FX Impact Magazine take-down

Hi rp
If you load the mag with one pellet turn the plastic cover back as if you were to load the mag,ot should enable you to remove to remove the lid without completely stripping the mag
Rgds
Steve

Here you Go

This may be hard to put into words... but I'll try;

Taking the magazine completely apart is easily doable. Similarly it is fairly easy to re-assemble which I'll get to at the end.

During disassembly about half the time the clock spring will insist on getting ahead of you and get tangled up on itself. One end of the spiral spring has a hook that grabs a hole in the mag's outer body, the other has a long straight leg that slides into a hole on the inner drum. That long leg is usually what gets caught up if you aren't able to gradually lift the drum's pusher notch over the outer body pellet stop boss and simultaneously unwind it before it turns inside out. Worse case scenario if it does become a "bird's nest" you can carefully grasp the end with the long leg and feed it back out of the tangle, at which point the spring will snap back from a scary looking mess to it's correct form. Just be careful because it is fairly thin wire, and any gorilla-fisted attempts to untangle it may result in a deformed spring.

Reassembly is straight-forward. Inserting each end of the spring into it's proper holes, and carefully winding it at least one full turn past it's neutral state, and capturing the clear lid with the screw. The rubber o-ring can stand a spec of silicon grease, but is not necessary, since the friction it imparts is actually beneficial during loading to keep the cover where you place it for each pellet insertion, and that same friction does NOT impede the job the spring is doing.

Also note the set screw on the forward side of the magazine acts as a limiter for the assembly screw, carefully positioned it allows tightening the larger rear screw without cracking the clear rear cover.

In the above post I mentioned putting at LEAST one revolution pre-load on the spring. One will work but 2-3 is preferable to assure reliability.

I apologize if the following ramble has been covered elsewhere;

The previous video recommends 3-4 winds to the spring, which may indeed be correct but poses an increased likelihood of distorting pellets as they are pushed forward by the probe, due to the pellet skirt being shaved by each pellet cavity of the inner drum at roughly the '8 o-clock position as viewed from the rear. If you've ever noticed small pellet skirt shavings inside the rear window of the magazine this is why. The knife edge of each pellet pocket radius on the plastic drum was cutting my pellets. I remedied this completely by burnishing a very slight bevel into each rear pellet pocket radius of the inner drum, as viewed from the rear, much like a feed ramp so that the pellet can still overhang the rear face of inner drum against the aft window, yet not be cut or deformed when being fed forward and out into the barrel. This burnishing is only needed on the left half of the radius (viewed from the rear) since that is the portion applying force to hold the pellet in the clockwise advancement stage when it reaches the loading port.

Hi Ziabeam,

What did you use to burnish the pellet pockets in the mag?

Seth,
I used the shank of a small drill bit by hand. Any piece of hard smooooooth steel smaller than the rear radius should work. I stood the drum (removed from mag) on it's edge like a wheel sits, on top of a folded towel to protect the down side as burnishing pressure was applied, and "aggressively caressed" the left half of each pellet bay's razor edge facing the rear, with the burnishing tool laying a bit steeper than the angle of the pellet's skirt. As you proceed you will notice a slight deformation of each bevel out onto the aft face of the drum, which won't hurt anything since there is clearance between the drum and the plastic window. Also you should begin to see a shiny smooth bevel forming where the rear of the drum use to cut and shave the pellets. After this treatment ZERO lead shaving occurs, groups improved and feeding is noticeably smoother.

While burnishing I kept the thumb of my non burnishing hand in the pellet bay counterclockwise of the one being addressed (to the left) to keep the burnishing tool from slipping or climbing over the peak which would cause an unsightly cow-lick to be formed on the pointy area between each pellet bay.

PRIOR to performing this take a raw pellet and try to simulate shaving lead on the lower left edge of any pellet bay/pocket. If your magazine shows signs of lead shavings you will easily be able to simulate and test your progress. ( It is surprising how efficiently the raw plastic drum whittles the pellet skirts. After the treatment the pellet should glide freely over the rear edge, with no lead slivers or shavings being formed.

Hope that made sense.