A Quick Overview of the Orange Mod Works Unleashed Solid Stage 3 Kit For Retaliator

Well, this arrived the other day.

I finally had an excuse to crack open a Retaliator and also install their Stage 2 kit. Previously, I was feeling way too lazy to do it if I didn't have the sealed breech system.

Read more about after the jump.

I won't go over everything in the kit in great detail. You can check their website if you want to see what's in it. It's very easy to see what's going on.

The bolt sled is very similar to the old one, with some slight design changes. Although OMW states in their video that you can use the stock locks, I had some issues. The bolt sled lock was not a direct fit, as the black sled is slightly smaller, as you can see in the following picture.

The orange bit is pretty mush flesh with the bolt sled wall.

This is the part that cannot close properly due to the design change. You can trim the lock itself to get it to fit.
However, with both the trigger lock and this bolt sled lock, I found the priming action to be quite difficult. I ended up taking them out for smoother operation. Not ideal, since I would rather make it harder to double load. I also found the catch spring that they included to be inadequate.

Here's the dart chamber assembly. You can see a bit of the new folding arms for pushing in the dart, and how the bolt's tip locks into the assembly. It's designed fairly well.

I then proceeded to take some shots using the chrony we built.
The results...were interesting. Sometimes, it delivered as promised. Other times, it fell short. It seemed inconsistent to me, and these first few numbers were taken at first using good ZS darts. They were not new, but the foam was in good shape and felt nice. The shots after that were from a new pack of Elites.

89.67 fps
84.06 fps
120.89 fps

Wow, as promised, 120 fps. I don't believe their 95 ft PTG number, but 120 fps is possible. However, infamous and I partially brass our Retaliators and get about 110-120 fps average. But also, this system seems to have large variation. The average fps from this batch of ZS darts was 98.206.

I wanted to see if it was truly that inconsistent, so I used a few brand new darts to minimize possible problems.

108.98 fps
61.12 fps
100.56 fps
102.8 fps
121.36 fps

Wow! 61.12 What happened there? In some shots that I did not chrono, when I was just testing firing, I remembered getting a lot of weird shots, where it just practically ploop out the barrel. This average was 98.96 fps.

I feel like the system works well when it works well. It IS possible to hit 120 fps with their system as promised. The air seal is quite nice. When I blocked the entrance to the barrel with a finger, the dart did not move forward much when fired. So that was cool. But I feel like it's very easy to cause the system to load the dart incorrectly or something. That's how I'm explaining some of the abnormalities seen here. It has a wide amount of variation in terms of performance.