THE CHASER .43 CALIBER PAINTBALL AIR PISTOL
One of the things that we've been looking at for a while now is getting back into the hobby of air guns. As noted before, with the low availability of ammunition for regular firearms and with what is available being more costly than usual, getting back into air guns is a low cost way of keeping up with the shooting sports in order to keep our skills sharp when it comes to marksmanship. Plus as we've noted, there are new advances in air gun tech that put these projectile throwers into a category close enough to regular firearms when it comes to self defense that they're worth mentioning here.
When it comes to self defense there are several different options. We've seen large caliber air rifles that have the power similar to some firearms, even to the degree that they use the same size and caliber projectiles as some firearms, with .30, .38, .45, .50 cal air rifles being the norm, including arrow guns to make things a little spicier. Now there is a large field of non lethal defense air guns out there as well. These are pretty much the same as regular paintball guns, except that they shoot different ammo outside of paintballs. These guns shoot everything from pepper balls to rubber balls to hard plastic balls with a metal core to them. With the velocities of some of these guns, they make for a unique twist on less lethal defense.
This brings me to the showcased gun here. This gun is a Chaser .43 caliber paintball air pistol. We picked up this gun a few years ago with the idea of having it available for less lethal defense, having several magazines and different defense rounds for the gun. This gun uses the standard 12g CO2 cartridges regular air pistols use and has a detachable magazine holding around 7 shots. When I got the gun back then it was working but since then its sat in cold storage and gathered dust and residue from past paintball test shootings and by now was in serious need of a good cleaning. At first I wasn't going to bother with this particular gun nor this caliber since there are .50 cal paintball/defense guns out there but after looking and seeing the selections of other similar .43 cal paintball guns, I figured this would be a good caliber to mess with as the ammo is small enough that the guns and their magazines are almost similar in size to that of a larger caliber pistol. Since the gun is .43 cal, the rounds are like that of a .45. Along with the .50 and .68 cal, we can have a nice little collection of defense paintball guns of various calibers. As for right now, this gun needs to be serviced.
The first and obvious thing was to disassemble this gun. Contrary to belief, paintball pistols are very similar to regular firearms in the components they use. I had to remove a slide, hammer and spring, magazine and other parts. I had to make a good mental note of how everything went back together so I can reassemble the gun without leaving anything out. After assembly came the cleaning. I cleaned all of the surfaces in the barrel, slide and other spots where components move against or on one another. Getting all the parts clean I could then start the reassembly process.
Speaking of breech blocks, I also had to be careful working with a couple of little rubber pieces that go into the breech of the gun to serve as soft stoppers so paintballs don't just roll down the barrel or into the gun's mechanism. Once these pieces were reinserted and the receiver oiled up well, especially where the slide would move over, I was able to start the main reassembly of the gun.
With the hammer and breech block and main spring block being reinserted into the receiver and linked up by the rod that connects everything so it all works in unison, I reinstalled the pistol grip, which includes the trigger and magazine well. From here I was able to get the slide put back on and get everything secured using the screws that I removed during disassembly. Everything got a layer of oil before reassembly.
Overall the disassembly, cleaning and reassembly didn't take that long. With the gun reassembled, I can now take this gun out to the yard and test shoot it to see how well it shoots. I didn't notice any sign of a bad power valve when I first shot this gun so it should be more than capable of shooting out paintballs and not leaking out any gas. I have a small container of .43 cal paintballs that I can use to test out the gun. Of course now I will have to start looking into stocking up on the different defense ammo for this gun, along with magazines. When I grab some of the other .43 cal paintball air guns out there I'll have a good little stash of defense ammo that I can share between the different guns.
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