Here's the long-winded narrative of my month-long investigation. I apologize for the wall of text that follows, but hope it may be helpful to someone. Keep reading, I promise it has a twist ending you won't expect.

Was it a chop, barrel break or blender? Didn't care at the time because, well, I was trying not to get shot. But after this happened on two more occasions (on different days) it was starting to irritate me. Always at the beginning of the day, too.

Well, we all know the cyclone doesn't chop ( humor me for a second) and I didn't have any shells in the cyclone. So - it must be the field's thin-shelled paint in my flatline. Fine. I switched to my SP Progressive and didn't have any more problems... Until, that is, day four. This time I started playing with the SP barrel. I'm playing, and within the first hour, right in the heat of a firefight I see orange goo flying out of my barrel. Suck, time to retreat while I squeegee that out (otherwise, I'm never gonna hit anything).

Note that I break down my entire marker and clean it after every game (not necessarily right away, but always before the next game.) So, today, I decided to figure out exactly what was happening. We can probably eliminate the flatline as the culprit, since it happened with the straight-bored barrel as well (plus there is paint in the cyclone). Is it the R/T's fault? Nah, I have it set to barely shoot faster that 9-10 balls/second. Can't be the WarGear paddles, because they're so nice and squishy. I sanded down the edges anyways... I know, I know. I hear some of you laughing now. "Its that el-cheapo cyclone upgrade kit you keep talking about." Perhaps... but the ratchet always stops in the right position, both when manually advancing or firing. Determined to figure it out, I took my nice-and-clean A5 into the garage and loaded the hopper up with V-balls.

I shot approximately 30 rounds as fast as I could, then... click. The hammer did not re-cock. Cool. I took the hopper off and saw a V-ball half in the chamber with the front bolt lodged on it. So, its definitely a chop. But the paddles were in the right position - the ratchet advanced to the proper position and the paddle was attempting to feed the ball into the chamber. It appeared that the bolt came down too quickly, not that the cyclone didn't feed fast enough.

Ah, ha! Trigger sear problem. But, I thought of that before and had verified that the sear and hammer were square and hardly worn down at all. I took the grip off anyways and thought "wow, there's a lot of oil in here." I wiped up the excess oil from the sear and bottom of the hammer. Reassembled everything, filled up my hopper and shot another 200 rounds without incident.

Then, it clicked. Like I said, I meticulously clean and oil my marker. Then, for good measure, when I'm done I put about 6 drops of oil in the ASA, gas up, and dry fire about 20 times. Then I pack it away for the next game. Well, aparently that's too much oil and that causes the hammer to slip off the sear. This also explains why it always happens in the beginning of the day. By the end of the day, all the excess oil has vented out, eliminating the chop problem and leaving no obvious indication of the excess oil when I go to clean up.

Lesson learned? Manually oil your blow-back marker, or do the quickie ASA method, but not both. If you have a chop after cleaning, take the grip off and verify there isn't an excessive amount of oil on the sear/hammer. Who would've thought you could use too much oil?

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Good process of elimination there. Job well done. Moral of the story...don't over lube guns.

in some cases too much lube can be worse than not enough.
some rep for you

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Proud Canadian Baller
Kit: A5, camo job, polished internals, 14" Smart Parts Progressive barrel. Borrowed Opsgear G36 stock. 24oz CO2 w/ remote and slide check. Neat homemade sling. MORE TO COME
Vents Goggles and Multicam

Yep, usually a little goes a long way. Glad you figured out the problem.

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http://www.PureExcessIndustries.com
Pure Lube Review on X7og.net

Just a quick update. Went through about 1000 rounds today without incident! Hopefully I've eliminated the last of my A5's gremlins.

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I had the same problem today! Ball kept getting caught by a bolt, however when I toned it down from 15 BPS to 10 BPS it actually seemed to have fixed it.....

Although I do think I over oiled.

I say something to this effect in my YouTube videos. The only parts that need oil are parts with point to point friction, and they usually have an o-ring there. I hear of all sorts of people who oil their Receivers from front to back. that's just to much oil. The only places that need lube in the A-5 receivers are the o-rings, and then you can put a drop or two of oil in the ASA to oil the inside of the Valve, but that's all you need to do.

for bringing this to light!

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great deduction.this is what we call "experience".Good for you.
great writup & thanks for informing us!

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