Inner Barrel Extension Pieces

Creator
1

I’m not sure if this has ever been covered, but I got it in my head that easily fitted and removed inner barrel extensions pieces would be a pretty handy thing. :man_shrugging:

Every time I look at changing up the handguard on a blaster for a longer one or running a mock suppressor, it usually involves a barrel and t piece swap to fit a longer inner barrel. Sure, it’s easy enough to split the receiver and do that, but while I was sourcing an outer barrel for a build I came across this :

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Which I thought was a good way to achieve flexibility. I started thinking that it’s not that hard to incorporate a permanent inner barrel into each section.

There are a few concepts for sealing flying around in my head, but sealing the inners wouldn’t be difficult Easy to make it airtight and concentric with that 14mm CCW coupling design.

By extending the outer you also extend the inner, making it simpler when you’re changing up your blaster.

Any thoughts, opinions, criticisms (constructive or otherwise, go hard :joy:) would be appreciated, it’s all part of the brainstorming process. :+1:

2

Yeah I would prefer to cut my own custom length barrels rather than reinvent the wheel with threaded inner sections.

Gelblasters are bad enough with barrel types and performance/accuracy issues, so can only imagine adding a few extra joints along the way would probably be even more frustrating! :thinking:

But hey, you never know until you give it a try :+1:

3

I do take your point, Doc… very valid. Cheers for the input. :blush:

Full disclosure, I’ve run blasters with extended IBs before and even with a perfect seal and total concentricity I’ll admit they seemed to be lacking compared to a full one piece. If I could get an inner barrel into a mock suppressor without any loss of efficiency I’d be satisfied.

I’ll look into it, for shits’n’gigs… call it my need to know. :wink:

4

I had a WTF moment the other day on Reddit where someone was using Copper for an inner barrel!

I have a hard enough OCD being used to maintaining real firearms religiously cleaning barrels …… yet alone Alloy, Brass or Copper!

My go to is highly polished and maintained Stainless Steel, Alloy second and Brass dead last…… Copper doesn’t even exist on the scale in my brain cells as a material that should be used as a barrel material :roll_eyes:

It’s something that’s severely misunderstood and overlooked by many Gelblaster builders as to the materials and quality of the barrels available.

I’m 100% sure that @RokSolid will agree and back me up with his vast experience that high quality mirror polished SS barrels are the only way to go with custom builds, especially for the longevity of the quality of the internal polishing to be able to withstand the harsh conditions that they are exposed to.

Hell…. I’d choose a stock clear plastic barrel over a cheap rough Alloy or Brass Barrel any day of the week!

Alloy is great brand new, but the internal polishing will degrade very quickly, even if looked after with continuous cleaning and lubrication.

Brass barrels are even worse for polishing degradation and maintenance, and I can’t even start to imagine how shithouse Copper would be to keep its original surface finish :flushed:

Alloy barrels are not the best material, even though they are the most prevalent unfortunately…… as there’s so many available out there, you never really know the quality of the internal polishing until it’s too late :frowning:

If you find a good brand/supplier of extremely well polished Alloy Barrels…. Stick with them and make sure to regularly clean, inspect and maintain them as best as you can.

I can’t even attempt to find pics of customers who have bought “Performance” Alloy barrels that had internal surfaces that looked like they had been cut out with a pair of Scissors! :cry:

5

I’ve had a good run on alloy barrels, I’ve found the polished inner alloy barrels work well initially but over time get a bit worse, though I have some that are 4-5 years old and still not bad, the ones that were coated inside and smooth are the better ones.

They are cheap enough and my tinkering compulsive disorder means they don’t usually hang around too long anyway.

Stainless ones are great, however the bunch I got that said were 7.3mm id, were actually 7.1mm, and with my gel preference being full size did not work great for me. I have considered trying them again with the xforce predator gels as they are 7.0-7.1mm average, reckon they would hammer pretty well. However, I am of the opinion that larger gels have more weight, which helps with accuracy over distance in my experience, hard to choose when spoilt for choice.

The Primal brass ones were coated with a ceramic and polished were really good, and even though they were 7.1mm still somehow fired full size gels okay… but still suffered jamming. If they were 7.3-7.5 I would have stacks of them. They are very thin on stock given primal no longer exists, and they were very expensive. Again, would love to try with predator gels.

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6

I had 3 of the very first release Bruisemaster Brass barrels and couldn’t really fault them, but then had that period of them going topsy Turvey and never really recovered from that period :frowning:

They still owe me about $500 worth of barrels from when they were apparently “getting back on their feet”…… but no, that was the end of their golden years unfortunately.

Trialled the tight bore 7.1’s, but the insane amount of pedantic gel specific brands, growth times, sieving sizes for every single batch and issues that they inherently caused was simply just too much time and effort for no real performance gains whatsoever when compared to building something with 7.3 -7.5 barrels that could chew through pretty much anything that you fed into them with very little issues.

Had also experienced that whole reality where ordering a 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 ID Barrel meant absolutely nothing once delivered and the Micrometers were run across them :roll_eyes:

Hence the reason for just bulk ordering pretty much everything that was of reputable quality and checking sizing when they eventually turned up in the mail.

This is the reason why I still have soooooo many stacks of boxes of parts stored away, as was a “must have” when building anything that was required to have many different brands of products available on hand to custom fit whatever suited each individual job on the bench.

The WA Bans had me destroy every single blaster in my collection, and also spent weeks going through all of my inventory to dispose of any inner barrels, Gels and anything else that was deemed illegal to possess to be able to assemble as a complete functional Gelblaster.

I still find it amazing that it’s never been a topic that gelblasters require barrel cleaning/care ever since their inception.

There’s a million and one videos/topics regarding everything else to do with the maintenance and upgrades for gelblasters, yet the most basic, simple and important thing for good accuracy and power is to regularly clean and check the barrel condition.

Certainly agree that good quality polished Alloy barrels can perform for a very long time if maintained properly, but I have also seen customers blasters whose barrels looked like the bottom of my cow paddock gum boots when I put the borescope down them! :flushed:

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7

I clean my alloy barrels regularly, a quick squirt of Inox on a cleaning rod fitted with felt and run it down the bore a few times.

It’s amazing how sticky and rough it feels the first few times, and you can definitely feel the difference when the bore’s clean…

Lottsa black shit on the felt too.

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Interesting. I too have had good success with alloy barrels from Xforce of the 7.3mm when many told me they were shit. My experience was exceptional. I was confused then.

Prior to that and still this day buy 7.3mm SS barrels off CHGBB where I first started years ago. The best :+1:

9

Honestly mate, if you’d listened to a nobody that was me… they are shite. $90 for a IB c’mon that is ridiculous.

I dicked around with an ACR that got “upgrades” . Fk me it was fucked up :face_with_peeking_eye:

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You would think that ceramic coated would be the ultimate… :man_shrugging:

Wonder how teflon coated barrels would go? Not even sure it’d be possible. Let’s face it, anything other than the crappy OEM acrylic barrels they used to use is an inprovement. I can’t understand why so many of the older blasters are still produced with acrylics.

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11

It’s cheaper, that is always what I put it down to.

Acrylic gearbox shells. Very brittle . Once the switch to slighty higher grade nylon and just that little bit extra in price, things like cracking for the most part disappeared. Stocks and furniture looked and felt better.

Try a 1.3mm spring in a LH AUG acrylic gearbox usually does not go far :joy: 1.18 ausgel does though, not so harsh :+1:

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Acrylics were bad enough brand new, but then add different chemical based lubricants, atmospheric aging and upgrades…… everything was only downhill from there :frowning::joy:

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