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Product Information:
Let me start off by saying that there are crap guns, so-so guns, terrific guns, guns that are a breeze to work with but are terrible on the field, and guns that are a DIY-er's worst nightmare, but are fantastic to play with. This gun falls in the last category.
Out of the box, there is a high chance you will get a blown fuse. I had one, lots of reviews here complain about it, but it's as simple as heading down to Autozone or something and picking up a 20A cylindrical glass fuse to shove into your gun. Afterwards, you can play with it just fine, and it'll tear it up. Although it's noisy, heavy, the battery never goes into the handguard willingly, and the plastic squeaks if you strain it, it's also darn accurate, a heavy hitter, and a fairly fast shooter with that JG Blue motor. Build quality is solid, it has a functional charging handle, sights are flip up, the stock doesn't wobble in the slightest, and you can drop it on its rails and the tile floor will crack before the handguard's paint chips.
However, should you ever decide to crack it open for a reshim and relube, you will be wanting to strangle a kitten by the end of it. S-Systems have a strange system for accessing the gearbox, which I didn't realize until I had disassembled the entire gun. In the process, I probably stripped a number of threads in the receiver from it being plastic. On top of that, this gearbox is totally uncooperative when you open it. The shimming out of the box is not great, the grease (for mine) was too sparse, and everything with a spring was bound to explode on a moments notice. I still have trouble shutting the thing with two people.
Technically speaking, the gearbox is a 6mm, non-reinforced shell with a standard gear ratio and has a ported cylinder, a piston with the first few teeth being metal, a non-ported cylinder head, and an air nozzle without an o-ring. Pretty early on, I changed out the gearbox to an 8mm reinforced unit with full polycarbs and reinforced gears from JG (which incidentally, is just as much of a pain to deal with). I would recommend switching to an air-nozzle with an o-ring if you don't change the box, though frequent re-greasings in that area can compensate.
The barrel and hop-up unit aren't the greatest, but they seem to get the job done. The hop-up unit is a plastic two-piece and the barrel is something like a 6.05mm, which technically isn't a TBB. Still seems to get the job done but, I switched in a Madbull 6.03 with the gearbox. The hop up was also changed to a Madbull, but I'm still troubleshooting the thing because this receiver was never meant to accept one-pieces.
The S-System receiver pretty much means that all though you have an awesome looking gun, you're stuck with its chunky glory permanently, because the receivers will not accept anything other than an S-System rail unit. So another upgrade you probably should do straight away is get bigger rails. It's unbelievable how tiny these things are.
Lastly, the weight balance on this thing is way off, because it's front-wired and all the heavy metal is up front. Get a fore-grip and sling with this or rewire it to the rear. It is exhausting to lug this thing around on a field, and especially taxing it you CQB hard.
But at the end of the day, as much grief as thing this bring me, I love this gun. It hauls butt and looks amazing while it does it. Just be prepared if you intend on upgrading this thing yourself. (Also, my apologies for the long review)
Pros:
Hard hitter (I really mean it)
Accurate
Fairly fast fire rate
Good out of the box
Looks awesome
Accepts most magazines (haven't run into anything that it won't feed if you remember to put the air nozzle on the tappet)
Rails are stronger than adamantium
Mostly upgradeable
Comes with a JG Blue
Flip-up sights, functional charging handle, two sling points, and a huge continuous optics rail
Cons:
Heavy beyond belief with extreme front weight bias
Plastic, off-color receiver
Hop-up is two-piece and you'll need some serious modification to upgrade to anything else
Usually comes with a blown fuse
Shimming is not great
Needs regreasing
S-System doesn't allow you to change to any other rail
Tiny rails
PITA to assemble and disassemble
Battery never goes in (and you can't use 9.6v batteries unless you use a PEQ box or file the handguard)
Rating:  [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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