[Leo Greer]

Most players using carbine style rifles outdoors (in my experience), tend to use .25 to .28 gram BBs, for which a partially ported cylinder is in the realm of okay.

However, I do have experience using full cylinders to obtain higher power, especially making use of joule creep. I suggest staying the heck away from metal pistons. Occasionally I’ll see a cylinder and cylinder head that are a bad fit, and cause rubbing, and the result is no good. Metal pistons basically,y automatically cause rubbing and issues, and from my research almost always end in total failure, since aluminum is very soft.

If you want to beef up your piston weight, go for an aluminum piston head, a thick polymer piston like the Lonex red, or another heavy piston using a full metal rack, which can have some advantages, and keep the bearings on the piston head to add about 8 grams just for those. For this level of energy, you’ll need a very beefy piston assembly anyways.

 

[Leo Greer]

I get pretty darn good joule creep out of a 31 gram piston assembly. Be careful when going too heavy as the piston will start to experience more lag than normal during acceleration, and cause a weird pressure wave.

I speculate that it could even throw off your hop settings and consistency, due to the BB experiencing less immediate acceleration, and rather gaining more energy farther down the barrel.

I don’t know if any of these effects are strong enough to be relevant at all with your setup, but I thought I’d throw the ideas out there.

There is a thread here on this site with results for different weights on VSR pistons, but VSR and AEGs don’t usually correlate directly…

 

[Leo Greer]

To get a bit more power, if you want it, you could shorten your barrel by a bit to get the air efficiency closer to perfect. Check out the info thread on BB weight vs. barrel length!