Episode: 2357
Title: HPR2357: Air Soft Mini Howto
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2357/hpr2357.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:38:55

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This is HPR episode 2,357 entitled Airsoft Minute How-To.
It is hosted by Opera Nero R and is about 14 minutes long and can remain an explicit flag.
The summary is, I talk about my current setup for Airsoft and how we should all have hobbies.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello again, this is Roman Crady, but another heck of a radio in my car, so apologize
for the audio.
What I'm going to talk about today is it's a blazing 92 degrees with a lot of humidity here in
Atlanta, Georgia, but I'm actually headed to an indoor Airsoft arena.
So if any of you have ever heard of it, that's what I'm going to be talking about today.
If you've ever done paintball before or anything like that, it's basically the same thing
with your shooting little plastic BBs.
It's a form of exercise, so if you're not that all that interested, this probably isn't the
best podcast for you, but only you guys in background of where I'm at the past four years with this
type of activity. So I was actually started out. I looked online about four years ago in some change.
My nephew had a birthday party at an Airsoft place, and I'd never heard of Airsoft before.
I think I had seen people with Airsoft guns, but I'd never really known anything about it.
I didn't know how it worked or anything like that. So it's essentially like a BB gun that shoots
plastic BBs, and it's an alternative to paintball. So the first thing I'll say is it's like paintball,
it's very good exercise. You're running around. You're doing a lot of squats, so if you've never
done paintball or Airsoft before, you should go and try at least one time to do one of the other,
because it is extremely good for your legs to do squats and things like that. You're running
around a lot, and there's a lot of, you know, in some cases, a lot of even adrenaline when you're
trying to get to different objectives and things like that. So it started out as just hanging out
with my nephew and doing his birthday party, and I thought, you know, this is really good exercise.
It's outdoor, in some cases, the arena that I was at was an outdoor arena.
Everybody was nice and friendly, but, you know, I'm fairly old now. I'm 36, 37, and I'm the old
guy, you know, the old guy there now, but a bunch of kids there, mostly kids, not a lot of females
there. It doesn't, it's not that all that attractive to females, but what I will say is the reason
I lapsed on to it is because it's a really good form of exercise. I found it kind of fun and
exciting to shoot and people and get objectives and things like that, and he also enjoyed it too,
so I brought him out, and I thought it was something to get him out of the house too.
So I quickly realized that, you know, the rental guns were expensive, and, you know, by the time you
rent a $50 rental, then a $25 helmet, and whatever like that, you could pick up a gun on Craigslist,
and even if it only worked once, you basically, once or twice, you basically get your money back.
So I will say don't go by a brand new gun, don't do any of that crazy stuff.
Go on Craigslist, find some rich, rich guy that bought his kid a bunch of gear, and you test it out,
make sure it shoots the charge of the battery, and all that stuff, and before you purchase it.
So I'll get into kind of the technical aspects of it, as far as cost goes, and what type of gear you
would need. For my gear, I had one gun, I had initially purchased one gun, and I got lucky,
it was an ICS gun with a split gearbox, meaning it's kind of fancy, and I purchased it for 150,
I got the gun, U.S., 150 U.S., I got the gun, a bunch of bullets, basically a mask, and
some clips, and additional clips. So we're probably looking at close to, I don't know, 400 retail,
if not six or seven, or 800 retail. So you never want to buy this stuff new, unless you're,
unless you really are that interested, or really want to start from scratch and everything. So
that was my first purchase. I actually had him take off, you know, I think it was initially
$200 or $200 or something, and I had him take off $50, because I had to do some fixing with it.
So there's two main types of guns currently. There's other types that I won't mention,
but the main one is just the regular gear box, which means you have a motor attached to most,
in most cases, inside of the handle of the gun, and then you have a gear, like a primary gear,
and then like another gear, and then a third gear, and then those three gears together will pull back
a little piston that's on a spring, and then that of course fills up with air, and then that
has like a little o-ring over the top of a, it's for your clip, and you put in the clip, and it
shoots the plastic BB out. So that's technically how it works. When you do take a gear box apart,
it's kind of an art form to get the gear shims, there's shims that go in between each gear box,
and it's kind of can get complicated. So if you ever take one apart, you need to make sure that
you put the shims back in the right order. I haven't had a very good success with that, like I get
as it, again, it's kind of an art form, so it'll probably take you two or three gear boxes to go
through to get the shims right and understand what it feels like, and sounds like when your gun is
firing properly, and the gears are all aligned properly. So that's a bit of work. You can actually
get out of all that just by buying a new gear box for 30 bucks and be done with it.
So anyways, it's a, that's kind of the technical end of it. The other piece of it is
the the air-based guns where it's all air-based. So you have a pipe that goes into a paintball gun type
of tank, which I think are actually the same exact tanks if not the same exact regulators,
and you have regulators just like you do when you scuba dive, but there are different sizes
and different connections and all that stuff. So you have to fortunately have to drive somewhere
to get air in some cases if the place you're going to doesn't have air. The reason these are more
popular is because they're fancier and more expensive. They're about the same type of upkeep
more or less. I've had two gear box guns and my first gun is my workhorse, the second one I had,
I dropped and it shattered into million pieces. So I figured my two, I bought two used guns, I guess
all pay full price for a new one. So I went all out and spent ready to give this amount of money
on an HPA gun or a what they'll call a polar star or an air-powered game or an air-powered gun.
So I've gotten to that recently, probably in the past couple of months. It's a little
quite a bit more expensive, probably twice as expensive as your gear box setups,
but it fires good and fires fast and that's technically what it's about. A lot of the arenas
will have your normal stuff like a paintball place. You'll have a ref and you'll have you'll have a
of course the players you'll have different objectives. It's an honor system so you know you're
playing with a bunch of kids so honestly I don't really care a whole lot. I don't complain a whole
lot. I'm usually doing enough just to defend myself if someone is playing unfairly. I'll try to
defend myself and you know it's usually they're worried against mine if it's a big group or
something like that, but for me I haven't had that many problems except with this particular arena
that's close to my house and that's why I'm driving farther to get to a more nice or more friendly
type of arena. But the objectives are fun. You'll run out of energy pretty quick. You want to stay
hydrated just like any other activity. The community's great. Most people want to help you or help you
fix your gun and it can get expensive to charge or to have people retail people fix your guns.
So I would try to advise against trying to have maybe the first couple of times you figure your
gun out. You pay somebody to get a part and look at it and watch the videos and stuff like that. But
oftentimes these places have teenagers working on your gear and you know honestly I wouldn't want
somebody working on my quite expensive gun that doesn't know anything about or may or may not
know anything about my gun or how it works or maybe they just don't care. So there's not a whole
lot of good engineers that work on guns in that regard. So there's a lot of people that play
that will help you understand what's wrong and maybe help you fix it. So it can get fairly
complicated fairly quickly and that's why I brought this up because it's kind of a it's kind of
a hacking thing. It's kind of a if you're kind of a tinker you're always putting something on the
gun or modifying something or setting up some kind of protective making some kind of new protective
gear. To that end I wear two of the whatever sweat shirt things whatever they call them cool shirts.
Mainly I wear two because one is not enough not enough layers because it hurts pretty well and
you can actually get scars on your hands and arms if you get shot on your arms and hands directly.
So be mindful of that. You can go and get shot and bleed and have your arm bleed but if you don't
take care of it and put like neospore on it with one of those little circular band aids you're
going to end up getting a getting a in seven miles your destination will be on the right.
I don't know why the audio went off there.
Anyways the you had to kind of wear the right gear and wear long sleeves traditionally.
I bought some paintball gloves or paintball elbow pads or griefs basically
that if you do get shot in the arms it's not going to bleed. That was the biggest thing for me was
getting shot in the arms and not paying attention and having little white marks. I probably have
four or five white marks on each one of my arms and then I realized that I need some more protection
outside of you know a couple of layers of clothing for for that. So that's how much it can hurt.
I've actually gotten shot on my thumb and my thumb has got kind of a permanent
damage on my thumb knuckle so you want to wear kind of full-size gloves. The canyx gloves are
actually pretty good. You can usually find some some other types that are that are
got good ratings on Amazon for whatever type of gear you're looking for. I wouldn't buy it retail.
I would buy everything offline. That's about it. It's fun. I've been doing it for four years.
I've just left an arena because they've got a little bit too much commercialized and
a little their refs kind of a revolving door. Their referees don't really understand
how to control the groups and teams and things. So I'd left an arena but outside of that I have a blast
when I go this the place I'm heading towards is an indoor and actually indoor place that's
going to be pretty ridiculously hot. So it's really good exercise. You run around. Some of these
places have huge outdoor fields where you get shot and you go respond. It's going to take you
five minutes to respond because you have to walk back all the way. So in that regard that's
pretty much all I can say. I haven't had any problems with this new gun that I bought that I
spent a bunch of money on. I've probably been out four or five times for close to six hours each
and I haven't had any issues. You'll want to bring snacks and things like that. Plenty of liquids
and if you can go with friends or sign up with the team that's always fine. If you can't find an arena
you can actually start one kind of a shadow arena where maybe there's a park nearby or maybe
there's an open area near maybe a company or a sometimes you can go in the back of office complexes
or places that are open or close during the weekend right. Big office buildings and office
complexes are are good places to do kind of that type of activity and then when they kick you out
you can just go online and form up somewhere else based on based on whatever else is going on
in that area. So you don't actually have to go to an airsoft arena you can create your own
you know community neon something like meet up and meet up that way with your with your friends
if there's no where else you're out in the sticks and there's no where else you have to meet up.
I think that's it I've talked about you know the exercise that's the main part gets you out of
that house get you exercising get you thinking about something besides computers to find a hobby
and that's one thing I'll say is if anybody listening if all you do is computers and all you do is
technology and screens and internet and TV and whatever that's not necessarily a hobby it has
to be something that hopefully gets you outside and out of the house and and gets you involved
with the community. So try to find a hobby and that hobby for me was fish and some other
couple of things but here lately it's just been the airsoft stuff because I don't get a whole
lot of exercise like most of the people in this field of security and peers. Anyways I hope
to help somebody out and I apologize for the audio but I just don't get a whole lot of time to
sit in silence in this in this life that I've chosen. All right have a great one.
And submit submit a podcast that too.
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