FX Wildcat Regulator Increase

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jking

jking

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May 12, 2015
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Hobbs NM, United States
Just a quick FYI, I was really wanting to try the Heavies out of my Wildcat but at the current regulator setting of 143bar it was only shooting them at 780fps. I pulled the regulator out increased the spring tension about an 1/8 of a turn to 152bar and tried that. After screwing in the HS adjuster I got a velocity of 835fps. Pulled the regulator again added maybe a 1/16 turn to 156bar added a little more HS tension and got 855fps. Over a 32 shot string from a 230bar fill the heavies (MKII's) averaged 851 while a lot were in the 855-858 range. Looks like it started falling off the regulator at about 28 unless a couple of pellets were heavier, attached is that shot string. The shot sound is as quite as it was before. I stopped at that regulator setting hoping for some nicer, warmer days to tweak it a little more. Accuracy so far is really great out to 60yds. Haven't had a good chance to shoot it much but I think I'm going to be really pleased. Oh, btw the MKI's are shooting about 2-3fps slower on average, the 25.4's are shooting 955 and the accuracy on them is still great from what I've shot at 50 and 60yds.
JK
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Hey everyone! 
I'm new to this forum . My wife purchased an FX Wildcat for me for Christmas after the 10,000 hints that I gave her . I opened it up and took a shot and I hear this noise like I was airing up a basketball after every shot . Called the company that it was purchased from and they said that it was normal . I have a lot of airguns including FX with regulators and have never heard the regulator on them . Can anyone tell me if this is normal for the regulator to be heard like this . thanks
 
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More than likely, it is because the tank pressure is below what it takes to make the regulator work properly. Air it up to 230 bar and shoot some pellets through it. 

mine makes that same noise if I shoot it down too low. Somewhere around 100 bar it starts hissing after the shot. normal for an FX reg from what I'm reading everywhere else.

Crusher
 
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Hey Jimmy,
If I may steer this topic back to where you started it...Congratulations on setting your FX reg up higher and the nice numbers your getting! I know you were anxious to see what would happen if you did. From the way she drops off the reg after shot #33 it appears that you have the hammer spring tension set perfect. As you know I have been doing a lot of testing with my Wildcat & Streamline recently and so I will share a little info with you. At one point a couple days ago I had her set to shoot the 34's at 880 ft/s but they were not as accurate as I would like, so I lowered it down a couple times and finally settled on 850 ft/s for my final setting. The barrel in my Wildcat likes the 34gr. original Heavy's better than the MKII's.

This morning I shot two groups at 50 yards at 850 ft/s with the Heavy's...the first group near the top of the paper was me not really even trying because I was shooting my first mag over my chrono to make sure my velocity was still where I had left off from the day before. The second group lower down on the paper was me focusing on my breathing and trigger control and taking a minute between each shot shooting for best accuracy.

So if I were you I would leave your Wildcat set right where she's at because you have her set perfectly...and your getting right at 55 ft./lbs energy. Any higher and you will gain a couple more ft/lbs of energy but the shot count will suffer accordingly...and any small game isn't going to notice the difference. With my Huma reg I am getting 56 shots but that is with filling up to 250 bar...on a 230 bar fill I get 48 shots. Check out these two groups... :) And by the way, the pellets you see stuck in the plywood below the target went through a sheet of 3/4" red oak plywood first when I was doing velocity testing at various reg settings the day before.
Kind regards, Chuck

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No problem crusher, I've probably done it a time or two as well. Chuck that's some great shooting. The Widcats are terrific shooters for sure. I figured I was getting everything the plenum had to give up on every shot since I didn't see a rise in velocity before it started falling off. It's been too cold here to do much the last few days. Your shot count is great. Do you attribute that to the Huma? Do you know where the regulator is setting now?
Jimmy
 
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Hi Jimmy, 
No I don't know what the reg pressure is set at. I got tired of messing around with putting those little gauges in the air bleeder hole and I'm still waiting on my new reg tester from Huma. So for the last few days I have just been changing the regs in both rifles, making note of where the brass screw registration mark in relation to the tape on the top of the regs. Then as I make changes I just shoot over my chrono to see the results of the changes and then go shoot them at the new settings to see what the accuracy is. This is a laborious and tedious process to say the least, on top of which you can only put the reg in and out so many times before the o-rings fail. I have a bunch of them I ordered from AOA a while ago so no problem with replacing them. 

As far as shot count I have to attribute it to the Huma no question. Our Wildcats come with a 10mm plenum spacer ring which centers the FX reg on the breath hole...but I chose 15mm for the plenum size for the Huma reg Huub made for my Wildcat. With the 15mm ring my Huma's rear o-ring is almost even with the breath hole but not quite, so it does not block it off. When I got the prototype reg from him last summer I went to Home Depot and got some tubing and a tubing cutter and started making plenum rings...from 10.5mm up to 15mm. I tried 11mm, 12mm, 13mm, 14mm, and finally 15mm, and the 15mm ring worked best for me so it is the one that I recommended for Huub to include with each of his regs he makes for the Wildcats. The Streamline does not come with any plenum spacer ring, but I chose a 7mm plenum ring for it which moves the reg forward so the rear o-ring is almost just touching the breath hole but not quite. These are the ring sizes Huub includes with the regs for the Wildcats and Streamlines and why. So I get the praise for these ideas or the blame depending on your point of view... :)

Please understand that I am a professional painting contractor...not a professional airgun tuner. I am basically a painter that needed a better regulator when I had problems with the OEM reg and its subsequent replacement. Everything I have learned about all this has been strictly trial and error...and it has cost me a pile of money to replace the parts I damaged or ruined with my errors. But once I started down this road I began reading everything I could about the balance between reg pressure, plenum size, valve dwell time, hammer spring tension, and hammer weight. One of the things I learned is that for higher power settings a larger plenum size is preferable...but with the Wildcat and Streamline we are restricted to the maximum plenum size by the location of the breath hole...we can't put the reg past it or all of our air would leak out. So the only way we could really use a much larger plenum would be to have a machinist make us a new air tube. Then we could choose the location of the breath hole in relation to the size of the plenum we choose, where we would want to situate the regulator in relation to it. I wish I had the ability to do these tests but I do not.

If you want you can use a slightly larger plenum ring Jimmy...I think you can make it 12 or 13 mm which would push the FX reg sleeve forward until the rear o-ring is almost touching the breath hole. One thing a larger plenum does for me is smooth out a jagged shot string and help my chrono numbers become much closer and uniform...It's much smoother and you can make a ring real easy. The inside of the airtube is 28mm...so just get a piece of tubing with an outside diameter slightly less and cut it to the size you want with a little pipe cutter. I only get 4-5 ft/s difference between shots usually, but it takes time for your reg to settle down once you adjust it. So don't be surprised if after a couple hundred shots that you see your chrono numbers stabilize slightly lower than they are today, which is another reason to leave it alone until you get it broke in to your new setting. I would rather put a saddle on a Bengal tiger and try to ride it than go through all this again!
Kind regards, Chuck
 
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Jimmy here are a couple pics to illustrate my point regarding plenum size. These are pics from last summer when I was picking a plenum size for my Robert Lane Lancet MK8 regulator. He shipped it with a plenum spacer ring way too long so I had to cut it down to size...but you can see from the location of the two o-rings on the reg body there wasn't much leeway for plenum size options when you consider that the o-rings have to straddle the breath hole in the air tube or it won't work. These pics will help show what I mean. And from the first picture you can see that to use the plenum spacer ring Robert sent me I would have needed a new air tube so that I could make a hole in it that would be in between the o-rings.

Theoretically this larger plenum would have allowed me to attain the higher velocity I wanted using a much lower reg pressure setting...which in turn should yield higher shot count and smoother shot strings with very small extreme spread. But I can't even imagine what a machine shop would charge to make an aluminum tube that's threaded inside on both ends to match the threading of the endcaps. And that experiment really would require a half dozen air tubes to allow me to experiment with various plenum sizes to find out what the ideal size would be. That I believe is something the manufacturer could afford far better than I could.

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The wall thickness of the ones Huub makes to go along with his regulators is slightly thicker than the OEM rings from FX. The ones from FX are highly polished, very thin, and very elegant.

To have a rifle with a regulator that fluctuates 50 to 100 feet per second up or down every time you take it out to shoot it is maddening. I just wanted my rifles to be the same every time....so that my pellets would hit the exact same spot at a given range every time I took them out to shoot them. And and now I have finally achieved that! Praise God!
 
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Thanks for all the info Chuck, I actually thought about checking the available space available for a slightly longer plenum spacer but of course after I had everything back together. It's times like this that makes an externally adjustable regulator look really tempting. I think that it best to have a slightly larger plenum than needed and not draining it completely with each shot. Seems like the shots would be a little more consistent when it's just the hammer, spring and valve in the equation. I think too small of plenum for the regulated pressure setting adds one more item to that equation. Just my thinking though. Curios why the RL regulator didn't work out. I tried one in a AAS510 project and it gave me a squeaky noise after shots so I returned it an went with a Huma. No squeak after that.
Jimmy
 
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Hi Jimmy, 
You are on the right track thinking about using a larger plenum. In a recent experiment I put an 11mm plenum spacer ring in my Wildcat and adjusted the hammer spring tension as I shot over the chrono while aiming at 50 yard target....then pulled it back apart and put my 15mm ring in and repeated the process. Results? I got the velocity I wanted at much less hammer spring tension, the numbers over the chrono were much more consistent and lots of "duplicates", and the accuracy was considerably better. So go get some real thin tubing and cut a piece so that it will push your reg as far forward as possible - but not far enough to block the breath hole with the rear o-ring. I think if I remember you can go 13mm but don't quote me on that. You will appreciate the results.

As far as an externally adjustable regulator? It would be nice but once you get your gun set up the way you want it, you're probably going to leave it that way and never change it again...As for the Robert Lane reg? I am laughing out loud right now... I am laughing because every time I emailed Bob about some little problem he went ballistic... :) so I naturally had to think up some problems to tease him with. He would probably like to strangle me...I told his wife to go out and buy him a big prickly cactus for Christmas and bill me for it! I should actually put it up for sale or give it to someone I don't like very much? If you would like to have it to play with let me know and I will send it to you along with the bottle brush...

With the Lancet MK8 in my Wildcat I got a real loud ping with each shot! So I watched a video on how to cure that and put a bottle brush inside my airtube to break up the sound wave, and it worked perfect! No more ping! But the numbers were not as tight as I wanted...in a head to head comparison between the RL reg and the Huma, the Huma reg wins hands down as far as I am concerned. When I first convinced Huub to make me a reg for my Wildcat I ordered the RL at the same time and figured I would try both and use the one I liked best. I put the RL in first and used it a while until I got the Huma...and the Huma is everything I hoped for. I haven't given the RL reg a second thought until tonight.

A little advice? If your accuracy ever gets weird on you, shoot your gun over your chrono to see what's up...don't assume your having a scope not holding zero problem. Your OEM reg may begin fluctuating up & down badly someday...and that will be the point where you replace it with a Huma and be very glad you did. Bye the way, I found out what causes them to fail - the stack of Belleville washers needs to be contained in a tunnel that is only slightly bigger than the washers to prevent them from drifting out of place...otherwise as they get worn on the edges over time one or more of them will slip slightly out of place and Bingo you just got a different reg pressure! That reg works fine in the guns that it was designed for where it is inserted into a tunnel in the breech block so the Belleville washers can't get out of place. But instead of designing a new reg for our Wildcats they just took that same old reg and put it in a large sleeve to accommodate the larger diameter of the inside of our air tube. Just check it every now and then by shooting over your chrono and comparing the numbers with the ones you got the time before to keep it honest. 
All the best, Chuck
 
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Hi Crusher,
The Huma regulator for your .25 Wildcat comes with the appropriate size plenum spacer ring of 15mm. If you want to keep your pellets shooting at the same velocity as they are now then specify a setting of 140 bar...if however you want to shoot the 34gr. pellets at around 850-860 ft./s then specify a reg setting of 150 bar. But consider that your 25.4gr. pellets are going to shoot approximately 100 ft/s faster than the 34's do...so if you set up your rifle to shoot the 34's at 850 ft/s for example, that means in turn that the 25.4's will be going out at 950-960 ft/s and they probably won't be as accurate at that high velocity. This means that at some point you are going to have to choose what pellet you want to shoot and set your gun up to shoot it. And just because it shoots one kind of pellet accurately does not mean that it will shoot anything else that accurately at a given velocity. Good luck my friend.
All the best, Chuck
 
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