Tuesday 6 December 2016

Mod: Desolator Overhaul

Received my Desolator a couple of days ago and fell in love with it, it's a beautiful blaster. I gave it an overhaul hopefully worthy of its shell, and it's turned out quite nicely.
EDIT 7/12/16: A couple of new, relatively small mods have been added.

I used my spare pair of Black Pig 130s for it, as I didn't want to cut the shell and I wanted to run it on 2S. I also put in my spare pair of Worker flywheels. Although I would have preferred truncated Artifact flywheels, I haven't gotten around to acquiring more yet. The wiring was a bit of a pain to run through the magwell, due to the clear window on the side, and the pieces that hold in the stock wiring bulge out slightly due to the thicker wire. As a result, the magwell is a bit too tight for gravity assisted mag drops, but it's still smooth and quite easy to remove and insert mags.
After being cleared out, the Desolator battery tray can fit some decent 2S LiPos inside. I'll be using an 850mAh 25-40C which fits very easily inside, but still provides more than enough current for the Black Pigs and has plenty of capacity. Given how thin the space is though, I could see fitting a decent capacity 3S being an issue.

The mod all up didn't take too long, about 3-4 hours starting from bone stock all the way to completely finished and closed up. Performance overall is pretty good. I'm getting typical Worker flywheel muzzle velocities, anywhere from ~110fps with bad darts to 140fps+ with really good darts on a good shot. Spin-up time is short, nearly as fast as the Hellcat builds I have. Flywheel noise is very harmonious and reserved, I'm getting a lot less vibration than most of my other builds, including my Bullpup RS with the Artifact red cage. Accuracy is fairly good, certainly more than usable for my purposes, and the trigger pull is quite smooth.
All round I'm quite happy how the Desolator turned out. Although I would have liked the magwell to be a bit more loose, I'm sure that could be achieved with a file and/or sandpaper. Additionally, I will likely make a dart stop piece like those in my Rapid Red, Stryfe and Rayven to keep darts popping out the top of mags. I am also considering retrofitting a Stryfe auto kit inisde for the full auto I love so much. This Desolator will likely serve as a backup primary alongside my Rapidpistol.

EDIT 7/12/16:











I added in a dart guide made from cardboard, toothpicks and hot glue, very similar to that in my Rapid Red. It's not perfect, it would naturally be much prettier and sturdier if made from plastic, but it will do for now at least.













I also looked at replacing the mag release with a Worker Stryfe lever, as I find the Desolator's one to be a bit awkward. A little internal clearing needs to be done, but that's easily done in a few minutes with a blade/pliers/other tool of choice. The Worker Stryfe mag release is a little loose on the screw post, but once closed up it works nicely, much more comfortable than the stock mag release.

I also sanded a few pieces internally, and now the magwell is loose as it should be, with gravity assisted mag drops being easy now. I'm very happy with this result, and short of putting an auto kit in, or switching the flywheels for Artifact ones, I probably won't be making many, if any, changes in the near future.

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