I have an Ion XE that I bought about 5 years ago and it worked great. I'm not a speed ball player and I just wanted a simple gun that worked and had a decent ROF. I havent played in about 2 years and my stuff sat in the closet until this season when I went to play for my bachelor party. I checked my gear at the local store, got my gun crono'd and my tank hyrdo'd and I was good to go. On the actual day my gun would not cycle. I had the local shop owner play with it at the field and he adjusted the dwell from the stock setting a few flashes higher until it was shooting again and all was well back in june.
Since June I have played about once every 3-4 weeks. Each time I continue to tweak, upgrade, and replace various parts in an attempt to get my Ion to shoot consistently. Each time it shoots well at the store, or well enough, then a day or two later when I show up to the field it has a variety of issues. The main issues it has are inconsistant velocity typically around +-10, not cycling at all when pulling the trigger every ~50-100 trigger pulls (just a puff of air) and various forms of double feeding. Here are the upgrades I have made to the XE.
- 360 QEV
- Deadly Wind Hallow Point bolt
- Virtue OLED board
- Virtue Laser eyes
- TechT detents
- New 0-300 psi Gauge
- Clamping feed neck
- Deadly Wind cf barrel
In addition I have also completely stripped the entire gun and cleaned every corner then reassembled with new O rings and sleek lube. I have also cleaned, lubed and rebuilt the stock regulator twice. All of the work I did was AFTER the tech at my local shop installed the Virtue board and had my gun "working". after it experienced the same issues the very next time that I went out I worked with the tech to try to solve the issue and I think I found the problem.
We tested a variety of tanks and swapped out the stock reg for a CP reg and every time the gauge on the gun would drop 10-20 psi during each shot and take a few seconds to recover to the set psi. We replaced the gauge and I cleaned and stripped the gun. I found an excess of lube coming out of the QEV and I believe that lube and dirt in the QEV was making it exhaust at a varying rate between shots and causing the inconsistency.
I rebuilt the reg and cleaned the inside of the QEV and the rest of the gun. Still the gun shoots +-10 or more. On the plus side I was able to lower the operating pressure from 180-190 down to 130-140. I am not able to lower the dwell down to anything under 27 without the gun not cycling regardless of the fact that I have the DW bolt and QEV. Swapping out the stock bolt does not fix any of the guns issues.
I am at the point where I am ready to give up on this gun after dropping another $300+ into it this year. The only improvement is that it shoots faster. After rebuilding it for the last time and testing it at the store, it was shooting acceptably. I have the dwell at 30 and the rof capped at 15 and I am using a rotor. The fps when I played this sunday was +-15 and the gun was double feeding every 10 shots or so and it was firing both rounds. I tried using other loaders and hand feeding it with the same results.
It looks like at this point I have a few options.
Sell my gun as-is at a huge loss ($300+ in upgrades this year)
Return my gun to stock, get it working and sell the gun and parts separate
Figure out whats wrong with my gun, get it working, and hope that it never has issues again (unlikely)
If anyone has an idea for something for me to try, a part to swap out, test etc I am all for giving this gun one more shot but otherwise I am ready to ditch this gun and get something that shoots every time I pull the trigger.
