Video: Air Venturi Rail Lock Airgun Spring Compressor

Air Venturi continues to innovate with products designed with the end user in mind with the world's first portable spring compressor--the Air Venturi Rail Lock Spring Compressor! Weighing in at only 1.5lbs this spring compressor allows airgun smiths and tinkerers to disassemble their spring or gas piston rifles anywhere they choose.

Air Venturi Rail Lock Airgun Spring Compressor Transcript:

Hey guys today we're going to show you how to take apart a spring piston or gas piston airgun. Now in the past, you would need a very large spring compressor to do this. Basically to safely remove the pretension or preload from the spring or the gas piston and then reapply it once you go ahead and put it back together. Now usually those units are you know quite large, very long, and they take up a hell of a lot of space. But Air Venturi has brought us something brand new, the rail lock. Now this is a spring compressor just like any of those big units are. The only difference is it clamps onto your dovetail or your Weaver rail and allows you to do the same exact thing. So if you need to take apart your spring piston gun to replace a broken spring or your gas piston gun to replace a blown piston seal or you just want to get inside the gun, maybe do a little lube tune on your spring gun or take apart the gas piston gun you know for whatever reason you want to see what's going on inside that gun, the rail lock is going to allow you to do that. So this is gonna be a great new addition to the airgunner’s tool kit and we're going to show you how to use it today.

So from the diagram, you guys can already tell there's a lot of parts to the Rail Lock Spring Compressor. Just gonna highlight a few of the important ones. The first and foremost is the rail mounting grooves that are in the front of the unit there. Those are going to be super important, those are clamping on to your dovetail or onto your Weaver Picatinny rail, they're precision machined and they're gonna hold solid as long as you go ahead and properly tighten down those front and rear rail screws. And just above that rear rail screw, we have the rotation locking set screw, and on top of the tube there we have our quick release button. Now that's probably the most unique feature of the rail lock unit and we'll show you exactly how that works. And within that housing, you have the threaded rod and in the back of the threaded rod you have your hole for your Allen key that you're gonna end up using to turn, and well counterclockwise and clockwise to loosen and then tighten your rod, once you get butted up against the back of the gun. The first thing you're gonna want to do is loosen the front and the rear rail screws just enough so that they'll slip over the dovetail. There's no need to go too wide on these. The next thing we're going to do is make sure that the rotation locking set screw is nice and loose as well. Before we go ahead and mount it to the gun we're gonna go ahead and depress the quick release button and slide the threaded rod back to give us enough room to actually be able to mount it. Now we're gonna go ahead and align the groove portion of the Rail Lock Compressor with our scope mounting rail. Now you want to make sure that the grooves are all of the way on to the rail so you don't want anything hanging off the back at all, you want those fully engaged on your scope rail whether it's a weaver or a dovetail. Once you have it aligned properly, you're gonna want to tighten the front screw just enough so that it stays secure and then head to the back screw and tighten that as well, and then kind of alternate in between the two until they're nice and tight on the rail. Before we go ahead and tighten down the rotation locking set screw, we're gonna go ahead and check our fit first. We're gonna depress that quick release button and slide our rod forward into the back of the gun. You want to make sure it's relatively centered before we go ahead and tighten that rotation locking set screw. Once you have the fit checked, you can slide it back out and then you're gonna go ahead and tighten that set screw. This next step is gonna vary from gun to gun, but on the Kral N-11 we're just gonna go ahead and remove this rear trigger pack holding screw and it's also our rear stock screw. Because the crawl has a hole in the back of the end cap, we're gonna go ahead and use a coin or a washer to prevent our end cap of the threaded rod from going into that hole, just to make sure everything's more secure you want a nice flat surface on the back of the gun. Now we want to make sure that the quick release tab is popped up that's how you know everything's locked and secured so we're just gonna give it a quick back fourth wiggle making sure everything is tight, just to get it to pop up there that way we know everything is nice and secure before we go ahead and put tension on the rail lock. 

Next, we're going to insert either of the Allen keys into the hole at the back of the threaded rod starting to turn it clockwise, as well to put tension on the rail lock unit and that's going to alleviate the tension that the end cap has on that rear pin in the action. Now, this is also important because it's going to be the last opportunity you have to make sure that your rail section on the scope rail isn't slipping. Now we're going to go ahead and take a punch and knock that rear pin out, and once we have that rear pin out of the gun all of the tension is on the rail lock unit, and as you can see it's holding solid. Using the Allen key in the back of the threaded rod, we're going to start to counterclockwise, which is going to bring the back end and everything out and release that pretension on the spring. As we do this, you'll notice that I kind of put my hand in there just to make sure the end cap as it gets looser and looser doesn't end up slipping off or anything on me so. It's okay to do that just to make sure that you keep everything aligned as you go ahead and release that tension. Pulling the guide out of the gun, we have a predominantly metal guide which is really impressive on a gun in this price range, and then that big beefy spring you guys can see it. This is why you need the rail lock, you are not going to be able to safely take tension off that spring or put it back on without a spring compressor and the rail lock does it with ease. Alright so we're gonna get our spring and our rear guide put back in again, reassembly is going to be on you in terms of doing it properly, so please make sure you guys are paying attention to it as things come apart. But what you'll notice is that we're gonna attempt to realign everything so that our hole for the rear pin, as well as the hole in the top that that stock screw sits in, are going to be properly aligned once we get everything turned back in. You'll notice we've put our washer back in just to put a little bit of tension on it and give us that flat surface, and now we're gonna start to make sure that everything is aligned as we go in. Ao we're gonna take that Allen key, put it back through the hole, we're going to start to turn clockwise. And obviously as you turn there's going to be more tension on everything as you go, so really important to make sure that as you go that back end of the gun goes in aligned with the compression tube. Because if you find out that you get a little bit too close, and then you have to adjust things, it's gonna be under too much tension to do so. So again as you see now you want to make sure that everything's gonna be relatively well aligned as you turn it in. That's gonna be the biggest hurdle you're gonna have to overcome here. And you guys will see now we have all the holes lined up, we can see daylight through the other end, so now we're gonna be able to go ahead and put that pin back in. I'm just gonna go ahead and take a mallet and give it some taps on in there. Once it’s flush, we're good to go. So once the pin’s back in, it is holding all the tension now, just as a safety precaution we're going to counterclockwise screw the threaded rod out with the Allen key there, and then once we have all the tension off of it, we can just simply go ahead hit that quick release, and slide everything back, and then we can take our rail lock unit off just by turning the front and rear rail screws counterclockwise, and pulling it off. It is that simple. We're gonna go ahead and replace that rear stock screw and trigger pack holding screw there, make sure it's nice and tight and we'll go ahead and get the stock back on.
So we've got our N-11 reassembled here. You guys have seen it, the rail lock is a very stout little unit, I'm really impressed by this. For the size, you know right around nine inches to be able to take apart a beast of a spring gun like the Kral N-11 here is really incredible, and all it does is climb up onto the dovetail. This is a really versatile unit, this is gonna make taking apart your spring piston or gas piston guns really easy and relatively affordable for the home tuner or if you're looking to replace it, maybe an older gun you can't get parts for anymore, you know this is really gonna be a great tool for every airgunner out there that wants to get inside their spring or gas piston gun, so check it out on PyramydAir.com. We'll see you guys at the next one.