paradoxum wrote:
On the subject of Thompson upgrades again, is it worth getting different aftermarket gears, nozzles, shims, piston, things like that?
So far:
nub / bucking
barrel
motor
swapping battery connectors with deans / replace wiring loom with 16 gauge wire
mosfet (still need to find a good cheap one)
There is no real need to swap out the internals, unless there is a problem with them.:
The cylinder head and nozzle will need to come from the same manufacturer to make sure they seal correctly, just make sure the original cylinder head has a great seal at the cylinder and the pipe coming out of the cylinder head (that the nozzle goes over), use RTV Silicone (gasket sealer) if all else fails to seal.
The piston assemblies that I have seen in the gearboxes seem good enough, unless one is trying to make 30+ rps gun or a high fps gun. Just make sure the o-ring is good to seal against the cylinder, and make sure its lubed with the same gear lube that is made for aeg gears.
The gears arent the worlds best but they arent that bad, assuming they arent used in a high rps/fps build, keep them well lubed and a good shimming will help them.
Plastic bushings should be swapped for metal bushings but the sets that I have used required some grinding down of the part of the bushing on the inside and outside of the gearbox, I dont know why that was, I used a set from Guarder and another one from Prometheus, same deal. I dont think the plastic bushings will melt themselves unless one continuously runs the gearbox to where it overheats and melts them, they just aren't as strong as a good set of metal will be.
Cylinder, the stock one is fine, just get some Brass-O and polish it to a shine on the inside and out; I also polished any area of the gearbox that would see friction.
One item that I highly recommend is a full metal spring seat with bearings in it, to keep the spring from binding, and improved consistency ( must be for a version 6 gearbox though).
As far as mosfets go, look at some of the lower cost Gates, they should work fine but I am sure that your local shop should have a good, budget friendly mosfet that should work well for you.
The nice thing is that you cant get a Gate Titan for a version 6, so you can immediately slap all of the bling-nerds that want people to spend more on a mosfet than the value of most peoples guns. They are really only good for extreme ROF guns or people that dont really want to move thier fingers to pull the trigger (ie trigger spamming speedsofters).