Airsoft Hacks

In one of my posts a while back, I talked about the various different airsoft gases, at the time, the only supplier I could find for the high powered Red Gas, was RedWolf Airsoft, I emailed them to inquire about shipping this gas to Ireland (it was costing over $100 to ship 6 cans worth $20 each) but never got a reply and a week later the gas was listed as discontinued on their site.

For a while I didn’t think any more about it, until a new variety of Red Gas became available on their site, it was still quite expensive to ship over so I decided I would wait and add it to a bigger order. In the meantime, Irish retailer AirsoftEire got the ET2200 gas in stock. I noticed this last Wednesday, prompted by a post on boards.ie’s Airsoft forum and decided to order a can. Many thanks to the lads from AirsoftEire for their great service, ordered late Wednesday night, shipped Thursday and arrived on my doorstep Friday morning, very well packaged too.

I set about testing the gas to see what kind of power it would put out, I’ve only tested it in one pistol so far (KSC Glock 18), so the results are by no means conclusive, however I will update later with results using a couple of different pistols.

To set a base line, the following are the results from normal green gas using 0.20g Excel BBs:

Testing with the ET2200 Red Gas gave the following results:

As can be seen, there is no significant difference in the power output when using the two gases.

Also noteworthy, in the “Technical References” information printed on the back of the canister, the main ingredient is listed as Propane, there is also no mention of HFC22 (which is what Red gas supposedly is).

Verdict: ET2200 appears to be nothing more than normal green gas, which is in turn, primarily propane. I’ll conduct some further testing in a few different pistols later today, however I am not expecting any differences between this and ordinary green gas.

A common problem here in the south of Ireland that makes us envy our Northern brethren airsofters is the lack of pyrotechnics which we can employ during an airsoft skirmish. A few flashbangs and a bit of smoke could really add to the combat atmosphere, especially for milsim events. Unfortunately under Irish law these devices are classed as pyrotechnics and require a licence and permission to import and use. Obtaining a licence for their use is not a simple matter either, even when importing pyrotechnics there is a raft of paperwork which must be filled out and you must specify the date, time and location in which the devices will be used, not exactly useful for airsoft use.

About a year back I created a small ventilated metal cylinder, about the approximate size of a hand grenade, into which you could place smoke pellets which can be bought in Joke Shops and Novelty Stores across Ireland. This worked moderately OK in a CQB environment, but ignition was always a problem. Even fuses are a restricted item in Ireland!! I had tried several experiments making homemade fuses from the sulphur scraped from match heads, some string and super glue, it never really worked particularly well and was far too time consuming to ever be a realistic option.

Sparked by a recent thread on boards.ie about legal options for smoke grenades I decided to do some searching on ebay. I was initially looking for industrial grade smoke pellets which I could build a new holder around and I came across these ph Smoke Matches, could these be a potential solution to the ignition problem? They appeared to light just like matches and had an extended head which would give off smoke when burned.

These arrived today and I immediately decided to give them a test, lighting one by hand at first, I didn’t expect much from a single match but had hoped that perhaps lighting several would provide a decent amount of smoke. A small amount of smoke was produced which was quickly blown away by the moderately light wind which is blowing in my back garden.

I then decided to try a whole box (12) at once. This gave off a good deal more smoke but still not enough to ever be considered a really viable alternative to pyrotechnic smoke grenades. Perhaps in an indoor CQB environment they might prove slightly more useful perhaps with using several boxes of them simultaneously, but care must still be taken as when lighting several together, there is quite a large flame which burns for several seconds.

I’ll let the video speak for itself on how they looked:

So that’s it for those, back to the drawing board for a legal alternative to smoke grenades in Ireland.

Hands up if you’ve ever wondered about the difference in different weights of BBs? Accuracy, range, wind resistance? Well, here’s another factor which I never considered until recently. I read a post on arniesairsoft.co.uk in which the poster mentioned that using heavier bb’s could potentially increase the power output (i.e. Joules). Essentially what it boils down to is that heavier weight bb’s stay in the barrel longer, therefore get more time to accelerate than lighter ones.

To test this theory, I grabbed my favourite AEG (TM P90), which fires at a fairly consistent .95-.98J and some Excel brand 0.2g and 0.25g BBs, testing with the different weights gave the results below:

Theory smashed? Yea, that’s what I thought too, I decided to test it out with another device, conveniently I had my KSC G18c to hand which I loaded up with some gas and BBs, results are below:

Haha! That theory seems it might have some grounding in truth, well, to be a bit more sure, I tested with 2 more pistols which I had handy, a Meister Glock 17 GBB and a KSC Glock 19 GBB, yes I know, all Glocks, you either love them or you hate them and in my case it’s definitely the former, but don’t judge me on that, I own several other pistols which aren’t Glocks too :).

The Meister Glock 17 achieved power outputs at:

And the KSC Glock 19:

So, what exactly is going on here? Well, the key difference is that the P90’s barrel is 247mm long, whereas the pistol barrels are only about 100mm long. The fact that the p90 has the same output power with both the .20’s and .25’s shows that the physical size of the BB is not playing a part in the extra power output, infact I measured a sample of both .20g and .25g BBs and found them all to be the same size (5.88-5.90mm).

The extra length of the P90 barrel in comparison to the pistol barrel gives the BB ample time to accelerate using the energy of the gas behind it (in this case, the air which is pushed by the AEG’s piston), however the pistol having such a short barrel causes much of the energy (in the form of gas) to be expelled out the end of the barrel after the BB has already exited the barrel. Using a heavier weight BB means that the BB spends longer in the barrel of the pistol and has more time to be accelerated by the expanding gas behind it, thus a greater amount of energy is transferred from the gas to the BB.

So not only do .25g BBs have greater resistance to wind, they actually make more efficient use of the energy expelled by the GBB, but in the case of the P90 with a barrel of 247mm, it made no difference. I’ll conduct some further tests on AEG’s with different barrel lengths, but I’m fairly sure that anything with a barrel of around 200mm or more will not see any difference in power output with different BB weights.

It is also important to remember that here in Ireland, the legal limit for any airsoft device’s output power is 1 Joule, using 0.25g BBs with a device which fires at 0.99J on 0.20g BBs may actually increase it’s power to above 1 Joule, care must be taken to ensure that you are compliant with the law at all times.

Thoughts/Comments/Suggestions? Feel free to click the comment button below.

*Update:

I repaired my Cyma Glock 18 AEP last night and re-wired it with an external battery, so this morning I decided to conduct a few more tests, below are the results using .20g and .25g BBs as above.

As you can see, there is no noticeable increase as with the GBBs, infact with the .25g BBs in the AEP, the power output decreases. Theory busted? Well, no, not really, the Glock AEP has a much smaller gearbox than an AEG and a very small piston/cylinder to compress air in, so in this case, the volume of air in the cylinder matches the volume of air required to propel a .20g BB efficiently down the relatively small 100mm barrel. Were this a full sized AEG gearbox with a 100mm barrel, then quite likely the expected results of the energy level increasing would be seen.

I’ll be conducting a few more tests with this theory to try and get the most conclusive results possible, so check back for more updates soon.

Just a quick post to say that yes, I’m still alive, life has been very busy lately, but I’ve got a few new and interesting posts coming soon, so check back often and feel free to leave a comment to say hello.

In the meantime, here’s a pretty picture of a pistol I put together today:

A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes, well at least according to wikipedia it is, in this case the objects in place on this map are you, airsoft players, retailers and sites in Ireland. Using the Google Maps API, I created a page which allows people to plot their location on a map, leave a comment for other’s and see if there are other airsofters in their locality.

You can check it out on the IAA website at http://www.irishairsoft.ie/map/

No IAA membership or registration is requried to post your location.

Was out at HRTA as usual last Saturday for a skirmish and with the temperature sitting at a nice 5 degrees celsius or so, gas guns were just not working so well, saw a few people having issues using them and had two separate pistols belonging to myself that were not working correctly with propane. Also got a Mossberg M500 gas shotgun from Tony at eirsoft.ie last weekend and although it’s a lovely shotgun (more on that in my next post), it was a bit temperamental in such low temperature.

So inspired by a thread by vtec over on the boards.ie Airsoft forum today, I decided to do a bit of research about various airsoft gasses.

This is what I found:

There are 4 types of gas you can use in an airsoft gun.

HFC134a/Duster gas: Known as duster gas because you can commonly find it in computer stores to be used for blowing dust out of computers and other electronics without damaging the components. A relatively low-powered gas which is mainly used in Japanese airsoft guns.

Green Gas/Propane: As alot of people know by now, Green gas is basically propane without the smell and with some lubricant added, buying a propane adapter from airsoft-innovations.com allows you to use propane cans bought from your nearest hardware store instead. Most gas guns will easily take this gas with no problems.

HFC 22/Red gas: A very difficult gas to find, the only retailer I could find with it in stock that I know ships to Ireland is RedWolfAirsoft, at $20 for a 2000ml can, it’s not too bad a price, but like all gasses it can only be shipped by surface mail. Red gas is significantly more powerful than green gas and should only be used in properly upgraded guns which can handle it, using it in guns only designed for green gas or duster/hfc 134a will do damage to the gun and could be dangerous.

CO2: It’s a whole different ball game really, co2 cannot be used unregulated and can normally be found in small little 12g canisters but requires guns designed specifically for use with co2 gas.

There is also rumoured to be a “Black Gas” but I can’t find any definitive information on this and alot of information suggests that it is merely a name for CO2 as it is stored in black canisters.

While I was searching around, I found some excellent information from airsoftcanada.com, in particular these two diagrams below showing the composition and pressures of the various gasses:

And secondly, a graph of Red Gas, Green Gas and HFC134a pressures at different temperatures:

(Click the images above for a bigger version)

The first time I played Airsoft, I used a rental mesh mask which although it provided adequate protection against any stray bb’s hitting me in the eye, was not particularly comfortable, it had little or no padding around the eyes and nose which was slightly irritating to wear.

Pretty soon after, I got my hands on a Scott Paintball Mask, this was a great mask, nice big mouth guard which was not too close so as to restrict your breathing and also extended back to protect your ears. Eye protection was provided by the in-built goggles which have thermal lenses which have never fogged on me and the mask has a nice peak to provide a little bit of protection from the sunlight. It’s a truly great mask however it has one major flaw, it’s big and black, many times people were able to spot me hiding in a bush merely by the mask, I needed something smaller.

While on holiday during the summer, my prescription sunglasses broke, so I bought a pair of SH+ RG4200 sport glasses with the intention of using them for airsofting when I got home, they came in a nice case with a couple of pairs of spare lenses (Clear, Amber and Grey) and a head strap, the head strap unfortunately broke during my first skirmish but I continued to use the glasses as they stayed in place fairly well without it.

Recently though I wanted to get a pair of glasses with a foam backing due to a certain site owner making me paranoid about the tiniest little gap around my glasses and the possibility of that gap enlarging in awkward positions, a very slim possibility of being in the wrong place at the wrong time but I’d rather buy a new pair of glasses than get hit in the eye.

So just last week, user JonAnderton on the boards.ie Airsoft forum posted a pair of brand new, never used Guarder C4 glasses for sale, I snapped them up straight away for €25, they can also be bought from ehobbyasia.com for the same price. I got them a day or two later and my first impression was good. The glasses come in a soft neoprene type carry case which contains the following: Frames, Blue, Grey, Amber and Clear lenses (all anti-fog), soft drawstring bag, foam frame backing and headstrap (a cleaning cloth would have been a very nice touch, but can’t complain).

The glasses on their own sit quite comfortably on your face with or without the foam backing, which simply pops in and out. The lenses similarly are very easy to change, just pull the frames slightly away and pop the lense out. Without the foam backing, there is only a small gap around the frames, with the foam backing, even less, however for absolute security, it’s best to attach the head strap.

To attach the head strap, the arms of the glasses unclip via a small button on the side of the frame and the head strap clips in, this provides a very secure fixing for the headstrap and turns the glasses into goggles. With the headstrap in place, you can adjust it by a buckle on the back which is easily reached while wearing them if you find they are a little too tight or loose during a skirmish.

I wore these at a skirmish all day yesterday for the first time, and they did not fog once on a very rainy day. They are comfortable enough to wear for long periods of time with the head strap and foam backing in place, so much so, that I even found myself leaving the glasses on while in the safe zone between games, it just never occured to me to take them off.

Just as an extra re-assurance to myself, I tested these glasses by firing at them at close range, a single shot at point blank range left a bit of a mark on the lense with some possible slight deformation lines around the point of impact.

Close-up of the impact point.

A burst at 15ft left a good few marks across the lens, not as bad as the single shot, but still enough to leave a bit of residue on the lense and a slight mark, however the mark cannot be seen while wearing the glasses.

Burst shot close-up.

The short burst also popped one of the lenses out of the frames, so it is very important to ensure the lenses are secured properly when changing them out.

All in all, these are very good glasses/goggles, the only thing I could fault them on is the fact that you they do not have a prescription lense insert, however there are other options available if you require these and I am comfortable playing without prescription lenses.

I recently had the opportunity to strip and upgrade a TM Sig 552 belonging to a fellow airsofter so i decided to take some pictures while i was at it and post them here with his kind permission.

Firstly, to start off here is the Sig 552 itself with the top part of the foregrip removed, and also the battery tray has been removed:

Remove the motor plate from the bottom of the grip by unscrewing the two screws either side, you can leave the allen key in the middle alone, this is the motor adjustment plate and unless your motor isn’t meshing correctly with the bevel gear, doesnt need to be touched.

Once that’s done, unhook the wires from the motor itself and remove the motor, watch out for the small metal disc on the bottom of the motor which will no doubt fall off and can sometimes stick to the side of the motor due to magnetism

next, have a look into the grip and you can see two screws which hold the grip onto the gearbox (brass here, but some aegs they are painted black and very hard to see)

Note the two motor wires go through the same hole in the grip

Fold the stock and remove the screw at the top pictured here

Then remove the two screws on either side of the body just behind the selector switch

the entire stock can then be slid straight off

On the underside of the selector switches is a small allen head grub screw, unscrew these halfway (so you dont lose them) and remove the selectors

underneath the selector is another piece which attaches to the selector gear assembly on the gearbox, unscrew these and lift them off, note that the one on the left hand side has a small spring and plastic piece which click into place when you turn the selector, be careful not to lose these. Also the one on the right hand side has a longer screw

Now remove the screw inside the mag well

And the two screws on either side (at this point you should have removed the bottom half of the foregrip too)

Next remove the screw just forward of the mag well

at this point you should be able to lift the upper half of the body forward and up away from the bottom half, note that it will be necessary also to remove the cable ties holding the fuse holder in place

The gearbox can now be lifted out of the rest of the body

note the position of the gears outside the gearbox which are controlled by the selector switch

right side

and left side

The larger of the gears will simply lift straight out, the small one on either side requires a screw to be removed on the left side and then slides out

Once you remove the gears on both sides, the black plastic piece underneath needs to be remove on the right hand side, simply pull it slightly down towards the trigger and it will unclip, underneath this there is also a small metal piece which sits partially inside the gearbox to block the trigger, unfortunately i havent got a photo of it, but you’ll know it when you see it

This is the positioning of the selector plate and other components, you dont need to remove anything here, this is just for reference

Inside the gearbox with all the original parts installed

Systema High Speed gears, 1 Joule spring and metal bushings installed, also gears were re-shimmed

Now just stick everything back together in reverse order

The 9.6v custom battery being test fitted without the top half of the foregrip, note the position of the connector and the orientation of the battery with particular reference to the side which only has 2 cells

When the battery is correctly position as above, the only modification that needs to be made to the inside of the foregrip is to dremel away a little bit of the protruding area of one of the nuts/screws that hold the side rail on

and your done, this particular AEG now runs at a nice 19-20 rounds per second and has a nice crisp trigger response, havent had the opportunity to chrono it yet but with a systema 1J spring i would expect in the region of 300-300

As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to do some testing on the difference in rate of fire with a stock DBoys Full Metal M4A1 and different motors and battery voltages. At the time I had available to me the stock motor that came installed in the M4, a Tokyo Marui EG700 motor and a Systema Turbo motor. Batteries used for testing were the standard 8.4v mini battery which the M4 came with and an Intellect 1400Mah 9.6v battery.

Onto the tests..

To calculate the average rounds per second, I used my laptop with a standard pc microphone and used Audacity to record the sound of the gun firing. Each wave peak recorded and graphed by audacity can be counted as a single shot. For each test, I fired one 2 second burst followed by a 3 second burst.

From the sound wave produced in audacity, I then counted the number of peaks in a given second. I took 3 seperate seconds and calculated the average based on those. Below is a table of the results achieved. Note that there is no figure for the Systema Turbo motor running on the 8.4v battery, the cheap batteries that come free with clone AEGs do not appear to be powerful enough to push this motor with a 1 Joule (or close to it) spring installed. However I have tested with a good quality 8.4v battery and it ran quite well, although it was at a skirmish so I was unable to record the rate of fire at the time.

And while we’re at it… here’s a nice shiny graph of the whole lot:

Motor and Battery Rate of Fire Comparison

It should also be noted that the Systema Turbo motor is a very heavy drain on a battery, the Intellect 1400Mah battery I used lasts less than a thousand rounds, so you pay a price for that kind of rate of fire.

Interestingly the stock Dboys motor and the TM EG700 motor performed exactly the same, running with a 9.6v, the TM motor did average 14 rounds per second as opposed to the stock motor’s 13.67, however this is not a significant enough difference to be conclusive. Physically the two motors are identical and performance wise they also appear to be the same.

There’s not much more to say on the matter really, the results above say everything I could, any questions or comments though, feel free to click the comment button below.

Oh and while we’re here, here’s some nice pictures of the various wave forms recorded in Audacity:

8.4v Stock Motor

8.4v TM EG700 Motor

9.6v Stock Motor

9.6v TM EG700 Motor

9.6v Systema Motor

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here, I had a good holiday, thanks! Spent a really great month travelling around Europe, taking in Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, Austria, Czech Republic and Germany. Saw a fair few places and there’s still a lot more I didn’t get to see, so I fully intend on travelling around Europe again, at least another month next summer and then more whenever I get a chance.

Me sitting on the pier in Trieste, Italy

Didn’t get a chance to play any airsoft while I was away unfortunately, the closest I came to it was a store in Marseille which sold airsoft guns, it wasn’t exclusively an airsoft store as it also sold computer games and model cars and such, but they had some semi-decent stuff inside, albeit overpriced. Also found out that the owner of the hostel I stayed at in Bled (Slovenia, beautiful place by the way, definitely recommended) ran an airsoft site, but we were there midweek so there wasn’t really enough people to play against. Ah well…

Anyway, on with the show….

This will be a brief review of the Dboys M4, to be honest, there are plenty of reviews out there already on this very popular AEG and there’s not really much I can add to that….

The team weapon for Na Taibhse (The ghosts in Irish) is the M4, so I decided it was about time I picked one up. The m4 is quite a popular weapon in the airsoft world and you can barely turn your head at a skirmish without seeing one. Likewise, the DBoys (or Boyi as they are sometimes known) replica of the M4 is quite popular and this is for good reason.

I opted for the M4A1 with the metal body from rsov.com. As always, their service was excellent. On initial testing of the M4 out of the box, I wasn’t particularly impressed, some misfeeds and quite poor accuracy and range. As with most clone AEGs, the barrel was absolutely filthy at first, so I spent quite a bit of time cleaning the barrel, then finetuning the hopup and I also sprayed some silicone oil into the mags (where would we be without silicone oil eh?).

After cleaning the barrel, the accuracy and range improved greatly, the magazines were also feeding alot better now too. I didn’t bother with the Hi-cap magazine that came with the gun, instead opting for the 90 round mid-caps. After using the P90 for so long where one single wind will empty 90% of the magazine, I’ve gotten tired of having to wind in the middle of a firefight.

The rate of fire was good, although maybe a tiny bit slow in comparison to some other AEGs with the stock 8.4v battery, I decided to test it out with a 9.4v 1400Mah Intellect battery I had spare and found it to be a bit better. I didn’t think a 9.6v would fit in the foregrip of the M4, but I found it would fit in, although it is a little tight at first, once you figure it out it’s quite easy to install.

More on the RoF in my next post, where I will compare the stock DBoys M4A1 running with the stock motor, a Tokyo Marui EG700 Motor and a Systema Turbo Motor