Saturday, September 22, 2007

The A-5 is no more...for now

So in a previous post I talked about how the Tippmann A-5 was a beast of a gun and how I've never had a problem with it in the five or so years that I've owned it. Well, I went home for the weekend and decided to dust it off and play around a little bit.

I brought it out in my backyard to make sure everything was working properly and was shooting semi-auto for a little while, everything seemed to check out just fine. Then I decided to put it through it paces. I switched the W.A.S. board to 25 b.p.s. full auto and let her rip. I got about thirty balls out of the barrel and then the cyclone feed just stopped feeding. I couldn’t figure it out, I had plenty of air, my battery was good, but the balls were not coming out.

I took the gun back into my house and began disassembling it. I opened it up and nothing was wrong inside the gun itself so I went to the cyclone feed. I unscrewed the bottom and opened it up to see that the parts inside it were made of plastic. Up until this point the plastic parts in the gun had not given me any problems and I don’t think they would have under normal condition. However, with the addition of a electric trigger and the full auto setting the plastic just couldn’t handle the pressure and got worn down.

Now I’ve got Big Game in two weeks and a gun to fix. Hopefully my new metal parts will arrive in time.

1 comment:

Tech man said...

I haven't had any trouble with my Tippman A-5 for the years I have owned it as well. However I prefer it as a stock A-5 with a flatline. To me, if you can't hit your opponent firing a few shots per second, then firing 50 shouldn't help you too much in the long run. It just provides room for laziness. But it is also a lot of fun to say that you were the one to take down the guy with the "tightest" gun on the field.