As such it appeals. However life is rarely so simple in reality.

 

For eg, no matter how much money you spend on a stock, or off the shelf, gun, be it £117 or £550, its performance, in terms of range and accuracy, will not be as good as a gun which has been upgraded and/or tweaked by an experienced gun tech. It can cost an absolute fortune in upgrade parts, but the difference in performance between merely good and absolutely excellent parts is actually not very much in terms of metres of range and centimetres of grouping size. It's a case of diminishing returns whereby, past a certain point, it costs so much to get any benefit and the benefit is so small that it's not cost effective. Not that that stops many of us, but then to some of us tinkering with our guns is as much a part of the hobby as shooting each other!

 

So you could spend £50 on a very good (PDI) inner barrel, £9 on a Prometheus Soft (Purple) hop rubber, £3 on an Element hop up "H" nub, £5.50 on an SHS air seal nozzle, £10 on an ACM double O-ring piston head, £10 on a Guarder spring, and £4 on Teflon grease (£91.50 inc shipping) and drop that lot into an entry level AEG costing around £120, judiciously apply some 50p PTFE tape, and the resulting performance will not only be better than an off the shelf £212 gun, but also a Systema costing a grand. Note however that you could achieve almost the same amount of improved shooting from less expensive upgrade parts (although the PDI barrel really is money well spent - that £10 extra compared to the 'next best' price bracket TBB is worth at least 5 metres of effective range on its own).

 

Of course you could go further and replace the entire compression chain, so in addition the spring guide, the piston, the cylinder and cylinder head, and the hop up chamber, but the performance benefits you would see, compared to just the parts listed in the prior paragraph, would be so small that it's unlikely they would be noticeable while skirmishing - minute during test shooting even, so unless you move on to sniping it's money pretty much wasted. That's not to say that if you were to just upgrade the hop up chamber of a stock gun that you would not see any benefits, just that the barrel, the rubber, and the overall air seal are the most important things, so if you get those right any variation in accuracy that a stock hop up chamber may introduce will be more than taken care of by a £3 H nub.*

 

*Although it is also worth noting that some guns' design precludes using an H nub, in which case you can use a specially designed rubber such as PDI W-Hold, Falcon Dual Point, or Maple Leaf Monster and get results almost as good.

 

Naturally the compression chain is not the only upgrade path, but outside of a MOSFET, which improves trigger response and protects the trigger switch from damage due to micro-arcing, messing with the rate of fire, the gears and other gearbox components really isn't necessary, especially if you're upgrading just for performance. As someone else said above though, TM guns do not do well if you increase the strength of the spring, nor can their gears withstand much of an increase in ROF for long because they are made of cheese light alloy not steel. Fear not though - the compression chain upgrades i suggested above would increase the muzzle velocity of a medium length AEG by 45-50FPS, so a standard TM spring and gearset would get you around 330-5FPS which is "site legal" and would improve range and accuracy. Of course you would then be paying TM prices + £92 and still getting less performance than an AEG is capable of and one thing i've noticed about people skirmishing with expensive guns is that their hits seem to sting more in inverse proportion the the cost of the gun with which they were shot...

[Sitting Duck]

I fully promote doing it in stages - much like passing ya driving test/1st car etc....

 

A good starter gun will serve you well and is ideal way to learn how to maintain & repair/service your gun

(if you screw up - no biggy)

 

That good starter will serve you well and always handy to have a spare or two or three.......

 

One day if fully bitten by the bug and have become a little more experienced or better player/driver

then move onto a better higher end gun if you wish to

same goes for loadout n stuff - but this is just my take on it and I don't judge anybody with higher or lower end guns

 

besides that spotty 12yr old kid will get us all with his £50 JBBG in the end

[Ian_Gere]

BTW I'm aware that at this stage much of what I wrote above means bugger all, but eventually it will, and besides there are other people reading this forum than those who contribute.