I feel a little obligated to throw my experience in. I was very fortunate in my journey to Raptor ownership as far as how long it took to get mine. I picked up a used one so I had it immediately, but I was not very impressed with how it felt, handled, shot, the efficiency, hell even the trigger was pretty bad. There was some scratching or grating sound when cocking on top of all that. Even with all this going against it, I wanted to give it a fair trial before I gave up. I owned a Flex for a while and really loved it, ended up selling it at the beginning of the pandemic when we got sent home, which ended up only being a couple weeks before my boss had us back at work. I don't make enough to just quit, we aren't given any sick days and there's no health insurance, so working with people who think all this is a hoax is a real joy..... Sorry, I managed to stumble onto a soapbox there for a second..
Anywho, I got to it one weekend. First thing to address was how it felt to hold. The picatinny forearm is insanely uncomfortable to hold, luckily MagPul makes some little grips that snap on to pic rails, a pack of 4 took care of that. Next was the pistol grip. The stock one is Ergo brand. It was narrow and didn't give me a good attack on the trigger. This is because it didn't have a beavertail which is needed to have your trigger finger line up with the trigger. Otherwise your finger lines up about 3/4" too high. Replaced with a Hogue with beavertail and fixed that. Next up was the cheek rest. For some reason, JSAR decided against running the 3 slots on the cheek rest all the way up, giving less vertical adjustment and forcing your sight line to be like 3" above the bore. I took a chainsaw file and worked the slots until they were all flush with the top line of the cheek rest. This allowed me to move the rest further down to a comfortable position. This one should be done on all of them as it wouldn't cost any additional to make them that way. I never understood limiting adjustabililty in favor of aesthetics. On to the trigger. I managed to get it close to where I wanted, but I liked the Timney I had before. And I may not have it adjusted perfectly, in fact I'm pretty sure I dont. I mean it is good, I've just had better. I also replaced the regulator gauge with a larger gauge with a range from 1000-3000psi. I have no clue why they wanted to put a 1-6 x 1000 smaller gauge for the reg side. Its nowhere near being able to tell what reg pressure you are actually at. While I had it de-gassed I looked into the noise coming from the hammer. This is what I found:
Finished tearing it down and found this inside the hammer chamber. A piece of foil and some chunks of metal. I was a little sick seeing that, but after scouring the rest of the parts, I couldn't find anywhere these parts would have come from, so I cleaned and lubed everything and reassembled. Everything worked fine after that.
I got a .30 barrel for my Raptor. Even though the site has them listed as back ordered I got mine in less than 2 weeks. Installation was easy. Now came the tuning. This is where the Raptor both shines and sucks. The shine part is that this powerplant is insanely tuneable, you just got to understand how each adjustment works with the others. There are 3 adjustments to be made, reg pressure, hammer tension, and hammer strike or dwell. To get the power or efficiency this gun is capable of I had to tune each of those 3 adjustments. The Raptor is not what I would call an "out of the box" kind of gun, this is the part that sucks. It needs to be set up. A chrony is not an option. The way I tuned mine was first adjust the reg to what I felt like would be a good pressure, going off the airgundepot vids with Travis I set it to 1800psi. Next I set the dwell adjustment all the way in so the valve was opened as far as possible with each shot. I was wasting a ton of air set like this, so the Raptor can handle much longer barrels. Then I backed out the hammer tension until I saw the speeds drop off then brought it back maybe a 1/4 turn. Then I went after the dwell adjustment and started backing it off, reducing how long the valve opened, again going until the speeds started dropping off and then back just a hair. I did spend the better part of a day doing the tear down and setup, but now it shoots 44gn JSB at 880 and I around 50 shots on the reg, from a 3500psi fill (I'll chrony a full string here soon). And I have the 350cc tank. The shot cycle is super smooth now and the impact at 40-50 yards is so much louder than the shot itself it's funny. So I have my reg at 1800, hammer spring with almost 0 pretension, and the valve dwell at maybe halfway so I have no doubt that it can hit the power that is claimed. Seeing what it took to get the .30 pellets performing like I wanted, I know that all the same things would need to be done to shoot slugs. I have a NSA sample pack to go thru and a pack of Griffin 73gn BTHP that look absolutely nasty. I hope they do well. I don't doubt the Raptor can get them up to speed. I'd love to see MOA at 200yds with them. I'm happy with it.
