Airsoft Megathread XI - "MOST PAINFUL AIRSOFT GUN IN EXISTENCE!"

[Nitronik]

Internals! All the fancy stuff involving the innards of the gearbox

[northshore]

If you want to make your AEG perform better, first place I'd upgrade is the hopup and barrel before getting into the gearbox. A good steel tightbore barrel (ZCI makes a really nice affordable 6.02mm TBB), rotary hopup (ProWin is a standard), and good quality bucking (Maple Leaf, Prometheus) or R hop+M nub+flat bucking would all be great upgrades to maximize your effective range and accuracy.

Gearbox wise, probably the best upgrade you can do to start with is swapping the stock motor for a high torque neodymium motor (SHS and ZCI make great affordable neo motors) and install a MOSFET with lipo batteries. This'll greatly improve the trigger response (time between pulling the trigger and actually firing a BB) and reduce the horrible screeching noise most untuned AEGs make. The actual gears in most stock gearboxes are usually fine, so next would be re-shimming them and correcting the angle of engagement (AOE) of the piston and sector gear.

You could upgrade pretty much everything in the gearbox with aftermarket parts, but I think the ones I listed above are the best places to start.

[TheMrFailz]

What's your opinion on tight bore vs large bore? I remember hearing waaaaay back when that big bore was better for long range whereas tight bore was accurate but only at short short range.

[northshore]

Having run both, the general rule of thumb I've found to be true is tightbore is best for AEGs and widebores work well with HPA/gas systems. It all comes down to how much volume of air your gun is putting out. I run a Tippmann HPA as my primary with an Orga 6.23mm widebore barrel. Tippmanns are notorious for overvoluming (putting out way more air than is actually needed to propel the bb); as it is internally regulated straight off of the 800 PSI output of the tank, so having a wider bore helps mitigate that. You don't want to overvolume as all that excess air creates turbulence in the "flow" of your bb as it leaves the barrel. Tightbores work well with AEGs because you almost never have overvoluming issues with the (comparatively lower) air volume that is generated by a regular gearbox piston and slightly increases the pressure behind the bb so you get a bit of an FPS boost as well.

At short ranges, either would probably work fine in either system. Widebores are generally a bit more expensive than tightbores so take that as you will.