| Re: The Tippmann A-5 For Dummies + Some General Paintball Info
iii. Trigger Mods (Mechanical)
I am only listing mods here that have to do with your stock mechanical trigger. However, you may find some of these useful on either the RT or E-Grip. You’re just not going to notice as much of a difference. A combination of the mods below will give a surprisingly light and short mechanical trigger.1. Pen Spring Mod
Probably the easiest and one of the most effective trigger mods you can do is the Pen Spring Mod. This mod replaces your stock trigger spring for a lighter one. All this mod requires is a clicky pen spring and some wire cutters. However, if you find a spring from anywhere that you want to use, go ahead. Find a clicky pen spring that is the tension of your liking and then cut it to fit in the area between your trigger and trigger spring mount. You’re now done. 2. Trigger Stop
Another easy mod to do is the trigger stop. You can use either a piece of a Q-Tip or the plastic thing that holds the ink in a pen. That is usually better as I have found that Q-Tips tend to get squished and become ineffective fast. What this mod does is stop the travel of the trigger just after the trigger trips the sear. The stock trigger has some extra travel and this mod can take off a couple useless millimeters in trigger travel. Basically, all you have to do is cut your Q-Tip down until it fits in your trigger spring. You’ll have to experiment with the right length for this but just keep slowly shaving off extra material on the Q-Tip until it stops the travel of the trigger just as the trigger trips the sear.3. Trigger Push
For lack of a better name, I am going to call this the Trigger Push. Another simple mod, all you need for this is a couple thin pieces of electrical tape. The object of this mod is to push the trigger forward until it is just before the area where the trigger trips the sear. All you have to do is put small pieces of electrical tape in the top of the trigger until you have achieved this. Combined with a Trigger Stop, this makes your trigger pull very short, down to only a couple millimeters.4. Magnetic Trigger
I could use some help here with a "how to".
-Marmaduke
g. Upgrades
Upgrades are manufactured things that increase the performance of your marker. Unlike a mod, you buy it instead of make it yourself or by modifying a pre-existing part. In this section, I will go over some of the most popular upgrades for the A-5. i. Firepower
These are the upgrades that make your marker shoot faster. Not FPS, but BPS. The speed limit of a paintball is 300fps so buying anything to make your marker shoot faster in that sense is a waste of money.1. E-Grip
The E-Grip is an electronic grip frame that uses a solenoid activated by a micro switch to shoot a firing pin into the sear causing it to initiate the firing process of the marker. The A-5 now has 3 boards that you can install in your grip frame so I will briefly go over all of them. Another popular add-on to the E-Grip is the JCS or APE trigger. I will go over them as well. Many people prefer the E-grip over the RT as you don’t have to sweet spot it for it to work and installation is pretty straight forward. No fiddling is involved in tuning, just adjustment of firing modes.a. Old Stock Board
The old stock board that came with the original E-Grips was capped at 17bps in semi-auto and 15bps in all other modes. Modes included were Semi, 3 shot burst, auto, auto response and turbo. Auto response and turbo worked fairly the same as when triggered, they would fire on the pull and release but in Turbo, it would turn on if it sensed more than one trigger pull in a second. Otherwise, it would stay semi auto. Auto response, it would always be on but if on the pull, you held the trigger down for more than a second, it would only fire one shot.b. WAS Board
The WAS (Wicked Air Sports) board now comes stock as the E-Grip frame. Capped at 30bps w/programmable ramping, it can really let the paint fly. There are many people however that don’t like the WAS board as it has an auto shut-off of 20min which may be a problem in Scenario games where it is very possible not to see any action for 20 minutes at a time. Also, for you to engage the full auto mode, you must first pull the trigger and take three shots which many people find very annoying. The WAS board is available as an aftermarket upgrade for older e-grips that did not come with it stock.c. APE Board
The APE (Advanced Paintball Electronics) is the most popular aftermarket board available for the A-5. Capped at 25bps, it is not as fast as the WAS board, you’re still throwing a hell of a lot of paint at your target. The APE board offers a ton of different firing modes like the WAS board but it doesn’t have a 20min. auto shut off and full auto mode starts the second you pull the trigger. APE also makes an aftermarket Double Triggerd. JCS/APE Double Trigger
The JCS and APE triggers are for E-Gripped A-5s only. They will not work on a mechanical A-5 or one with an RT. However, they work wonders on an electric A-5. Many people say that the E-Grip isn’t truly complete without one of these triggers and I whole heartedly agree. These triggers are very adjustable and easy to walk. I have never had experience with the APE trigger but I owned a JCS trigger on my A-5 and it was a thing of beauty. It made it very easy to walk my A-5 to high rates of fire on semi and max out the board’s potential on turbo and auto response. Be warned though that these triggers can take a while to set up. Expect about half an hour or longer to get everything working correctly. But the fiddling around is really worth it as these triggers do wonders.2. Response Trigger
The response trigger is a mechanism that uses extra air like the cyclone to help you reset the trigger. People are able to do what is called “sweet spotting” which is where you apply a certain pressure to the trigger which balances out the with the piston that resets the trigger to make a kind of full auto effect. Stock RTs can reach speeds of up to 17bps and there are some “Super RTs” that people have done to make their markers fire up to insane rates sometimes surpassing 25bps. I will discuss these Super RTs a little later.a. RT Mods
Here are some mods that may help you use your RT to its max. Please note that some people feel a double trigger also helps when it comes to sweet spotting the RT.i. LP Hoses
Contact Tippmann and order that you would need to run your RT off of a Low Pressure compressed air tank. Using these with a HPA or CO2 tank will allow more air to get to the RT which will make it shoot faster.ii. Trigger Stop
This is done the same as the trigger stop in section IIIfiii2 but you want to make it so the trigger stops on the sweet spot of the RT. This makes it so all you have to do is pull the trigger back until it hits the trigger stop and it basically sweet spots itself.iii. Drinking Straw Mod
A very simple mod, all you need is a drinking straw. Cut the straw down so it will fit over the pin that the sear rest on in the trigger assembly. Not the pin the sear is pushed through, but the one that the front of the sear rest against. This will almost instantly double your sweet spot.b. Super RT
If you were on the old A5OG before it was disbanded, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear super RT is the infamous Vulcan created by ~Finsec. This thing is a beast. Some others also created some super RTs that could reach and sometimes break the 25bps mark. However, no one would ever tell exactly how they achieved this. They would however, let you ask questions about the mods done and they would answer them. What was amazing about them is that they still allowed you to use the Cyclone. While this isn’t as big of a deal now with QEV kits and aftermarket ratchets available, it was quite a feat back then. ii. Barrels
In today’s world of paintball, choosing a barrel can very difficult. There are so many options to choose from including rifling, porting, counter-boring, length and kits. It is very easy to get lost in the immense amount of options. With the A-5 though, Glenn Palmer (The god of Paintball) concluded that 12” is the best length for a barrel. Rifling is completely unnecessary due to the physics involved with a paintball. It changes shape and becomes elongated during its travel so rifling may actually have a negative effect. Porting helps stabilize the paintball in flight and keeps it from moving around at all. It also quiets the marker. On some barrels, such as the Flatline or Palmer’s Brass Barrel, porting doesn’t have any affect on the travel of the paintball. I have no idea what counter-boring is so I’m not going to comment on that. And no, a 21” barrel will not make your marker more accurate or shoot further. A barrel that long is more of a novelty item than anything.1. Flatline/Apex
The Flatline and Apex are very unique in the fact that they are the only two barrels that will actually affect the range of your marker. However, they do it in two very different ways. The Flatline is actually a curved barrel while the Apex has an adjustable lip on it that puts a backspin on the paintball much like a “hop-up” system on an Airsoft (gag) gun. Many people prefer the Apex because it can be attached to basically any barrel, has decent accuracy, doesn’t break paint as much, is adjustable, and shoots further than the Flatline.a. Cleaning the Flatline
The best way to clean the Flatline is by both taking off the shroud and boiling it in water, or by rinsing the barrel out over the sink with very hot water and a swab. Make sure the barrel is completely dry before using it again or you are going to suffer horrific inaccuracy and more broken paint. If in a pinch on the field, I have found that the flexible battle swabs (fuzzy ones) do a adequate job of cleaning it out for a temporary fix. 2. Barrel Kits
Barrel Kits offer the user the ability to “match” the paint to their barrel by choosing different backs or inserts. The thought is that the best match offers increased accuracy. Some people hate them while others swear by them. One thing to be careful with when using a barrel kit is to make sure the inserts or back and tip line up correctly. Otherwise, you’re just asking to break paint on a seam. A good match can be found by using what is called the “blow test”. If when you put a paintball in the barrel, and it doesn’t roll out, you should be able to blow the paintball through without getting purple in the face.3. Palmer’s Brass Barrel
Palmer’s barrel has recently become very popular and I have seen a lot of questions asked about it so I thought I would briefly write about it. Brass is the best material to use for paint as it is naturally the slickest. Palmer, through testing has come up with the best boring on the inside of the barrel for the average A-5 valve. You can have a barrel custom made to “match” the valve of your marker. Palmer believes that the matching of the valve to the barrel is more important than matching the paint to the barrel. Palmer’s markers are elliptically honed so that it follows the way a paintball stretches out in your barrel. This makes it so that you can shoot any almost any size and quality of paint just like you would Marbilizers on any other barrel. The Brass Barrel can be ordered with spiral porting, or double spiral porting as well as being powder-coated black or nickel plated. A 12” Black powder-coated barrel with no porting is around $50(USD). You must order directly from Palmer.4. Other
There are a whole host of barrels out there to choose from. Popular choices for the A-5 include the JJ Ceramic which is a great barrel at an even greater price ($35USD). The Lapco Big Shot and Sure Shot are also very popular along with the CP, St!ffi and Dye barrels. I can NOT recommend the Tippmann Sniper or Werks barrels as they are basically just glorified stock barrels.
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