Upgrade progress of my TM P226

[Crunchmeister]

SITREP: Upgrade successful.

Yes. The gun is finally performing as I want it to now.

First, I stripped it down to install the new piston head that came with my slide. I had to file down the groove under the rubber as Saint suggested, and it worked. I now had a nice, tight seal and all seems well.

I reassembled the gun, and fired away. Again, the accuracy was horrible. So I disassembled the hopup and reinstalled the stock hopup rubber. Lo and behold, the gun shot nice and straight again, and hopup adjustment had the effect it was supposed to have. For shits and giggles, I reinstalled the King Arms one, making absolutely sure if was installed correctly without any pinching and such. Again, a mag of BBs few wildly around the target, with few hitting the bullseye I was aiming for. One shot was so bad that it completely missed the 15" wide target at a distance of about 15 feet. Ouch!

So I reinstalled the stock rubber once more, and I was shooting straight again. So I have to say that this King Arms airseal chamber is pretty much poo in this gun. Maybe it makes a difference in other TM guns, but it causes problems in the 226.

So, I once again tried with the alternate recoil springs, starting with the one that came with the metal slide. It worked this time. I guess the combination of the metal slide, new piston head, and spring worked. I tried the Guarder 150% spring, and still I can't use it. I get about 15 rounds off before the slide doesn't cycle back far enough to reload the next BB. There's still good pressure to fire the BB at a decent velocity if I manually rack the slide in between shots, but that defeats the purpose of a semi-automatic gun...

So I also tried the 150% hammer spring. I can hear the BBs hitting the target much harder, and can get more shots out of the gun than I could before having the new piston head, but I still run low on gas and there's not enough pressure left to lock the slide back after the mag is empty.

The good news is that with the metal slide, it will lock back when empty or dry fired EVERY time now without a problem. I dry-fired a full mag's worth of propane, and it locked back every single time. There's no wear whatsover on the inner rail that got damaged with the stock slide, as the slide catch now locks onto the notch in the slide, rather than the internal rail. And after all that, there's no sign of wear on either the mag catch or on the slide notch itself.

I'd still like to be able to increase the performanc of this gun somewhat, but don't think it's possible while maintaining it fully functional. I was thinking that hi-flow valves on the mags and a rocket valve in the gun would increase its power, but I'm afraid it would make it into even more of a gas hog than it is now. And I don't see that as being a good thing, as I already have to overfill my mags now to make sure I can fire off all the BBS. If there's anything anyone can suggest on this front, I'm all ears (eyes, in this case).

And I did try shooting off a few .25s, and it does help with accuracy. The difference isn't that substantial, I think, but it helps. I'll more than likely get a bag of Metal Tech .25s next time I order BBs from Hellfire989.

[Griffin]

Well here is my little update:

Installed the creation metal slide/outer barrel with no real issues( Side not wow slide and barrel are really thin and light compared to other metal ones). The only difference between mine and crunches setup is, I have a PDI 6.01 inner barrel and the PDI piston head. So with the Guarder 150% spring install, when dry fired the slide would lock back every time. Performance for me dry fired, was able to get 25 shots than a few weak ones before mag was empty. I have not had a chance yet to fire with loaded gun was late when I got things set up.