How to Increase Airsoft Rate of Fire
There isn’t an airsoft player on the planet that doesn’t want to crank their FPS a little higher – squeeze a little more juice out of their AEG, and bump up their effectiveness every time they step on the playing field with a weapon they know to give them a bit of an advantage against the competition.
We highlight those three ways to increase your rate of fire (and oftentimes your FPS, boosting your accuracy along the way) below.
Let’s get right to it!
Three Easy Ways to Increase Your Airsoft Rate of Fire
Upgrading Your Battery
One of the smartest upgrades you can make to your AEG is to swap out the stock battery for a more advanced, more performance-focused battery – usually, one based on the lithium polymer platform.
11.1 V lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries are some of the most powerful options in years of the world today. Putting a LiPo battery into your AEG – especially if you are replacing a nickel-cadmium battery – is going to raise your rate of fire through the roof.
You’ll get more power to your motor (which drives your gears and the piston), which can make you more effective on the airsoft battlefield.
If you are ready to bump up your rate of fire and trigger response, here is the battery that I enjoy the most. It comes with deans connectors, which also help with your trigger response. w
Upgrading Your Motor
AEG airsoft motor technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last 10 years or so, to the point where pretty much every quality AEG ships directly to you with a decent motor that’s going to be reliable, consistent, and a pretty solid performer.
At the same time, there are no manufacturers of airsoft replicas – including companies like Tokyo Marui – that are stuffing high-speed motors into their AEG rifles on the assembly line, none of them offering the power and performance (or the speed) that these high-speed motors provide.
By making the swap out to a reputable aftermarket high-speed motor you immediately bump up fire rate by anywhere between 20% and 40% (and sometimes even more than that). Some high-speed motors are better than others – which is why it’s so important to find a reputable source – but all of them are going to crank your rate of fire to the max ASAP.
One thing you want to know about swapping out a high-speed motor, though, is that you’re going to limit your torque a little bit.
When your torque goes down the motors going to have a bit of a tougher time pulling springs as much as it used to – and that’s going to drop your piston performance slightly, all resulting in slightly lower FPS out of the barrel.
There is one way to counteract that approach, though, and that’s by swapping out your standard gears with an upgraded gear set specifically designed to make the most of high-speed motors without sacrificing FPS performance.
Upgrading Your Gears (Gearbox Drivetrain)
Lower gear ratios (like 12:1 ratios, for example) are going to give you a big bump in the rate of fire.
The overwhelming majority of AEG options come directly from the manufacturer with a gearbox that is set at 18:1, which means that every time your motor spins 18 times you’ll get one full spin of the sector gear – which is one shot coming out of the gearbox.
Drop the gear ratio to 12:1 and you’ll get a nearly 60% increase in rate of fire straightaway. That’s going to have you putting airsoft BBs downrange whole lot faster than you would have been with standard gearing.
The reason that you want to combine a motor upgrade (high-speed motor) with new gears, though, is that these lower gear ratios are going to require a little more performance and a little more power to get them spinning.
By dropping a new motor and new gears into your AEG (alongside a new battery) you’re able to completely overhaul the effectiveness of that weapon without having to spend a mountain of money along the way.
Closing Thoughts
When you get right down to it, there are dozens and dozens of different upgrades you can make to your favorite airsoft replica.
Some of them are going to be predominantly cosmetic upgrades, others are going to be more focused on formants than anything else, and others still are going to straddle the line between those two universes.
All of the upgrades that we highlighted above are designed to do one thing and one thing only – increase the effectiveness of the weapon by helping you get those nonlethal plastic BBs out and onto your target much faster.
These upgrades along will overhaul even the highest-end AEG options you can find on the market today, but combine that with other upgrades – like inner barrel upgrades, MOSFETS, shims, etc. – and you’ll be able to push the performance of your AEG to even higher levels than you might have thought possible.
It’s going to take a little time, little money, and maybe even a little bit of elbow grease to implement these upgrades. But once you make them you’ll wonder how you ever carried your AEG out into the field when it was bone stock.