A Few Notes On the V-350

I reassembled the V-350 with a new o-ring but reused the other two seals

I decided to sand the rust out of the barrel.


Still splotchy…I kept at it.


At least the lettering is still intact.


Barrel and tube were reblued with Van’s cold blue.


I still don’t completely understand the gun. But this pop valve feeds the BBs into the barrel from the flat and channel above.


Fed.


I had to debur the end of the barrel. I found that the BBs were shooting out at a 45 degree angle – there was a dent at the end diverting them. I wish I’d noticed it when I had the barrel in the lathe…

I had to disassemble it again though as it was only doing 175fps and it should be doing 350fps (hence the V-350).


The manual said to use thread sealant on the barrel threads, so I uses some teflon tape. The spring seems canted (sorry, no pic.) which could also be part of the problem, more so if it’s also become a bit relaxed. But I reassembled it and it’s now shooting between 185 and 240 fps. That’s an annoyingly large spread of velocities which was compounded by the fact that I think the chronograph has a hard time seeing BBs on a sunny day. I received many of the dreaded Shooting Chrony “ERR” messages. To further muddy the waters it seems as though trigger release plays a large part – which means that things are dragging on other things in an unpredictable way.

So I’ll have to think about things. Spring, seals and more smoothening seem in order. Unfortunately I’m not sure what to do about the first two. I might preload the spring a little, if there’s room. We’ll see.

Well Derrick's been posting up a storm, so I messed with it a bit more...

I made a spacer for the spring.


The spacer adds about .2" of thickness...So I put it back together again and found almost no
change in velocity. At least I figured out that the lenses of the Chrony were dirty - cleaning them helped getting better readings. This leaves it at the seals or some other unknown problem. I'll have to think on it for a while. It may still be that the spring is too weak but it does seem as strong as it should be for a non leveraged cocking gun.