ICS M16 A4 Upgrade advice?

[A guy with a gun]

Hi all,


I'm looking to upgrade the internals of my ICS M16 with the split gearbox design. I'm looking to increase the ROF/Trigger response on it as stock it's pretty dire. I was thinking of replacing the piston with an SHS (the stock has plastic teeth on it) and replace the motor with a high speed (perhaps lonex a1?) I'd rather not mess with the gears as I wouldn't have a clue on where to start with these and will more than likely install them wrong.

Also looking for recommendations on mosfets?

I will also be looking to be using a 11.1v LiPo.

Can anyone recommend anything different or let me know if any of this is incompatible with the split gearbox design?

Thanks in advance x

[sj_asc]

Having a plastic toothed piston isn't always a negative, particularly in this type of build so long as its a suitable type of plastic and the back end design is right. The ICS, like the Marui is Nylon based, and for the initial pickup side, this is a better suited material.

Best advise as has always been is to avoid polycarbonate pistons all together, and look for something that is POM or Nylon based, that goes for both body and the initial rack gear teeth (There are are certain builds where this would be an exception)

Polycarb pistons and many full metal rack gear pistons often suffer premature failure on the initial pickup side - the issue with this is that its almost impossible to see signs on maintenance, it will just fail without warning at some point - in contrast, this is very rare for well setup config using the POM or Nylon variants, and signs of wear and can be identified on maintenance intervals and changed out accordingly.

At uk power level, id advise something like the Prometheus Hard piston, that is POM based and has 7 steel teeth, but the pickup side is plastic and has additional side reinforcement. This piston, though a bit more expensive but is very high quality and made in Japan, through experience I know is very durable and will last many years of hard use at speed.

It is also highly recommended to adjust the piston spacing for angle of engagement correction. This also requires modification to tooth 2 and parts of teeth 3 and 4. There are plenty of guides on how to do this - I will say though that the Promethus piston is a little more difficult to modify than the standard design piston because the plastic teeth have side wall reinforcement - just be sure not to cut into this when you trim the teeth. I can send an example over if you wish to take this route and get stuck.

Gear set - The ICS gears are actually pretty durable steel. The Bevel gear and pinion gear teeth profiles are slightly different to the normal profile and as such, if you are swapping out motor for a non ICS part, you should either change the Bevel gear for a TM spec one, or pop the old ICS motor pinion gear on the new motor - if you just drop the new motor in, you may find that its a little noisy otherwise!

Mosfets - I can't stress how important this is, particularly for any high speed build and or where Lipo and high current motors are being used. A decent simple MOSFET will be more than enough to help your trigger response and protect your trigger contacts, but if you wish to have additional functions there are computer controlled units on the market like those from BTC and Gate.
If you want a Simple FET that will get the job done with no extra functions, something like the Firestorm FET will work well and costs £10 posted and comes with a complete 16AWG loom.
For best Performance, I would recommed that you would run the low resistance wiring throughout and use low resistance connectors such as deans to remove any bottlenecks in the loom.

Motor - The Lonex A1 is very fast, with an 11.1v High drain Lipo and the stock spring, you would be well into the 40's and not safely. That motor also draws a lot of current, so even if you were to configure the rest of the upper end for this kind of speed, it would be essential to run the MOSFET. If you want to run the 11.1v pack, persoanlly I would suggest sticking to the stock motor, this will run cooler, draw less from the battery - Going over to 11.1v and MOSFET with the stock motor, I'm sure you will be more than satisfied with the trigger response and rate of fire will also rise significantly.

Main Spring - If you did intend on going for the A1 or similar motor and running it with the 11.1v pack, then you would need to run a higher main spring rate in order to keep the piston assembly in time, the issue with doing this in the UK is that on full stroke, you will almost certainly be over the Site power limit with the spring required to keep that in time - the way to combat this is to short stroke the piston - this will allow you to run the higher main spring rate whilst reducing the pistons stroke and thus FPS - this can also, depending on your barrel configuration, limit the efficiency gains of heavier BBs and or barrel length.

It really depends on how fast you want to take it, as said, keeping to the stock motor would significantly reduce the amount of work you would need to do to keep it reliable.

[A guy with a gun]

Hi sj_asc,

Thanks for the reply. You really seem to know your stuff!

So what I can gather it's well worth leaving the motor and gears well alone and just swap the piston and install a mosfet with a change of wiring and that is more that likely going to give me what I'm looking for? Or will the stock ICS Piston be durable enough?

I'm not looking for anything crazy in terms of ROF, I just wanted in to be a bit more snappy when on semi auto.

Cheers

[mattaddiction]

Personally I would stick with the stock piston and just buy a spare (I consider that a consumable part that will need replacing over time), dam sight easier replacing a piston in an ICS gear box than a broken gear set.

Never really had an issue with ROF on my ICS M4, stock motor (I forget which mine came with though) and using 7.4v lipo or 9.9v LiFe battery packs. If anything I think I've slowed mine down a bit (save on ammo...).

And the best 'upgrade' I would recommend in general and specifically for semi trigger response is a Gate Titan (Their may be other similar Mosfets, but I went with the Titan, no complaints here so far), the pre-cocking feature gives very good trigger response without running the gears silly fast.

matt

[A guy with a gun]

Hey guys, thanks for the advice. I put in a gate nano hard mosfet (it was cheap) and got myself an 11.1v lipo and not messed with anything else and I am really pleased the way it's firing now. I think the main issue was using a knackered old 8.4v NiMH battery which is easily 6 years old!

But thank you so much for the advice and saving me a lot of time effort and money!

[Sprint]

No wonder it was slow, those old NiMH could never match the kick up the arse a LiPo can!

You definitely picked the best option to achieve your goal with least aggro