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)
Tags: Airsoft Gas, Black Gas, CO2, Green Gas, HFC134a, HFC22, Red Gas
[...] 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 [...]