PHOENIX Hop Adjustment

Having trouble with your PHOENIX Hop? Check out the Owner’s Manual for a step-by-step explanation of hop adjustment, or watch these videos for visual instructions and an in-depth look at how the PHOENIX Hop works.

Video transcript: what’s up guys this is rich with Wolverine airsoft and today on what the tech we’re gonna be taking a look at how to set the bucking lip tension on your new Phoenix hop from wolverine airsoft so a few things we’re gonna want we’re going to need the hop-up with the bucking installed and ready to go we’re going to need some bb’s just a couple bb’s on hand I would recommend having the engine that you were planning on using with you and then you’re gonna once your adjustment tool and then some sort of a tool with a thin shaft that will fit inside the barrel of the gun probably the most challenging thing with this is just developing a feel for what the right amount of tension is so we’re gonna try to tackle that two ways we’re gonna give you some some guidelines on how to tell to get it pretty close and then we’re gonna give you some indicators that we’ve developed over testing extensively with this the generally indicate based on what the behavior is how bua to adjust it so to start with you have your adjustment tool the process of adjusting is very simple you’re going to take the adjustment tool install it into the notch in the back and you’re going to turn the thread the threaded portion now righty-tighty lefty-loosey you tighten it down it’s going to be tighter you unscrew it some it’s going to be looser okay so that’s all very intuitive now as far as telling how much force you need to load it play with this a little first do it a couple times make some small adjustments drop a BB in and then use your little tool and push the BB through the load it into the chamber and see how much force it takes okay and make a little adjustment and you can kind of get a feel for how it works so do that first that’s a good first step as far as getting it pretty close generally what we want to do is you want to put a BB in we want to take the engine that we’re planning on using and then we want to load the BB into the chamber using the engine now if you make it too tight what’s gonna happen is as you try to load the BB this nozzle is gonna get pressed in alone but it’s gonna kind of press in a little bit and then it’s gonna pop into the chamber it’s a pretty good sign that you probably have the tension too tight rule of thumb is you want a little bit less that resistance then it takes to cause the nozzle to deflect right so if I’m doing this and I tighten it down a bit I tried this I feel okay – all actually compressed just a little bit they’re loading it in probably too much right I try that again yeah it get compressed a little the spring on the nozzle compressed a little bit we don’t want that because then it’s not gonna load smoothly so just take my tool back it off a little bit we’ll try again there we go okay there the nozzle the spring on the nozzle did not compress at all it popped cleanly past guess the lips that’s probably about right and we can try that but if you put it together you try that and it’s not working great the first time don’t freak out it takes some getting comfortable with the system and developing a feel for exactly where this temperature should be it’s very easy to adjust so let’s talk about some of the symptoms of either being too loose or too tight and how to interpret that and then get dialed in pretty quickly so first symptom we’re going to talk about mid cap syndrome so mid cap syndrome is the tendency of the gun to shoot with more hop at the beginning of the magazine and less hop towards the bottom of the magazine this is something that has been observed with broad range of systems but in general our rule is that if it is an AR s flat hop something like that in general you probably need to increase tension on the bucking lips if you are getting mid-cap syndrome now counterintuitive is that with a traditional-style bucking you probably need to decrease tension not always there are exceptions but generally mid-cap syndrome with a traditional-style hop-up rubber and nub indicates too much tension loading the bb’s double feeding this one should be fairly obvious but you want to increase tension right if you’re double feeding there’s not enough resistance the BB limiting someone just kind of slips fast don’t want that so increase resistance jamming can happen in various forms but jams across the board are almost universally a sign that you need to decrease the tension alright inconsistent hop so it’s kind of firing some up some down that is generally you say generally because there are exceptions but generally that is a sign that you want more tension in order to in order to get better consistency now I will throw in there that regardless of how you said the tension it is very unlikely to create side to side variation any substantial amount of side to side variation this only really has an impact for the most part on vertical variation of the hop up so if you’re seeing a lot of side to side variation you want to look at something else with the system it’s not the tension right you want to look at a different using a different rubber or different bb’s or something else is causing the variation there last one is slow fire so this if fires we see we we see this sometimes especially with the the Gentoo inferno this is a behavior just because it loads and then fires it’ll it’s just kind of slow and firing the BB it’ll sound a little funny it’ll kind of just pop you know you kind of hear it fire and then it’ll actually fire the BB this is sort of one step short of jamming right it’s really struggling to get that BB through the bucking lips and so we need to decrease tension so that’s the overview of how to tune your Phoenix hop from wolverine airsoft for the full breakdown of the technical explanation of how the system works and all the patented technology that’s going on inside it check out the full video right over here. how’s it going guys this is rich with Wolverine airsoft and today on what the tech we’re gonna be taking a look at the brand new Phoenix hop from Wolverine airsoft so since we launched the MTW about two years ago now people have been asking for a cnc version of the hop up for the MTW up until now I haven’t done one and that largely comes down to the fact that I don’t like to put products out unless we can do something that is really different that we really believe in the value of that performs and functions differently offers a different value to customers out there the Phoenix hop does just that and we’re going to get into why and start off with if we just if we just look at this thing now it obviously looks very similar in exterior design to the existing stock hop-up now the obvious differences are that the body is CNC aluminum it is anodized and it has this strange little slot over here on the side which we’ll get to and it looks a little bit different at the backend but it shares the same basic components so your front your c-clip here and your adjustment dial and hop-up all armed all those parts are backwards compatible which is nice so what is the big difference here because I’ve been hyping this up I really believe in the in the product and I want to want to explain this to you so it’s no secret that one of the key performance variables to with a hop-up system is the amount of force that it requires to load the BB into the hop-up chamber to push past the bucking lips this this variable is what we’ll call bucking lip tension right it’s the amount of force that it takes to load the BB into the chamber now this is an important variable because it impacts a ton of things it impacts your ceiling yeah that will also affect how much how tight the seal is between the bucking lips and the the nozzle it can affect the consistency of the hop-up it can affect whether the system jams or double feeds there are a ton of different variables now it’s also no secret that in general HPA systems are more sensitive to this than aegs and there’s a ton of variation within HPA systems how sensitive they are something like the gen 2 inferno is much less sensitive than a pure open bolt system but there’s there all tend to be more sensitive than the than their Aug counterparts and I’m going to talk to you about why all right so let’s for a moment set aside the loading mechanics of an HPA system because they vary widely a true open bolt system is gonna load it and fire it in all in one motion a sort of hybrid system like the gen 2 inferno is there’s going to be a very slight pause between the loading and the firing the Reaper or other closed bolt systems the BB will load and then sit there and then fire so that varies but we know across the board regardless of the loading mechanism that all HPA systems tend to be more sensitive to this so it’s not exclusively the load and load and does complicate this and you can go back and look at some of the videos we did early on with the SP which is a true open bolt system talking about how to deal with some of these issues but it’s not exclusively the loading it’s also the firing so let’s take a look at just the firing sequence so here we have our BB loaded in the chamber this is our hop-up bucking nub sits right there and then our nozzle is sitting up against the bucking lips sealed ready to fire this is the same all everything we’ve shown so far is the same regardless of whether you’re talking about an AG or an HPA system what’s different is the firing mechanism so with an AEG you have a pressure wave that looks something like this let’s draw a graph let’s get nerdy for a second here here’s time here’s pressure okay because you have a spring compressing a piston which then compresses air to fire the BB it takes time for that pressure to bill because the piston needs time to move forward and build pressure and it needs more time so the pressure wave looks something like this not exact you’re actually going to have a sharp drop off one two the BB and leaves the barrel is all the pressure events but we care about this front part because at some point we’re gonna call here the BB experiences first movement that means that the BB overcomes the resistance of the nub and starts to move so we see that leading up to this it’s a gradual slope and then it moves past the beat past the nub smoothly now let’s talk about what happens with a HPA system and this is true regardless of what HPA system instead of having a spring and piston you now have a valve which can either be open or closed and I’m going to draw an electrical valve because I don’t feel like drawing a or an electrical switch because I don’t feel like drawing a mechanical valve here but you get the idea here’s our nozzle once this closes and air is allowed to flow directly through the pressure builds very quickly okay this is our first movement line you can see the pressure builds much faster behind the baby with any sort of HPA system regardless of how the baby was loaded so what does that mean what how does that play back into the the sensitivity to the force required to load the baby well what that means is that any small deviation in the position of the baby with respect to the nub is going to be amplified right because if you get just a little bit wedged past the nub and that maybe not pay fully past the number here just a little bit wedged under it because you’ve loaded the BB a little too hard or there wasn’t enough resistance or you know you’re sitting back or it’s you haven’t quite fully unloaded it yet or anything like that he’s going to be amplified because this pressure builds so fast and it gets accelerated past the the nub more quickly now the obvious question if we know that that you need the right amount of resistance to loading the BB or the amount of force on the system loading the BB why don’t we just pick the right amount of force in with the system when we design it with the engine let’s say when we design it so that it always loads properly well here’s where we get into the million variations within airsoft manufacturing no two combinations of no of rubber and housing are going to create exactly the same resistance to loading and it’s not that there is one exact right amount of loading force it’s that the loading force needs to properly match the amount of resistance so you can be off either way right if you don’t have enough loading force well now the baby’s not going to load and you’re gonna run into issues or it’s not gonna look quickly enough or if you have too much thing you’re gonna run into issues so because of the the manufacturing tolerances in the different dimensions of the hop up rubbers and the hop-up housings that we have to deal with you can’t have an exact right amount of loading for that force now we can design the systems so that it is less sensitive to that right so Jen to infer a really good example of this much much less sensitive than earlier systems and some of the other systems on the market to the amount of loading force even with a system like the gentle Reaper where the amount of loading force is exactly the same every single time regarding them regardless of operating conditions if you get outside the envelope of acceptable resistance you’re going to run into issues like double feeding or jamming or just general poor performance peak again because of the the fast firing cycle so with that as a background let’s talk about what we actually did with the Phoenix hop okay this is a really cool and simple solution to this what we wanted to create was something that lets us precisely control the amount of loading force needed so that we can precisely adjust it and tune it this will make the hop-up housing work well with a far broader range of hop-up bucking ‘s and other variables barrels things like that the barrel the hop-up bucking all these things have an impact on how tight that interface is so we want to come up with a system where we could precisely adjust what we’re calling the bucking lip tension or the amount of loading force so let’s talk about how that works inside the hop-up what you have I’m gonna draw this here so that you can see it we’re gonna draw a cross-section so here we have what we call the adjustment screw threaded here we have the adjustment sleeve which is as an internal taper on the front end and has an opening at the bottom that lines up with the feed tube this is where bb’s load up this is cross-sectional area here just so we can see what’s going on then you have your hop-up rubber and your hop-up rubber the lips if the hop-up rubber sit right here like this and then inside you have the nub so you can see the tapered portion of the hop-up sits inside this tapered portion of the adjustment sleeve now what that lets us do as you can see if you look at the back of the hop-up here you have the threaded insert that we show right there and if we take this little tool that comes included and we turn the threads we’re going to push this taper more or less up against the hop-up rubber which is going to compress or allow the hop-up rubber to expand so what that lets us do is that lets us precisely control the amount of force required to load the BB into the chamber really really simple so let’s take a look at this put this together and show you how it works in practice this is just like any other of our hop-up housings if we removed the adjustment wheel at the back we’ll see we have this overhang back here which is our friction o-ring we want to note that there is a small polyurethane pad underneath this o-ring that keeps friction on this adjustment screw so that doesn’t back out or back in either either way as you’re playing it doesn’t move it stays put and it also provides a nice amount of friction on the wheel so that it moves smoothly but does have some friction there and will not move while you are playing the hop-up arm is our standard arm we tested some different designs and found that this worked just as well as anything else and so we’re sticking with that design so let’s go and put this together I have a maple leaf 70 degree bucking here let me go ahead and install the bucking you will as usual when you’re doing this you’re going to want to put a little bit of silicone lubricant on the hop-up rubber we’ve already done that here so I’m just going to go ahead and install it and then you’re gonna line up to the barrel correctly so that your barrel window is facing to the top of the hop-up and then you’re going to snap your c-clip in place and we go that around and make sure it’s seated correctly now I picked the maple leaf specifically for this example because it’s a really good example because by itself there is not enough resistance to keep the BB from simply falling through you can see if we set that there and just slightly tap it it just falls straight through there’s almost no resistance the lips on this hop-up rubber are very thin so they don’t provide much resistance to loading the BB but watch what happens as we adjust this tighten this down a little bit and you can see I’ll do this sideways something you can see this here you should be able to see on the video through this window you can see the sleeve moving forward and back as I adjust it and that’s adjusting that tension so we’re gonna set it right about there and see how it does now when I drop it in definitely not falling through so I’ll try pushing it through that’s actually about where I would like it a little bit of force required to load it through but not too much you can see if you continue adjusting it you can eventually make it much too tight which you don’t want to do and then it will require a great deal of force if you can even get the b2 load at all in this case the baby doesn’t even want to load so let’s go ahead and set it back about where we want it so let’s go ahead and finish assembling the hop-up here obviously you have your nub of your choice that will sit in the arm make sure it stays in the arm as you’re putting the arm in place and then you’re going to put your wheel on now the wheel you’re going to want to start on the side with that little insert on because it sticks out a little bit you’re going to want to kind of hook that side pop it on place the last piece to install is going to be the tapered lock ring locking ring which slides on the front and fits snugly inside keep your barrel aligned with your hop-up now let’s talk about one of the other really cool benefits that came out of this which is that by having an internal sleeve remember we have this internal sleeve in here and an external body there are two different pieces it lets us make them out of different materials now those of you that have listened to some of the stuff I’ve said in the past to know that I generally like polymer for hop ups now the reason is that while the stiffness of aluminum is nice and has some some benefits in terms of the consistency the lower coefficient of friction of polymers improves feeding and consistency on full auto and things like that so what this lets us do is it lets us get the stiffness of the aluminum while using a very low friction material for the sleeve inside so the internal sleeve is actually Delrin it’s a self lubricating polymer so it lets us have the stiffness with the very low friction qualities of a polymer in the areas that we’re actually sliding so this acts as a bushing inside where the nozzle is sliding because one of the things that we we know happens is that the force straw what’s happening inside here here’s your nozzle here’s your BB your stack of bb’s coming up from the magazine and here’s your your half cup now the force from the spring in the magazine is pushing on the bottom of this nozzle and causing it to make contact with the top surface of the hop-up housing right now that rubbing usually doesn’t cause an issue per se but when you’re running high rate of fire I and you have two materials like both of these being aluminum that produces a an amount of friction it can cause some inconsistencies again especially on full auto you’ll see maybe things see it a little differently and it catches a little bit because it’s dragging so having a very low friction interface here between the nozzle the top of the nozzle and the top of the hop-up housing gives us better feeding and better consistency especially with full auto so that’s about it for this episode it’s already been a long episode I apologize for that and didn’t want to drag it out anymore so we’re gonna throw a separate discussion of the application of some of this to our and flat hops in a appendix after the closeout of this video so if you are into our hops or J hops or s hops or whatever else stick around we’ll talk about why some of this is particularly relevant for tuning those types of hop up systems so to wrap this up let’s take a look at the list of what the benefits are for the patent pending technology in the Phoenix hop up first of all you improve feeding increase durability and reduced wear a superior air seal improve groupings with a broad range of barrel and hop-up setups and superior full auto performance currently we only have the phoenix hop available for the MTW we do have plans to introduce it for other platforms so stay tuned for that so if you stuck around for the bonus our hop section props to you let’s talk about why this has to some extent changed my perspective a little bit on our hops why are our hops particularly sensitive to this now let’s let’s draw a picture of an arc hop versus a standard hop up so to illustrate why this adjustable bucking with tension is particularly relevant our hops s hops flat hops things like that I’ve drawn out a cross-section here of an our hop and a traditional copper forever so an r ha well first let’s start with the traditional the traditional has an opening in the barrel window and you have this distinct mound that protrudes down into the barrel and that is what puts backspin on the BB it catches the BB and spins it right and our hop the patch is built into the window and even when engaged it only extends very very slightly into the cross-section of the barrel now this is one of the reasons it can work well it it it engages gradually it’s also one of the reasons it’s extremely durable right because you don’t have an edge to kind of catch on and the BB to kind of tear up the rubber over time but think about this from a loading standpoint even a small mismatch let’s take a small mismatch in the loading force between the with the traditional and you still have this distinct edge that the BB when it comes in he’s going to bump up against alright it’s gonna hit that and it’s gonna stop right now if you if you’re loading Forks was a little excessive or your your tension on the bucking lips was a little low you’re still gonna hit that you’re still gonna stop it’s probably not gonna have a huge impact right it’s gonna be kind of minor right because it stopped it still has to kind of push that that nub up and out of the way and it’s going to get the majority of the backs been applied with the AR hop a very small mismatch in the loading force to the resistance is going to result in different placement here it’s going to push it further forward or further back underneath the patch and because the RF doesn’t depend on an edge to catch it and then spin it it depends on continued acceleration or with gradual engagement so it’s this real gradual engagement but it stays in contact for longer well by that force not being a perfect match you’re pushing it a little bit too far forward and then things like variations in you know you can have variations with this in terms of how empty is the magazine okay one of the cool things that we’ve that that this phoenix hop has let us find is some of the weird things that have shown up over the years things that people have talked about with and that we’ve seen with what people call mid cap syndrome right where the system hops differently with a loaded magazine and an empty magazine it comes back to stuff like this right because if you have very little resistance here what’s going to happen is that the the nozzle is going to see different amounts of resistance from the force in the magazine depending on how compressed the spring in the magazine is so it’s going to place this differently up against that patch right it can happen in extremes cases with a traditional rubber but it’s much less common we’ve been able to get and we can recreate if we want to we can recreate mid cap syndrome by setting the tension mismatched to the feeding force all right so it really has expanded our understanding and lessor and let us made these things recreate able so that we can adjust things and figure out what’s actually going on and how to solve it and make the performance better so this this mismatch bloating force is particularly relevant to our hop again just a final review here before I wrap this up because there isn’t a distinct stopping point doesn’t load the baby and then kind of have a stopping point that then it accelerates off of it gets pushed in and then there’s just this real gradual slope and if it got pushed in a little too hard you might go a little way down that slope and kind of stick and then you forgot the catches on the nozzle catches a little bit on the next BBS it’s trying to load and doesn’t push it quite as hard or quite as fast now falls back a little bit so that’s where the the resistance of the bucking comes in to normalize that so that you get a consistent loading force every time or a consistent loading speed every time that is matched to the force of the system that you are using and I can I can tell you from my personal experience I make no claims of being an AR hop expert in terms of actually installing them right there are people to have much more experience than I do with that and I’m happy to defer to them in terms of the the specific processes for exactly how they do it but I will tell you that my success rate with making our hops has dramatically improved by using this hop-up chamber versus previously he was very hit-or-miss one would work and then several wooden and it wasn’t very predictable exactly why some installations went better than others very consistent results in terms of how the total installation performs with this Phoenix hop-up technology