Modded 25 Armada, Tuning is Difficult, Pulling The Bolt Back Moreso
- Thread starter Maskeno
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Okay, I pulled the bolt, cleaned it, lubed it (just the bolt itself) with balistol. Swapped the studs on the bolt and the hammer, and lightly lubed the hammer tube with silicone grease. It definitely seems a LOT smoother. We'll see later.
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Just a heads up, silicone is great for plastics and elastomers (rubber) but is a poor lubricant for metal-on-metal. Virtually anything else will work better.
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Alright you magnificent bastard, one of those three things did the trick. I can't tell if it was lubing the bolt, the tube, or switching the studs, maybe all three, but it's night and day now. There's a dirty joke in there somewhere about pulling out, lol.
I'm definitely thinking something was up with the stud. The one in the bolt was a lot harder to take out, but since the hammer has so much wiggle room it doesn't seem to be a problem there. Accuracy is another story, but I might have just been over-excited. I have more headroom for tuning now too, as it requires 2 and 1/2 turns to hit that 40 foot pound sweet spot. As opposed to 3/4 of a turn.
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Oh excellent! I’m glad you got it straightened out. Now you can enjoy tuning it.
The Marauders are very simple, and once you’ve had it apart it’s fairly easy to trouble shoot issues. I do complete dissassemblies on my airguns about once a year (In the winter when I have lots of downtime.) and I apply a thin film of silicone grease to every surface.
To illustrate the value of silicone .... I have a gen1 marauder that I pre-ordered when they first came out... that rifle was hand pumped for many years with no moisture filter of any kind and to this day there is ZERO corrosion of any kind in it. Now everything I own gets a thin protective layer of silicone grease inside.
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Silicone applied to pressurized areas (air tube) is effective against moisture and corrosion, and carries no risk of detonation unlike a petroleum-based lubricant.
Applied to metal surfaces that experience high load concentrations, it is a poor lubricant and does almost nothing to prevent galling between the hammer and tube as several Marauder owners have attested to over the years.
A viscous lubricant on a hammer also tends to negatively affect the consistency of the strike. If a wet lubricant is used, better it be a very light oil like 3-in-1 machine oil or pneumatic tool oil...preferably blended with molybdenum disulfide powder, that way when the oil migrates away over time, the moly continues to lubricate.
Applied to metal surfaces that experience high load concentrations, it is a poor lubricant and does almost nothing to prevent galling between the hammer and tube as several Marauder owners have attested to over the years.
A viscous lubricant on a hammer also tends to negatively affect the consistency of the strike. If a wet lubricant is used, better it be a very light oil like 3-in-1 machine oil or pneumatic tool oil...preferably blended with molybdenum disulfide powder, that way when the oil migrates away over time, the moly continues to lubricate.
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So I tried both for a while. Shot consistency does seem to be better with dry lube, as I can now get sub 1/2" groups, but the silicone felt a lot smoother to pull, and produced less spring noise. Shot consistency was okay.
Hard to say which I liked more.
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