Maybe I should have asked?

My wife, Amanda, who some of you know, is an employment lawyer. Generally there is very little overlap between our respective work but this week has been an exception.  In both cases it was the result of not asking a question that we didn’t know we had to ask.  Follow me so far? No?  Ok, I’ll try and explain…

It all boils down to making a not-unreasonable assumption based on what I believed to the be the situation.

I was given a LCT TK105 to look at.  I know the gun having done some minor work on it in the past.  It has changed owners and now wasn’t feeding or firing properly.  What followed was for me a week (off and on) of mind-buggering frustration.  I stripped and checked the gearbox – all fine in there.  Still mis-feeding and muzzle velocity was a paltry 150 fps.

Ok, swap the hop rubber.  No appreciable difference.  Change the hop unit for a ProWin (not one of my favourites) – Ah – now it feeds much better but almost no change to velocity.  Fit a new barrel – feeds pretty well, velocity still sucks.  Grab a new piston head but settle for changing the piston O-ring.  Great compression and the spring is perfectly healthy.  No change apart from a blinding headache caused by hammering my head off my workbench.

Finally I message the customer (Taz Stokes) and give him a run down of all that’s been done, and in return I discover that the air nozzle had been changed to try and resolve the problem. Ah.  Really?

In Landwarrior I grab an Ultimate AK air nozzle, strip the box a third time and fit it.  Guess what?  Suddenly I have an extra 200 fps at the muzzle, and returning the original barrel and hop to the gun claws back another few fps.  Feed is much improved although still a bit magazine dependent.

Throughout all of this pain, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask if anything had been done and it wasn’t obvious that the nozzle wasn’t the original.  Some might claim that they would of noticed straight away but I doubt it – different manufacturers use slightly different designs and more importantly I had no reason to believe it had been changed – so I didn’t ask.  Well, that’s a lesson learned.

Had I known that the change had been made I would have started there – it’s axiomatic.  This is no criticism of Ian in anyway, I should have asked and I didn’t.  Rest assured that in future there will be a “anything else I should know” question; it can and will save a load of grief!