As I teased awhile back on a Instagram and the EDgun Leshiy Owners Facebook group, I got my hands on a prototype of the parts needed for Phil's famous 'Leshiy Super Tune' mod from Brian over at EDgun West. The gist of it is to maximize the barrel length, but keep things nice and short within the 250mm OEM setup (i.e stock EDgun Leshiy).
You can watch Phil's full run through of the tune below. He's an incredibly smart guy, and this is a great example of what I call 'simply complex' as I'll talk about here in this article. The whole video is worth watching, but the part I'm talking about starts at about 10min in.
The Mod is made up of 3 main parts... a 320mm barrel with a threaded end, a custom baffle that threads directly onto the barrel, and then a custom end cap with an air stripper.
A 350mm barrel will give you about 80-100FPS increase with no changes to the HST. This is a significant difference, and it allows you to tune the gun down and get the same performance you were getting in the 250mm setup.
The side benefit of this is you can really quite the gun down pretty significantly. With all those benefits come at the expense of length... and for many people, Phil included, the added length took away from a huge benefit of how compact the OEM Leshiy is.
For most people, it's just a choice you need to make... but Phil isn't 'most' people. In the context of airguns... Phil is the kind of guy who gets to have his cake, and eat it too!
The design eliminates the OEM baffle all together... which I'm going to bring back up in a bit, as I think there is an opportunity to replicate this, but within a different concept. To keep the gun quiet, Phil designed an air stripper that goes directly on the barrel.
The pellet travels through that, and then through the 2nd stripper built directly into the custom end cap as shown above. As you're probably guessing at this point, alignment is key. It's not hard, you can use a rod to line things up, but you need to have it perfect, or you will 100% smash it, and potentially jack up your gun.
The results were pretty cool. I was getting about 65-70fps increase from the 250mm barrel, while staying within that same frame... which is pretty badass! Noise wise, it was quiet, but had a snap kind of noise to it. It was still really quiet, just a different tone to it than other ways that are more trying to muffle it than strip the air.
Here's the bad news... This is incredibly complicated to make, and because of that, I just don't see this being a commercially viable kit to make. Everything has to be perfect from cutting and truing the barrel, the threading on the barrel, and then inside of the stripper as well. The End cap is no picnic either. Everything is metal, so it has to be done on a CNC machine. The skillset required is the final piece of the cost puzzle... so all in, you're probably in the $400 range. In the end Phil made this for Phil... it's such a badass concept, but just doesn't translate into a commercially viable application for someone to make and sell it (In my opinion at least).
So it's not all bad news... in talking with Brian, I think there's a way to simplify this, and it can be 3D printed. Using the concept of the threaded barrel... build a baffle that goes the full length and allows the 320mm barrel to thread directly into it. You just pop on the normal end cap and call it a day.
What this nets you is the ability to have the gains mentioned above of a longer barrel, but keeping it within the OEM 250mm frame... and most importantly, there is no modification to the gun to pull it off... like I did with 'Silent Overkill'. This mod is totally reversible.
So who's gonna design and build it... any takers??
Happy shooting,
Tim