[Off-topic] xaccers:
I wonder if I knew them...

I used to play, starting in 2004, even went to Arnigeddon05 (Arnie's Airsoft forum annual event) and to Ground Zero international events in the New Forest a couple of times.

I still have Sarah, my modified Classic Army G36. While normally they run on 8.4V or 9.6V NiMH batteries, I ran her on an 11.1V Lipol. Gave her an awesome rate of fire, so much so that I had to build a self feeding 6000 rnd box mag (which had UV LEDs in it for glow in the dark tracer bbs).

The extended bursts (of over a minute) tended to make the pistol grip which houses the motor too hot to touch.

So I reconfigured her into a semi-auto sniper and removed one of the cells from the battery making it 7.4V.

With a decent scope and 20 inch silencer I'd hide in a bush and pick people off without them knowing where I was :)

I used to repair guns for other players, and then got into providing rentals, eventually having about 30 at one time. Most were made by JG, which produce Tokyo Marui clones, but designed to run at higher than Japanese power levels. They have a 1J muzzle energy limit (which is 328fps with a 0.2g bb, but I have a feeling they've now got a 300fps limit over there) where as in the UK generally 1.35J is considered the limit (as an air rifle more powerful than that is considered lethal and therefore a firearm) - incidentally a paintball marker has a muzzle energy of 8-12J and are actually firearms, but the CPS has decreed the shouldn't be treated as one, even though they can kill).

TM guns are considered to have great build quality, but they are not designed to be upgraded, so the gears have nylon bushes rather than metal, and they tend to be softer so more likely to strip teeth. The pistons too are more likely to fail if you fit a more powerful spring in them or run them at too high a rate of fire.

In the UK we've got the poorly written Violent Crime Reduction act, and I believe it's sections 36 and 38 that cover airsoft, as we use realistic imitation firearms (something that actually looks like a real gun) and imitation firearms (something gun shaped but may be considerably different in size or predominantly coloured one of a list of bright colours).

Basically it is illegal:

for someone under 18 to buy a RIF or IF

for someone to sell a RIF to anyone

for someone to sell a IF to anyone under 18

for someone to import a RIF

for someone to modify a IF to make it look realistic (paint a IF black)

for someone to manufacture a RIF

However, being airsofters we have a defence against the above offences (except the buying/being sold ones if you're under 18) as long as the law was broken for the purpose of re-enactment of military and law enforcement scenarios for the purpose of recreation covered by public liability insurance.

Still following?

So a parent can buy a bright green gun, give it to their teenage kid, and they can spray it black. The kid is breaking the law, but as it's for airsoft he's got a legal defence.

Now, the problem is, how does an airsoft shop like Action Hobbys, 6mm, Airsoft Armouries, Zero1, or Wolf "over charge you when we can Armouries know it's selling to someone for the purpose of airsoft and therefore covering themselves?

Well, the government agreed that if someone has been to an airsoft site at least 3 times in at least 2 months then they can be registered on a database run by the airsoft retailers association (UKARA). So the airsoft shop checks the database for your membership and will then sell to you.

It's resulted in one instance of armed police being told they can't buy airsoft glocks identical to the real ones they're carrying!

Now, you may look at all that and think "Blimey, that's a really badly written law" and you'd be right, for instance, it was brought in after the Sun ran several stories of kids taking cheap MP5Ks into schools or buying them from market stalls (cheap springers that can barely shoot through paper) and waving them about in public.

You even had Labour MPs claiming they can be converted to shoot real bullets, and claiming that one was bought from a corner shop in Liverpool and used to shoot a passer by in the back crippling him (it was actually a converted Brocock which have been illegal for years that he was shot with, the MP had gotten two stories mixed up thanks to Mothers Against Guns).

So this law was brought in to prevent chavs waving fake guns around in public (we already had laws to tackle that but they just weren't being enforced), but it's so badly written, if said chav is over 18, it's not illegal for them to buy a RIF, it's only illegal to sell it to them, so if a corner shop hadn't been visited by trading standards and told to remove their cheap springer RIFs, said 18 year old chav could buy RIF glock and he'd not be breaking the law!

It sucks but it's what we managed to get agreement for, after the retailers and several site owners lobbied parliament.

So if you want to get into it in the UK and you're under 18, you need your parents to buy a brightly coloured imitation firearm, and then a couple of cans of krylon. I recommend watching the full version of Shooter for spraying ideas, unless you want the airfix lancaster bomber look :)

If you're over 18, then you can either buy a gun on the site on the day and play with it (bit hard to prove the sale wasn't for airsoft if you then have 50 witnesses to say you ran around the woods playing airsoft with it :D ) or go 3 times in at least 2 months and get your UKARA membership. Most sites offer gun rentals. I highly recommend Finmere near Buckingham, there a lovely bunch who I used to play with until I ended up spending too much time doing the rentals, gun repairs, burgers etc, and my belly outgrew my camo :(

Here's Sarah