level 10 shims?

[rmg]

I recently bought a good used mag, standard body, Retro valve, with intelliframe. It worked OK, seemed to chuff fairly often, I blamed that on my fingers. Anyway my boy took it to play friday night, he said it just keeps chuffing, sure enough he was right, but while I was messing with it, it started leaking down the barrel.
I took it home, figuring one of the orings had gone bad. I checked that it didn't leak with the trigger pulled indicating (from what I've read) that the on/off was OK, and that the problem is probably with the o-rings in the power tube. Took it apart, first time I ever really had one of these valves apart (basically I'm new to mags) I had 4 shims in front of the carrier.
Everything appeared OK. I've read about you guys messing with the shims to trouble shoot levelX problems, so I put it back together with no shims.
Guess what....works great, better than before, so I put 2 shims back in, still works great. I was going to put the other shims back in, but I ran out of air to play with so I let it with 2 shims for now.
I don't know if maybe it got some dirt in there, and I fixed it by simply taking it apart and reassembling it, or if its something with the shims.
Would additional shims cause it to chuff more?
Any ideas? I've been searching, but haven't really found anything.
Thanks

[Chronobreak]

the shims are used to adjust the spacing/cycle time of the bolt stem and the release of the air

too long it will shoot, to short it wont.

1-2 shims is usuly sufficent( never more than 3)

[athomas]

I never use shims in mine, but they do allow you to tune the distance the bolt has to move before it can vent off excess air if it chuffs. The distance is so small anyway, that it doesn't seem to affect operation that much.

I suspect you cleaned out a piece of dirt that was causing a sticking problem.

[flyingpootang]

Use the shims to tune your L10 bolt so it dosen't chop balls. Start with 2 shims and place a squigee about 1/4" in front of the bolt and fire the marker. The bolt should hit the squigee and reset. If it dosen't add 1 shim at a time until it dose. Beaware that adding more than 2 shims you may need to change to the next largest carrier while using the same carrier o-ring (white). The shims do affect the carrier tightness around the bolt. I use 3 shims each in all 6 of my mags.